Research
Mapping China’s Influence at Multilateral Institutions
Under review. With Courtney Fung. Does China exert influence at multilateral institutions? If so, how? Analysts note that a rising China is coming to dominate multilateral institutions, pointing to China’s lead of four of the fifteen UN specialized agencies; the frequency of PRC rhetoric injected into international diplomatic discourse; and the linking of signature PRC projects, like the Belt and Road Initiative, to multilateral programs. As China assumes a greater leadership role in the United Nations system, China has stalled discussions on managing lethal autonomous weapons, muzzled UN Security Council interventions on human rights violations in Syria and used UN bureaucratic procedures to refute criticisms of China’s Xinjiang policies – shaping multilateral politics in China’s favour. Yet, there is no clear conceptualization and operationalization for what ‘influence’ means, nor how ‘influence’ is exerted in a formal multilateral setting. In order to address these questions, this paper first theorizes an operable definition for influence, disaggregating and mapping five different influence pathways: coercion, bargaining, persuasion, discourse, and agenda-setting. The paper highlights China’s influence as varying over time, intensity, and issue area, relying upon data-scraping, textual analysis and case sketches of China’s four UN specialized agencies’ headships.
- Presented at APSA 2020, ISA 2021
- With Courtney Fung. The Washington Post, Monkey Cage, “China already leads 4 of the 15 U.N. specialized agencies — and is aiming for a 5th,” March 2020
- Mentioned in Foreign Policy, “China’s Soft-Power Grab,” August 2020
- Related paper: With Courtney Fung. “Staffing the United Nations: China’s motivations and prospects,” International Affairs 97(4).