Why and Why China Interferes
Given Beijing’s long insistence on the principle of “non-interference” as the golden rule of international society, why did Chinese diplomats at the UN Security Council condone humanitarian interventions in Darfur and Libya? And why did China revert by 2012 to its fierce aversion to anything smacking of “regime change,” most notably during the UN debates over the civil war in Syria? University of Hong Kong professor Courtney Fung offers a solution to this puzzle by emphasizing the under-appreciated importance of “status” in China’s diplomatic calculus. With theoretical sophistication and detailed case studies, Fung argues that Beijing carefully gauges how two key “peer groups” will judge its position on sensitive cases of potential UN intervention in another state’s domestic affairs, and acts accordingly. One peer group consists of China’s fellow “great powers,” especially the US, the UK and France. The other is a much larger collection of developing countries that China refers to as the Global South. When these two constituencies are aligned, Beijing is likely to follow suit. When they diverge, it faces a dilemma. When they are internally divided, China chooses its own approach.
If Fung is correct about “status” as the key to China’s pattern of behavior, her study has important implications for understanding how Beijing approaches international co-operation, particularly intervention. There is one important caveat: Fung’s cases are drawn from the Hu Jintao era of 2002-12. Whether Xi Jinping’s China “reconciles status” in the same way might inspire her to write a sequel.