Mapping China’s influence at the United Nations

Abstract

How do emerging powers secure international leadership posts? How do these international civil service positions contribute to an emerging power’s influence in multilateral institutions? Focusing on China as an emerging power in the UN system, we find that China forms coalitions with other weaker states to control leadership personnel appointments. We couple UN voting affinity data with under-utilized nationality-leadership data of the UN’s six principal organs’ departments and agencies. States with higher UN General Assembly voting affinity with China in turn secure a greater increase in UN leadership positions. We then investigate the effect of these bureaucratic leadership positions for China’s influence, scoping analysis to discourse (i.e. aligning liberal diplomatic discourse with PRC discourse). Applying text analysis methods to 54 UN departments against PRC-produced documentation, we show that China-friendly leadership positively correlates with the frequency of PRC-specific terms and PRC-reinterpreted words in its reports. Our findings illustrate that China wields influence in the UN system, i.e. the worldview of the international bureaucrats converges with their perceived principal, China. Our project advances research largely focused on United States and its allies’ influence in the multilateral system, and speaks to a limited literature on emerging power’s attempts to influence multilateral institutions.