Rising and Leading: China with the G77 at the United Nations General Assembly

Abstract

How does China behave when its interests as a rising power contradict those of the developing countries, namely the Group of 77 (G77) members, in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)? Even with the realist premise that China could go its own way, a large coalition like G77 is valuable in the UNGA, where countries need cooperators to get their opinions voiced. This paper defines China’s rise in terms of its status identity between 2006 to 2008, and theorizes that, overall, China should remain silent but behave increasingly in line with the Global North, while they will rhetorically emphasize their alignment with the Global South, or the G77 to anchor their support. This theory is elaborated by four hypotheses that dissect the mechanism by pre/interim/post-rise periods, and a UNGA co-sponsorship dataset (1993-2016) built on several existing datasets is used to test the hypotheses regarding China’s silent behavior of authorship with regressions. Meanwhile, my original text analysis data of Chinese statements (2008-2011) is used for testing China’s rhetorical behavior with regressions. The analyses are supplemented with findings from UN documents, Chinese documents and newspapers. In sum, this paper seeks to contribute to research on coalition politics from a state-centric perspective with an emphasis on China studies.

Keywords: UN General Assembly, China, Group of 77 (G77), coalition politics, rising power, status identity, sponsorship behavior, text analysis

JEL Classification: F53, F55