Unpacking China's Influence on Global Human Rights Norms

How does a rising China impact the international order? This important question has attracted much attention from scholars and policymakers alike. What is the nature of a rising China? Is China a status quo power or a revisionist state? Answers to such questions carry immense policy implications. If China is a revisionist power that seeks to undermine and replace the international order, beneficiaries of the order may seek to deter or contain China’s growing power and influence around the world. If China is a status quo power, less coercive or more constructive measures would be warranted in dealing with a rising China. 

Xinyuan Dai (Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a visitor at IBEI) addresses the implications of a rising China in one of the most controversial areas of international order: international human rights. In a joint project titled “Beyond Liberal Narratives: China and International Human Rights Order” with Lucie Lu (Columbia University), the authors ask: Does China seek to overturn UN human rights organizations or, in the other extreme, uphold international human rights norms and principles? Or, in between, does China participate in the UN human rights regime strategically by selectively endorsing norms that are consistent with its interests? 

Using the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR) - a mechanism within the UNHRC - as a laboratory, the authors analyze over 93,000 recommendations made by states between 2008 and 2021. They not only examine China's position on international human rights, but also analyze how China's position compares with that of other countries. Their project overcomes two common shortcomings in the literature. First, the authors depart from the conventional wisdom that treats human rights as nothing more than political rights. Going beyond the liberal narrative, the authors see the international human rights order as multidimensional, consisting of rules and principles codified in global human rights treaties. Second, the authors fill the void in the literature of systematic evidence by assessing states’ positions on the international human rights order as emerging not from selected documents or isolated statements, but from recurring practices, as states are repeatedly prompted in recommendations to each other to articulate what they consider to be the most important norms.

Using textual data analysis, their study provides new and systematic evidence on how China engages with the international human rights order and, more importantly, the extent to which China’s position on the international human rights order resonates around the world. The study shows that states recognize the multidimensionality of the international human rights order: they engage selectively with some norms but not others, and most countries are partial to selected rights. China's position overlaps with that of most countries in protecting vulnerable populations and safeguarding citizens' rights to physical integrity, but China is strongly and increasingly championing social and economic rights and sidelining civil and political rights. This position contrasts most sharply with that of the United States, which prioritizes civil and political rights over social and economic rights. Moreover, China's position enjoys considerable support in the Global South, particularly among recipients of Chinese development aid. The echo of the Chinese position is most evident when countries from the Global South are in direct dialogue with China: they prioritize social and economic rights, as China does, but interestingly do not completely ignore civil and political rights.

These findings do not support the claim that China is seeking to overturn the international human rights regime. Rather, while sharing with most countries a commitment to protecting vulnerable populations and safeguarding citizens’ rights to physical integrity, China is championing those rights that have been sidelined by liberal democracies and on which China has made immense progress. Those in the Global South are increasingly echoing China’s position on social and economic rights, suggesting that China may have subtly reshaped the discourse of international norms.

This study invites reflection along efforts to promotes EU values and strengthen the EU’s external legitimacy in the EU-VALUES network and beyond. Initial findings from this study were reported in SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 40. Latest updates and additional information are available on Xinyuan Dai’s page here, and Lucie Lu’s website here.

Xinyuan Dai is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is the author of "International Institutions and National Policies" (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Her work, published in top journals like the American Political Science Review and World Politics, explores international institutional order and China in global governance. She has received recognition for her research, including a Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association Human Rights Section.

Lucie Lu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University and a Project Fellow at the Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2023. Her research focuses on international cooperation, human rights, Chinese foreign policy, global governance, comparative political communication, and computational social science. She has previously held a fellowship at the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program.

The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of EU-VALUES Network.