Rising and Leading: China with the G77 at the United Nations General Assembly

• In Event: Legislative Politics of the United Nations

Abstract

A glance over the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions today reveal that many of the socioeconomic drafts are co-sponsored by the “Group of 77 (G77) and China”, where China claims to be the “leader” of the developing world. The term “leader” connotates the fact that China’s opinion as a rising power expressed at the UNGA is in support of the other developing states.

However, it is intuitive that the interest of a “rising power” may contradict those of the G77, especially when China itself is outgrowing the mere label of a “developing country”. Furthermore, even when compared with the rising powers within the Group of 77 (Brazil, India and South Africa), scholars point out that China’s UNGA voting behavior is distinct and requires further investigation (Binder and Payton 2019). Therefore, this paper seeks to describe the trajectory of the relation between China and the Group of 77, and whether it has actually altered due to China’s “rise” especially in its socioeconomic aspects.

To be more precise, this paper proposes a theory that China keeps emphasizing its role as the “leader” of the G77 when drafting new resolutions from their side, while quietly going their own way regarding the resolutions (co-)sponsored by others and not by China. This is due to two reasons; firstly, China needs to maintain a set of potential cooperators under the “long shadows of the future” in the UNGA platform. Therefore, it emphasizes such closeness to secure a certain number of supports, especially when they are paid attention to. Secondly, it also needs to go its own way to secure certain preferences that may not necessarily align with the G77. This is done so by quietly reacting to the non-Chinese resolutions by paying less attention to whether they align with the G77.

This paper consists of two parts. In the first half of the paper, it shows the descriptive statistics of the relation between China and the G77 in three steps. First, it sorts out the UNGA draft resolutions (ultimately adopted regardless of whether with or without voting) since the year 1990 until today by whether it was of high priority for China. Those of high priority are identified by whether China was included in the (co-)sponsorship members at the latest draft. Secondly, it goes on to show descriptive statistics of the extent of China’s “alignment” with the G77 countries in the “high priority” cases. I point out to the ratio of co-sponsors for China that are G77 members, which should signify how the extent of China-G77 cooperation on issues important to China transitioned. Thirdly, as to those of low priority, I identify all non-Chinese (co-)sponsors for respective drafts and also identify what reactions were taken by China in its adoption, such as “agree without any statements/reservations” or “suggesting to vote but ending up joining in the ‘consensus’ with some statements being made”. By calibrating the strength of Chinese support by its reactionary behaviors, this should show the extent to which China agrees to G77 in issues that are not of high priority for them.

As to the latter half of the paper, I test my theory that China’s rise brought change to their behavior in low priority issues, but they maintain alignment with the G77 on high priority issues. I test the cases of high and low importance separately. As to the Chinese-sponsored resolutions, I test whether China’s rise proxied by their economic status does not give decrease in the ratio of G77 countries co-sponsoring the resolution. Meanwhile, as to the ones not sponsored by China, I test whether China’s rise gave a decrease to the correlation between China’s strength of support and the ratio of G77 sponsors on the draft. The theory will be buttressed by looking into Chinese statements at the UNGA and reading their party newspaper Renminribao in Chinese.

This paper contributes to the field of international institutions regarding China from two aspects. Firstly, while there is a general understanding that China as a rising power have frequently sided with the “Third World”, its behavioral patterns remain underexplored. Since the earlier studies have looked into the macro issues of whether China as a rising power “socializes” into multilateralism (Johnston 2008; Kim 1971), or joins the multilateral arena (Kastner et al. 2019; Kastner et al. 2020), it is high time we test whether it behaves as a rising power on concrete policies within multilateralism. Secondly, while the UNGA resolutions data have been a huge topic, the ones adopted by consensus have been ignored by focusing on voting data. This is significant, since at least approximately 75% of the resolutions are non-voting ones between the session years 1990 to 2004 (Peterson 2006: 74-79). Furthermore, coding (co)-sponsors for respective draft resolutions is essential especially when “who” initiated the resolutions matter.

Author

• Tomoko Takahashi, University of Tokyo