Professor Julian Ku discusses the strategic goals of China on Lawfare:
While China’s international organization influence strategy seeks to expand its global prestige in ways similar to any other great power, it also has narrower, “China-first” interests to pursue. First and foremost, China’s growing influence in international organizations is aimed at ensuring the government of Taiwan is excluded and marginalized. China has succeeded so well in this regard that Taiwan has not even been able to achieve observer status at technical, nonpolitical organizations such as the World Health Organization, Interpol, or the International Civil Aviation Organization
Second, China seeks to use its newfound influence to pre-empt criticism by international organizations on long-sensitive issues such as human rights. For instance, China has been able to shape the agenda and build support within the Human Rights Commission for its own state-centric concept of human rights protection. To a lesser extent, it has been able to leverage influence in the United Nations Development Program to win endorsements of its controversial Belt and Road Initiative from UNDP leaders.
I see this as a part of their offensive against American democracy, touting their combination of reformed communism + managed capitalism as superior to more democratic, less controllable forms of government.
While the first explanation for their sensitivity on human-rights and other issues in that category may be the traditional reputation or “face” argument, I think the second explanation has to do with metrics. That is, many people like to have metrics that indicate how good something might be. So much the better if someone else is doing the measurements. So if China can control those organizations which can be seen as measuring the various competing forms of government, then China has a better chance of having the dominant form of government in the future.
And it won’t matter if the United States is a province of China in that future, just so long as it’s form of government is something that China can understand and, preferably, control. Because then they look better, relatively speaking, and have a better chance of surviving in their current governmental form.
Because who wants to run for election in China when you can make your way up the ranks in the Communist Party instead?
