State Autonomy of Rising Powers in International Institutions: China in the United Nations General Assembly

How does a rising power, and China in particular, engender state autonomy within international institutions? Although recent studies have explored how China chooses multilateral arenas to further their interest (Kastner et al. 2019; Kastner et al. 2020), its transitional aspect as a “rising” power rather than any large power is yet to be explored. This is interesting, because the status of a “rising” power is different from those of a hegemon or any other country in the arena, and lacks earlier studies especially in the era of “regime complex” situations (Alter and Raustiala 2018). For example, conventional theory on American liberal order has contended that hegemons seek to build conducive institutions that lock-in their power (Ikenberry 2006), while another strand of theories have hinted at how states may be wary of institutions that constrain their state autonomy, but still comply to them in case they are beneficial to their regime survival (Debre 2020; Hashimoto 2020; Poast and Urpelainen 2018). In a nutshell, China may be cherry-picking the domains of cooperation to those that are beneficial for them as a non-hegemon, while also seeking deep influence throughout the institution by other means. The most puzzling are the situations where China faces policies that are not of high priority, and they have no substantive preferences, but still have to react in some certain way. This is a significant issue, since international institutions have persistence and states do not have much leeway in choosing not to react to insignificant issues, which constitute a large portion of the policies being discussed. Although it is intuitive that states seek larger margins of influence in such cases to pursue national interest, it is a conundrum as to why and how they choose to support specific strength and breadth of restrictive policies on state autonomy. Therefore, this paper proposes and tests a theory on how China chooses to support specific draft resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) since the 1990s until 2010 as a hard case. The insignificant policies will be proxied by draft resolutions that were not (co-)sponsored by China, and it will calibrate the level of Chinese support with their reactions to the drafts, both via non-voting and voting behaviors. The theory contends that, China seeks to take advantage of the opportunities to react to insignificant resolutions, and build up their influence across the complex of international institutions. Therefore, even if all UNGA resolutions are legally non-binding instruments, China prefers to support when (1) there is larger Chinese influence within the external implementation mechanisms mentioned in the resolution, and (2) there is a larger number of co-supporters to the draft, while weighing factor (1) heavier. Such actions will be contrasted to how they are vocal about being in line with the Group of 77 in the UNGA. Methodologically, this paper gathers a dataset on resolutions as described above. After showing the descriptive statistics, it conducts a regression analysis to test the hypotheses that derives from the theory.