AFTER a soporific summit with Barack Obama, President Xi Jinping’s address to the United Nations General Assembly seemed unlikely to set pulses racing. By comparison, his speech on September 28th was a show-stopper. It revealed that China’s relations with the UN have what its ties with America lack: a sense of direction and even engagement.
China used to disparage the UN. Even though it is one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council, it repeatedly abstained from votes, accounting, from 1990 to 1996, for two-thirds of all abstentions by the permanent members. Since then China’s behaviour at the UN has changed profoundly. Over the past few years it has increasingly used the body as a vehicle for its international ambitions.
A simple measure of its new engagement is China’s contribution to the UN budget. In 2015 it handed over $140m, or 5% of UN revenues, about the same as Britain or France. That compares with $67m (3%) in 2010. According to Zhang Guihong, director of the Centre for UN Studies at FudanUniversity in Shanghai, by 2018 China will be the UN’s third-largest...Continue reading
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