https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3365-7474
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Abstract
The rise of China in peacebuilding has invoked lively debate about its role vis-à-vis the dominant peacebuilding order, or liberal peace. Extant research revolves around the binary construct of challenger-versus-supporter, ignoring the nature and scope of challenges that China poses to liberal peace. Also, these studies tend to unidimensionally examine China’s stance on particular elements of liberal peace. There is scant research assessing China’s role against the overall normative structure of the liberal peace paradigm. This article proposes a typology of contestation that targets different constitutive parts of liberal peace. China’s stances on these constitutive parts are scrutinised based on a systematic review of its policy documents and interviews with scholars and practitioners in Beijing, Shanghai, Geneva and New York. This article finds that China has generally abstained from contesting the normative basis of liberal peace (validity contestation). However, it has been actively pursuing content contestation by reshaping the sequencing of existing elements of liberal peace and by incorporating the democratisation of the international system into the peacebuilding agenda. Moreover, China clearly opposes externally formulated or imposed peace solutions, whereby it advances application contestation against liberal peace.
Acknowledgements
I thank Keith Krause, Kazushige Kobayashi, Swapna Kona Nayudu, Agnieszka Paczynska and the anonymous reviewers of Third World Quarterly for their constructive comments on the earlier drafts. I also thank Augusta Nannerini, Rosalind Tan and Swetha Ramachandran for proofreading the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This article is an output of the project ‘Coherence or Contestation: Chinese, Japanese and Russian Approaches to the Transformation of Peacebuilding Practices’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under Grant 100017_176363/1.
Notes
1 See UN Peacekeeping, Summary of Contribution to UN Peacekeeping by Country, accessed 31 January 2021, https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/03_country_an_mission_34_jan2021.pf
2 I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
3 I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
4 Interview with a researcher of CICIR specializing in China’s policy on Africa, 28 June 2019, Beijing.
5 Interview with a former peacekeeper of China, 9 June 2019, Beijing.
6 This is not to say practices always align with the normative or discursive orientation. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
7 This typology is built on analytical frameworks developed by Wiener (Citation2004, Citation2014, Citation2020) and Winston (Citation2018).
8 Some understand SAR as recasting ‘traditional’ sovereignty while others highlight that SAR has deep historical roots. See Glanville (Citation2011).
9 I thank the reviewers for raising this point.
10 This does not mean China always pursues content and application contestation in every case and to the same extent. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
11 Interview with a Chinese scholar specializing in China’s foreign policy, 13 August 2019, Beijing.
12 China was still concerned with sovereignty in this case, preventing it from taking actions more timely and decisively. The peace operation in Darfur was introduced as a joint undertaking by the African Union and the international community after the Sudanese government granted consent. Also, fearing the negative consequences for the 2008 Olympic Games played an important role in China’s activeness in the issue, as the existing research often emphasised. However, the Darfur case is illustrative of China’s efforts in flexibly interpreting its non-interference principle to fit in the need of international intervention in particular scenarios. I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping refine my argument in this regard.
13 Interview with a Chinese scholar specializing in China’s foreign policy, 13 August 2019. Beijing.
14 Interview with senior staff of the Policy Branch of OCHA, 12 June 2019, New York.
15 Throughout the article, ‘China’s ambassador to the UN’ refers to the UN as a whole rather than a particular UN institution.
16 I thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.
17 I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
18 Interview with a Chinese scholar specializing in China’s peacekeeping policy, 23 July 2019, Shanghai.
19 I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
20 See AidData, China’s Global Development Footprint, accessed 3 March 2021, https://www.aiddata.org/china-official-finance
21 Interview with a Chinese scholar specializing in China’s BRI policy, 17 July 2019, Shanghai.
22 Interview with a former Chinese peacekeeper, 9 June 2019, Beijing.
23 See the program lists of UNPDF, available at https://www.un.org/en/unpdf/index.shtml
24 Interview with senior staff of permanent Canadian mission to the UN, 10 June 2019.
25 Interview with senior staff of OCHA, 12 June 2019, New York.
26 Interview with a diplomat of Permanent Mission of the Czech Republic to the UN, 18 January 2019, Geneva.
27 Interview with a Chinese scholar specializing in China–Africa relations, 19 June 2019, Beijing.
28 Interview with an expert on China’s South–South cooperation and aid policy, 15 July 2019, Shanghai.
29 Interview with senior staff of the Policy Branch of OCHA, 12 June 2019, New York.
30 Interview with a Chinese scholar specializing in China’s foreign policy, 13 August 2019, Beijing.
31 I thank the reviewers for pushing forward these reflections.
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Xinyu Yuan
Xinyu Yuan is a PhD candidate in international relations and political science at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, where she wrote a dissertation on the shrinking civic space in China and the responses by international non-governmental organisations. She is also a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding of the Geneva Graduate Institute, where she conducts research on peacebuilding practices by non-Western powers (China, Japan, Russia). Her research focuses on norm diffusion, peacebuilding, civil society, Chinese politics and rising powers. She has published in Review of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Pathways to Peace and Security, among other journals.