Beijing’s Struggle for Global Discourse Power: Decoding China’s Narrative at the UN

In the last two decades, China has become less vulnerable to external pressure and has instead launched a counter-discourse against international criticism of its domestic human rights record. A key aspect of China’s foreign policy and diplomacy under president Xi Jinping is to “struggle for global discourse power” in order to “break Western hegemony” around global norms. According to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) historical narrative, China has suffered a century of humiliation and “three afflictions” at the hands of Western powers: “being beaten”, “being starved” and “being scolded”. The first two problems were solved under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. In Xi Jinping’s new era of “national rejuvenation”, China will no longer accept being scolded. Instead, the time is ripe to “tell China’s story well” and defend “China’s right to speak”. Projecting an image of confidence in its own system, Beijing no longer presents China’s political and economic model merely as different to liberal democracies in the West, but as superior. The CCP has “opened a new path of human rights protection and added diversity to the concept of human rights”, said a White Paper issued last year. “China’s socialist democracy is the most comprehensive, genuine and effective democracy”, according to Xi Jinping. “The standard of democracy and human rights is whether the people of the country are satisfied and happy”, as foreign minister Wang Yi put it in 2021. What is China seeking to achieve with these claims and statements? This paper will analyse how China’s discourse around key UN concepts and terms like human rights, development, rule of law, and democracy has evolved over the last two decades, and assess how effective China’s new narrative is in terms of influencing UN negotiations and debates, and, ultimately, international norms and standards.