China’s Influence at the United Nations: Words and Deeds

We investigate China’s influence at the United Nations (UN) by focusing on the promotion of its narratives (words) and its voting behaviour (deeds). For the former, we assess the extent to which China’s global initiatives have become embedded in UN discourse, compared to Western narratives. For the latter, we assess the degree to which countries, regions and voting coalitions align their UN General Assembly votes with China, compared to the US.When it comes to words, China’s global initiatives– which have expanded and now focus primarily on a global audience – are sometimes more discussed at the UN than Western global initiatives. More specifically, the Belt and Road Initiative has had a much greater impact on UN discourse than any Western initiative and certainly much more than the EU’s counteroffer – the Global Gateway. Still, other Chinese global initiatives do not stand out compared to those from the West, with the Global Compact for Migration featuring more prominently at the UN than any Chinese initiative other than the BRI. Our analysis of the geographical distribution of countries linked to Chinese and Western initiatives in UN documents finds that Chinese initiatives are more self-referential than those of the West and mention the US more often than partners in emerging economies. Western initiatives, instead, tend to mention countries targeted by their initiatives more frequently. Finally, we also find that security is the most relevant theme in China’s global initiatives, but also very much so for Western initiatives with aid and human rights listed as the second most discussed topics in the context of Chinese and Western global initiatives.Moving to voting patterns (deeds) measured by alignment scores, we find that countries are more aligned with China than the US, but that this result is mostly driven by the larger number of emerging and developing countries voting at the UN compared to high-income countries. In fact, we find that income per capita is a very good indicator of voting alignment as higher income countries are closer to US voting patterns than middle- or low-income countries. Russia has an exceedingly high alignment with Chinese voting patterns throughout our sample. In other words, it predates its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and even the Crimean crisis. EU countries are more closely aligned with the US, especially when we consider only votes designated as important for the US. Finally, voting alignment with China is generally very stable across geographies without noticeably increasing over the past few years. The latter finding is quite surprising if one considers China’s growing economic power globally and the flurry of global initiatives that China has pushed into UN discourse.Some policy conclusions can be extracted from the above. First, Western narratives are not compelling and popular enough in the community of nations, but neither are all Chinese global narratives, except for the Belt and Road Initiatives. The limited impact of the Global Gateway is particularly poignant, which should make responsible EU officials reflect on how to better promote this initiative. Second, the Global South has long been aligned with China when voting at the General Assembly, but the EU has not as much, especially for votes that are important for the US. This is true for UN voting related to Russia’s aggression of Ukraine but much less so for the Israel-Hamas war. Finally, it might be surprising to note that China’s influence in the UN, whether in terms of words or deeds, is quite stable even if China’s economic global power has increased. While this finding might be reassuring for the EU, we should take it with caution as there are other parallel actions that China is pursuing such as chairing key committees or increasing the budgetary contributions to the UN which might change our findings in the future. *This is a reprint. This paper has been published by Bruegel as part of China Horizons within the EU Project China. /working-paper/chinas-influence-united-nations-words-and-deeds