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China’s influence at the United Nations has been hotly debated in the past few years thanks to its potential impact, from climate change through global health, security, to aid and human rights. As one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China plays a crucial role in shaping international laws, resolutions and responses to global conflicts. Recently, China’s position at the UN on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has again brought to the fore China’s significance for the world, particularly Europe.  

China is already the world’s second-largest economy, which should equate to increasing leverage in terms of its lobbying of other UN members, arising either from trade relations or its lending and investment in UN members, especially emerging and developing countries.

At Bruegel, we have assessed how influential China is at the UN. We focused on how effective China is at the UN in promoting its global narratives ('words'), especially given the many global initiatives China has introduced in the past few years. The best-known is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from 2013.

Since then, a flurry of global initiatives has been introduced, such as the ‘Community of Shared Future for Mankind’, which was popularised by President Xi at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017 and has been inserted into several UN General Assembly resolutions since then. Another is the Global Development Initiative, introduced by Xi Jinping at the UN General Assembly in 2021 as a China-led initiative to advance the UN 2030 agenda on Sustainable Development Goals. A third narrative, the Global Security Initiative, launched in April 2022 just after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, focuses on state sovereignty, creating a balanced security architecture to guarantee global collective security. Finally, China’s most recent plan, the Global Civilization Initiative, emphasises the respect for cultural diversity among nations, promoting people-to-people exchanges as a cornerstone of global affairs.

When analysing the extent to which these initiatives have been taken up in the UN discourse compared to Western initiatives, the BRI stands out, while the others are comparable to the Western initiatives in terms of their influence (an exception is the European Union’s Global Gateway, which is mentioned little in UN documents). In general, China’s global narratives are more self-referential than Westen ones, and more focused on security than on topics such as aid and human rights.

To analyse ‘deeds’, ie the extent to which countries align with China when voting at the UN, we took all of the votes at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) since 2000 and found that countries are more aligned with China than with the US. However, this has been the case since the beginning without a significant upward trend. The result should not be surprising as it is mostly driven by the higher number of emerging and developing countries voting at the UN. In fact, we found that income per capita is a good indicator of voting alignment: higher-income countries are closer to US voting patterns than middle- or low-income countries. Interestingly, Russia has aligned with Chinese voting patterns to a very high degree from the beginning of our sample, meaning Russia-China alignment predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and even the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

All in all, China’s relevance in the UN is clear but its influence does not seem to be growing as fast as its global economic power. Western narratives are less influential, at least when compared to the BRI. The negligible impact of the Global Gateway is particularly painful for Europe.

On voting, the Global South’s voting alignment with China has been consistent and has not increased lately, though it might in the future if China continues to focus on the Global South with both its UN narratives and financial resources. Furthermore, the UN is only one of the venues of Chinese influence, with an increasing number of initiatives – in particular the expanded BRICS – focused on the Global South.

ZhōngHuá Mundus is a newsletter by Bruegel, bringing you monthly analysis of China in the world, as seen from Europe.

This is an output of China Horizons, Bruegel's contribution in the project Dealing with a resurgent China (DWARC). This project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions under grant agreement No. 101061700.