Impact of China’s decision-making processes on international cooperation: cases of peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief

ABSTRACT

International cooperation on peacekeeping operations, and on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) operations, is important in tackling global non-traditional security threats. It also helps China address its ‘trust deficit’ problem. While both operations seem ‘low hanging fruit’ for international cooperation, the ways in which China undertakes peacekeeping and HADR cooperation differ – the former encompasses not only cooperation for technical and capacity development but also cooperation for policy harmonisation, while China’s HADR cooperation is limited to technical and capacity development. This paper asks, ‘why the difference?’, despite the fact that they both address similar policy problems. It argues that the difference corresponds to the level of holisticity/fragmentation of China’s decision-making process. The more holistic China’s decision-making process, the deeper the international cooperation. The nature of China’s decision-making processes has international policy implications, because the fragmented nature of those processes maintains cooperation at a functional level only, and hinders the deeper development of cooperation into policy harmonisation.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• peacekeeping
• humanitarianism
• disaster relief
• foreign policy analysis
• Cambodia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Miwa Hirono is an Associate Professor at the College of Global Liberal Arts and the Graduate School of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University. Her research focuses on China's evolving roles in conflict-affected regions, with attention paid to UN peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, conflict mediation and development.

Notes

1 The author consulted the databases of China Core Newspapers Full-text Database, Zhongguo Junwang (China Military Online), and the Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China webpage. Keywords used to search relevant occasions are weihe (peacekeeping), rendao zhuyi and yuanzhu (humanitarianism and assistance), jiuzhu and hezuo (rescue and cooperation), and jiuzai and hezuo (disaster relief and cooperation).

2 For definitions of partnership, cooperation and coordination, see Cook and Yogendran (2019) and Jones and Jalkebro (2019).

3 Author’s interviews with a former Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, Beijing, 21 July 2016; and with a Chinese government official (with experience of dispatching HADR overseas), 20 June 2016.

Additional information

Funding

The author is grateful for the support of the British Academy/Leverhulme trust small grants scheme under project number SRG\170645; and for the support of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI in the form of a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) under grant number 17K03606. Special thanks goes to Catherine Jones, Garren Mulloy, and Peter Trebilco for their invaluable advice and encouragement, and to Yujia Fan for his excellent research assistance.