China and the battles of coalitions

“China does not have any other partner of the same strategic weight as Russia, who shares [its] distrust of the current international order,” Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore’s former ambassador to Russia and the United Nations, was recently quoted as saying in The New York Times, in a piece analyzing China’s position towards Russia after it attacked Ukraine.

For Beijing, that “current international order” is of course the global governance system created in 1945 by the US and supported by the West and its allies, an order that China is now fully bent on completely restructuring to reflect the new geopolitical realities of today, abandoning in the process the values the current order embodies. That fierce competition between the two blocs is increasingly polarized, structured by profoundly different ideologies and anchored in radically opposed political systems.

How China means to achieve its goals, and where it is leading the charge, is the subject of ‘China, The Battle of Coalitions’, a very recent paper by Alice Ekman, Senior Analyst in charge of the Asia portfolio at the European Union Security Institute. “China’s coalition-building efforts are currently supported by Russia and a growing number of countries, and fueled by strong resentment against the United States and its allies,” Ekman writes.

International Geneva is at the very epicenter of China’s efforts: “China has learned step-by-step how to build voting coalitions at the UN and in other multilateral arenas,” she writes, stressing that “through its diplomatic endeavors China is not only seeking to promote a specific type of domestic governance beyond its borders but also to restructure the global governance system. In particular, it wishes to craft a new approach to security and conflict intervention at the United Nations and other multilateral organizations.”