Leader Visits and UN Security Council Membership

Existing literature on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has largely painted a quiet China content with its veto power and uninterested in actively lobbying other members. While this might indeed be the case, this could also be attributed to the fact that these studies have focused exclusively on foreign aid as the favor. 
Writing in International Studies Quarterly, YU WANG first lays out reasons why a rising China might want to seek UNSC votes. His paper, titled “Leader Visits and UN Security Council Membership,” then approaches the problem from a new perspective and argues that leader visits are a better proxy for favor than foreign aid in studying China’s lobbying efforts. 
Using leader visits as the favor, he consistently finds that Chinese leaders are substantially more likely to visit a UNSC member than a nonmember when visiting Africa. The author obtains similar results when he extends his models to Dreher et al. (2018). YU further show that this positive effect of UNSC membership on leader visits does not hold in election years or exit years, nor does it hold for US leader visits. He concludes that China in the twenty-first century, just like the major Western powers, actively promotes its agenda among UNSC members, albeit this is not necessarily reflected in foreign aid.
“Our paper contributes to the literature on the political economy of the UNSC. It is arguably the first of its kind to provide solid evidence that China actively lobbies UNSC members and challenges our conventional view of a quiet China content with its veto power,” the author states.
“Our paper also adds to the debate of whether the rising China is a revisionist or a status quo state. Our findings suggest that China seeks influence over the Security Council, just like other major powers in the world. 
“Last, our paper highlights the importance of tailoring and updating our IR tools for studying China. China is different from other major powers. Yet, we have been studying China using exactly the same tools, such as foreign aid and UNGA voting, that were originally developed to study the United States. More tailored tools and measures could potentially yield new insights.”

Yu Wang, Leader Visits and UN Security Council Membership, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 4, December 2022, sqac064, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqac064