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Great Power Responsibility: China's Active Participation in United Nations Peacekeeping Activities
Time : 2019-06-28

  By He Wenping

  Research fellow of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

  Every May 29 in the year is the United Nations international peacekeepers day. And the day always reminds people in the world that there are still wars and conflicts in the current world and the UN peacekeeping, peace building are very essential for maintaining world peace and security.

  Being a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the second largest economy now in the world, China has taken an increasingly active approach to fully engage with and participate in the UN peacekeeping operation and peace building activities. By actively participating in UN peacekeeping operations, China’s global reputation and its status as a cooperative responsible global stakeholder can be strengthened. And by doing so, China’s image and soft power as well as the experience and capacity of Chinese peacekeepers can also been increased.

  As a matter of fact, China’s participation with the UN peacekeeping operation has gone through a gradual active process. Historically, China's foreign policy was to have less engagement and non-participation in international multilateral organizations and its operations, such as the UN peacekeeping activities. And it was not until the 1990s, almost 10 years after the reform and open-up policy was adopted that China’s policy towards peacekeeping started to shift and China joined its first military peacekeeping operation by deploying five observers to the UN Truce Supervision Organization in the Middle East.

  Ever since then, in the past 29 years, China has been participating actively and firmly in the UN peacekeeping operation and serving as the second largest contributor to the UN Peacekeeping budget, and contributes more troops to UN peacekeeping missions than any other permanent members of the UN Security Council. So far, China has dispatched more than 40,000 blue helmet peacekeepers and participated in as many as 24 UN peacekeeping operations, and is regarded as the key force in UN peacekeeping activities. Apart from peacekeepers and budget contribution, China advocates to linking the four stages of conflict prevention, peace maintenance, peace building and sustainable peace together. China believes that the fundamental way to maintain lasting peace and common security is to abide by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, build a community of human destiny, promote a system of global governance that is jointly, co-built and shared, and practice a new security concept of common, integrated, cooperative and sustainable. These ideas are welcomed and supported by a growing number of countries.

  The year 2015 can be regarded as a landmark year for highlighting China’s rise as a global security provider. Chinese President Xi Jinping announced in the UN Peacekeeping Summit in September 2015 that China will join the UN standby mechanism for peacekeeping capacity, and is committed to establishing 8,000 troops for the UN peacekeeping standby force—one fifth of the 40,000 total troops committed by fifty nations. China also pledged to help train 2,000 peacekeepers globally as well as give 100 million USD worth of aid to the African Union standby force building and 1 billion USD to establish the UN Peace and Development Trust Fund. So far, the 8,000 Chinese standby peacekeeping troops are ready and 1,600 out of 2,000 peacekeepers globally have been trained.

  Since Africa is a continent with a more frequent conflict in the world today, promoting African peace and stability has becoming the major mission for the UN peacekeeping agenda, and also one of the corner stone for strengthening China-Africa cooperation as a whole. In recent years, China has been increasing its peace and security cooperation with Africa in personnel training, information sharing, joint military drills and training, etc. China is also actively involved in mediating conflict in South Sudan, post-conflict reconstruction in African countries. The improvement of Africa's infrastructure and the enhancement of economic dynamism under the Belt and Road Initiative have also laid a solid economic foundation for the sustainability of peace and security in Africa.

  For a long time, the West always held a vigilant and even precautionary attitude towards China's overall national strength improvement, particularly China’s increasing military capabilities, and the so-called "China Threat Theory" and "China neo-Colonialism theory" have been also haunted there. Therefore, strengthening China's participation in and contribution more to the United Nations peacekeeping mission is of great significance in reducing or even eliminating these murmurs and further establishing the image of the Peace Division and Justice Division of our Army in the international community. All in all, in the era of globalization, international peace and security needs international cooperation and joint efforts from all countries in the world. China's becoming the backbone of peacekeeping operations is not only an inevitable requirement for China's great power responsibility, but also conducive to world peace and security.

Copyright: Institute of West-Asian and African Studies, CASS

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