Obvious facts call attention. On the one hand, China has largely accommodated itself to the Western-dominated liberal international order: it has assimilated its rules and vigorously defends them in the United Nations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international forums. On the other hand, it has tried to create new multilateral structures that serve its interests more directly, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Of course, the Chinese Communist Party denounces American and Western hegemony over the current order, but it is far from wanting to upset it. He prefers to make an effort to create coalitions, especially from southern countries, to gradually change it. In other words, China is revisionist, but its revisionism is reformist, not revolutionary.
In many respects, China appears to be a good student of the current international order. Since the time of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, it has always scrupulously applied the Vienna conventions on the rights and privileges of embassies and diplomats abroad. Since joining the UN in 1971, he has been learning how this enormous machine works, has integrated its various institutional components and acceded to its norms and conventions, whether in the areas of disarmament and arms control, economic development or even human rights. . Thus, in 1992, he signed the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; in 1997, it signed the United Nations Covenant on International Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which it ratified in 2001. And although it had already approved the UN Convention against Torture in 1986, in 1998 it signed the International Covenant on Civil Rights and UN politicians.
More recently, China has been very active at the UN. For example, starting in 2012, its contribution to the peacekeeping operations (PKO) budget has increased rapidly, as has the number of Chinese blue helmets participating in them (some 2,500 in 2022). For this reason, it is now the second country that contributes the most to that budget (15% of the total), behind the United States (28%) but ahead of Japan (9%). At the same time, China has assumed the leadership of four UN organizations. Among them, since 2015, the International Telecommunications Union, based in Geneva; and, since 2019, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), based in Rome. However, and above all, the Chinese government is displaying an unparalleled entryism at the UN. Every year it sends many trainees to become familiar with its operation, both in New York and in Geneva. When the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus broke out in the spring of 2020, we saw that it was able to influence the management of the pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). He even got the UN to adopt Xi Jinping's famous formula about the “common destiny of humanity”, a slogan clearly intended to promote the Chinese vision of the world order. Therefore, it was not surprising that Chinese diplomats were able to assemble a sufficient coalition in the UN Human Rights Council in October 2022 to prevent any debate on the serious human rights violations committed by Beijing in the Turkic-speaking region of Xinjiang: 19 out of 47 Council members voted against holding a debate, 17 in favor and 11 abstained.
The result of that vote highlights, above all, the unprecedented increase in power and influence of China, especially through advantageous loans to southern countries, and, consequently, its growing role in multilateral organizations interstates.
Another illuminating example of China's acceptance of the international order established in 1945 is the alacrity with which it sought to join the WTO, heir to the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) created in 1947. The negotiations were tough and were led by then Prime Minister Zhu Rongji. However, Beijing achieved its goals and acceded to the organization in 2001, with the benefit of a fifteen-year adaptation period. So today the Chinese government presents itself as an active and respectful member of the WTO, vigorously debating with Western countries in the dispute settlement body while advocating reform of the organization. In particular, he advocates strengthening the authority of the WTO and its dispute resolution mechanisms, which are currently hampered by the US veto on the appointment of appellate judges. However, China is reluctant to propose too radical a reform, as it is very interested in a selective opening of its internal market and in the protection of its national champions, who remain heavily subsidized, in contravention of WTO rules.
Finally, let us quickly mention the IMF and the World Bank, two institutions inherited from the Bretton Woods agreement (1944) and the global economic dominance of the United States and the US dollar. Since the start of the reforms (1980), China has maintained formal relations with the former and has benefited from loans from the latter. At the same time, he has tried to increase his right to vote. It is true that we had to wait until 2016 for it to go from 3.8% to 6.09%. Today he continues to campaign for IMF reform in the hope of making the United States lose its effective veto power (16.5% of the vote in an organization in which important decisions require a majority of 85% of the vote ). At the same time, it has succeeded in including the Chinese currency, the yuan, in the basket of currencies used to determine the value of Special Drawing Rights and is increasingly collaborating with these two organizations.
More broadly, the government avoids being dismissive of existing multilateral organizations and tries instead to join them. In the past, the strategy was motivated by the interest of excluding Taiwan from them; today, it is a way for China to increase its voice and global influence on the world stage.
Even so, after the end of the cold war, the Chinese authorities began to be more open to changing the international order. It is clear that they were not satisfied with the American unipolarity that had been imposed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that time, China was still too weak to directly influence that order and force changes to the existing organizations. Therefore, he tried to change them from the outside by creating his own organizations.
The six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue between 2003 and 2009 were seen by some as a Chinese initiative. By bringing together China, the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States, those talks constituted a new multilateral format that satisfied Beijing to the extent that it established a balance between the allies of the United States and the countries close to Pyongyang and allowed for the first time the establishment of direct relations between North Korea and the United States. However, Chinese ownership is far from established and the failure to resume those talks in 2012 has led the Chinese government to avoid promoting them.
Instead, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is now celebrated by the Chinese government as a model interstate multilateral organization. Born in 2001 from the Shanghai Group created in 1996 by Beijing and Moscow and by the three new Central Asian republics that share a border with China (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) to secure that border and fight terrorism, the SCO has been more ambitious. While exhibiting unwavering respect for the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of its members, the SCO pursues security, diplomatic, and economic objectives. Expanded in 2001 to include Uzbekistan, the SCO now has nine members, including India and Pakistan since 2017 and Iran since 2022, as well as a dozen dialogue partners, some of whom, like Turkey and Belarus, want to become full members today. In such an organization, Beijing can most effectively test its new initiatives for global security and world economic development. Launched by Xi Jinping in April 2022, the first initiative promotes the idea of "indivisible security," which harms no other country, while respecting everyone's territorial integrity, security concerns, and development path. That initiative, which opposes what Xi calls the "spirit of the cold war", "unilateralism" and "bloc confrontation", directly opposes US alliance systems. Released a year earlier, the second initiative aims to promote balanced, coordinated, respectful of the environment and inclusive global development, fostering multilateral synergies. Their priorities must be poverty reduction, food security, the fight against covid, financing for development, the green economy, industrialization and connectivity. This initiative intends to be linked to both the new silk roads (Belt and Road Initiative, BRI) launched by Xi in 2013 and the UN 2030 Agenda on sustainable development. In other words, the SCO has become the test bed for these two initiatives. The problem is, on the one hand, that the SCO is now too large and diverse an organization to remain coherent and, on the other, that since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and even more so since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it is difficult for Beijing to convince all SCO partners of the merits and, above all, the effectiveness of its comprehensive security initiative.
Since the year 2000, China attaches great importance to another structure that it has created and that it presents as multilateral, the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). FOCAC, which meets alternately in China and in Africa every three years at the level of Heads of State and Government, is also presented as a model of South-South cooperation in which everyone wins. It is true that the financial package provided by China to all the countries of the African continent (with the exception of Swaziland, which still maintains relations with Taiwan) is impressive, since it finances multiple infrastructure projects with often concessional loans (about 160,000 million dollars between 2000 and 2021), stimulates Chinese investment and bilateral exchanges, and provides medical and educational assistance, especially through the Confucius Institute, to a large number of African countries. However, there is nothing original or new about this format: other countries, such as France, India or Japan, have created structures of this type before, with quite similar objectives. It is the magnitude of China's financial manna that sets it apart from other creditor or donor countries, as well as the anti-Western rhetoric that accompanies it. For the rest, FOCAC continues to be a much more bilateral than multilateral platform and, above all, more asymmetric than symmetric, which fuels African fears of this new Chinese hegemony.
Since 2001, the Chinese government has partnered with other groupings, such as the BRICS, which joined in 2009-2010. Also in this case, Beijing has taken advantage of this congregation of large emerging countries to defend and try to share its vision of a new world order that takes more into account the needs of the different parts of the world and, especially, of the new poles that have appeared. . However, the difficulty in this case lies in the fact that the BRICS promote a more multipolar than multilateral approach to the world, an approach that reinforces the weight of large countries to the detriment of small ones and that goes against the very principles of the United Nations. United.
China's interest in the G-20, the grouping of the world's twenty largest economies created during the global financial crisis of 2008, is based on this same inclination. In fact, the advantage of the G-20 is double in the eyes of Beijing: on the one hand, it helps to marginalize the G-7 (the former G-8), that meeting of the seven main industrialized democracies (seven, since the suspension of Russia in 2014); on the other, it focuses its attention on economic and financial issues in which Beijing and other capitals of emerging countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Mexico or Turkey, can coordinate their activities more easily than on political-strategic or human rights-related issues. In other words, the G-20 blurs the distinction between democratic and authoritarian states, which is obviously in China's interest.
Through all these initiatives, we can see a China that wants to change the international order by creating seemingly multilateral institutions, but which reinforce the position of the main emerging countries while eroding US and Western hegemony in general. . But what world order does he really want to establish?
A reading of the 2019 white paper on China and the world in the new era reveals that the new international order promoted by Beijing is not so new. It is true that the Chinese government wants to give more space to the global south, that is, to the developing countries at the expense of the countries of the north, which it wishes to weaken; believes that it can promote world peace through economic development; is in favor of a transformation of the "global governance system" that gives more room for agreement, coordination and the search for consensus on the basis of shared interests, and for this reason is in favor of a reform of the UN and of the WTO in particular; In short, it promotes the appearance of a more just world and what it calls a "democratization of international relations." However, at the same time, China supports economic globalization and regionalization, through the establishment of agreements in the style of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RECP, established in January 2022), and opposes protectionism; supports multilateralism and declares its willingness to cooperate with all countries in the world, including those with which significant ideological and strategic tensions persist; and, above all, the authorities in Beijing believe that a growing influence and role for China in world affairs will help to achieve those goals.
In this long list, the objectives seem above all as ambitious as unrealizable. The reality is that China's priority continues to be its economic development, the increase in its power and the achievement of national unification with Taiwan. The priority is also to thwart any criticism of the internal political regime and human rights abuses. And lastly, try to break any attempt at diplomatic isolation and impose their interpretation of international norms.
Those priorities are so many obstacles to any reform and improvement of the international order. Indeed, Xi Jinping's China's assertion of power and its wolf warrior diplomacy have fueled international tensions and contributed to dividing the world. They have led most of their neighbors to seek American protection even more than before. Beijing's progressive dominance over the South China Sea, especially through the construction and militarization of artificial islands, in flagrant contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is a matter of concern to Southeast Asian countries and other countries. great powers. Likewise, his desire to speed up the annexation of Taiwan by all means, including military means, is perceived by most of the international community as a worrying factor of tension, even of war, more intensely since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Seeking to protect and perpetuate its authoritarian, even totalitarian regime, the Chinese Communist Party urbi et orbi denounces Western democracy, presented as a factor of economic weakening and political and moral decadence. Although it claims to adhere to the universal norms of the UN, it continues to refuse to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights because this would deprive it of the means of repression that it continues to consider essential; in particular, the indefinite administrative detention of political opponents or even potential suspects, as is currently the case in Xinjiang
Also in this sense, China is revisionist: it favors the selective application of international norms, those that do not undermine its internal regime and its Westphalian sovereignty. But today's world is globalized and, at the same time, riddled with geostrategic tensions that undermine its globalization. It is hard to imagine any realization of China's plans for a new international order. On the contrary, what today's world highlights is the outbreak of a new ideological, strategic, and technological cold war simultaneously between China and the US and, more broadly, between China and the West (including Japan, South Korea, South and Taiwan). It is true that this cold war differs from the old one in that the economies of all these countries are much more interdependent than in the days of the extinct Soviet Union. However, it is obligatory to recognize that today we are moving towards a partial decoupling of the Chinese economy from the United States; above all, in the sector of high technology, for example, in semiconductors. And this disengagement is having global consequences, since it forces other agents to also reduce their dependence on China. Although the covid has contributed to such an evolution, its cause has not been the pandemic, but the difficulty of the international community to agree on the nature of the world order and the norms that it must promote and protect.
Under these conditions, the revisionist international order that China intends to establish has little prospect of becoming a reality. Rather, the liberal world order inherited from the end of the Second World War is called for to be maintained, without ceasing to reform itself with the growing participation of emerging countries, but not only China.
Jean-Pierre Cabestan is a researcher at the Asia Center research institute, Paris.
