Gauging Chinese Public Support for China’s Role in International Peacekeeping

With a growing number of states disintegrating into civil war and anarchy in recent years, the international community has urged China to step up its efforts to provide much-needed support for peacekeeping through both financial and personnel contributions.
China has responded: it is currently the largest troop-contributing country among the permanent members of the Security Council, and the second-largest financial contributor to the UN peacekeeping budget. “This development is impressive, but the real test of China’s commitment will probably come in the future, when the Chinese public begins to feel the costs associated with these increasing contributions,” contend SONGYING FANG and FANGLU SUN.
So far, scant attention has been paid to the Chinese public’s preferences regarding peacekeeping, the authors write in ‘Gauging Chinese Public Support for China’s Role in Peacekeeping’, published in the Chinese Journal of International Affairs.
Much of the analysis within and outside of China about its expanding participation in UN peacekeeping has focused on Beijing’s decisions – especially its motivations for contributing more, and whether it will change its stance on non-interference. “We believe there is a real need to understand the Chinese public’s opinions on these matters.”
Beijing’s foreign policy decisions are not without constraints. The proliferation of online news sources and communication technologies has made shielding the public from information on sensitive foreign policy issues extremely challenging for any government, including Beijing. Meanwhile, the Chinese public has become more eager to express their opinions, facilitated by rising living standards as well as ever more convenient and rapid social media applications, such as Weibo and WeChat. “Therefore, understanding where the Chinese public stands on China’s role in providing peace for the wider world provides important insights into the policy options available to Beijing in response to such issues.”
The survey design allows the authors to gauge Chinese public support for peacekeeping in the context of a wide range of factors, including motivations to participate, types of participation, international organization authorization, and perceptions of the benefits to China. “Moreover, we are able to tease out to what extent sensitive issues, such as host state consent, which is associated with China’s long-held principle of non-interference in others’ domestic affairs, may influence public attitudes about China’s peacekeeping efforts.”
Many both intuitive and surprising findings emerged from the study, the authors contend. First, in all scenarios, respondents showed high levels of support for China’s engagement in peacekeeping activities. Secondly, contrary to the conventional wisdom, China’s various self-interests in the host country did not increase the already high level of support based solely on humanitarianism; however, respondents perceived indirect benefits to China’s international reputation from such activities that might have contributed to their strong support for China’s participation in peacekeeping. Thirdly, whether the UN or the AU authorized a peacekeeping operation made no difference to the level of support for China’s engagement in the mission; at the same time, we found no evidence that AU authorization was perceived as a substitute for the condition of host state consent. Finally, respondents generally preferred China to make personnel (military and police) contributions in addition to financial contributions.
“Although our sample is not representative of the general population,” the authors state, “it is representative of China’s large online population. The attributes of our respondents are consistent with the characteristics of Chinese netizens found in the annual Report on the Development of Internet Network in China recently released by the China Internet Network Information Center. The samples drawn in others’ online surveys or survey experiments conducted in China also found attributes similar to those in our sample.”
One could argue that the online population is the more politically attentive segment of Chinese society and is the likely source of domestic pressure on Beijing’s foreign policy. Beijing may well be keen to anticipate the online public’s reactions when rolling out significant foreign policy initiatives. Therefore, research on Chinese public opinion such as ours helps explain and predict Chinese foreign policy.
So, what are the main policy implications of the study? First, the results suggest that Beijing has a great deal of policy space when it comes to providing peacekeeping, because the Chinese public does not seem to attach immediate self-interest to their support for such missions. Secondly, the fact that the public tends to give even greater support to peacekeeping if China takes a leadership role should give Beijing strong incentive to seek such a role in the UN. Thirdly, the public is likely to view favorably Beijing’s deepening cooperation with the AU on peacekeeping. Finally, host state consent may continue to pose domestic constraints on Beijing’s peacekeeping decisions in the future.