A Flamboyant Mandarin in a Declining Liberal Order: China's Revisionist Agenda in Global Human Rights Institutions

Abstract

This article applies the methods of text analytics and discourse analysis to explain the Xi Jinping government’s illiberal conception of, and the corresponding policy preferences to, international human rights. In particular, the author purports to examine the extent to which the Chinese party-state under Xi’s leadership has changed her political relationship with the United Nations human rights bodies and procedures. The author finds that China in the Xi Jinping era has continued to uphold a developmentalist and state-centered conception of human rights, which is a diametrical opposition to the liberal normative foundation of post-WWII international human rights institutions. Rather than simply defending an alternative conception of international human rights and its corresponding policy preferences, China under Xi Jinping’s rule has leapt forward to marketing the Chinese model of rights protection as more superior than the existing liberal model. Furthermore, China under Xi’s rule has sought to mainstream her illiberal model as the new universal solution for international human rights. In other words, Xi Jinping’s China has embarked on reconstructing the international human rights standard, and to turn the Chinese conception into the new universal value. Xi’s effort is no less than an international campaign of thought engineering that highlights China’s leadership position in world politics, and promotes the Chinese model of international multilateralism — what Xi Jinping has increasingly referred to as the effort of “building a community of shared future for human beings” — as a new hegemonic guideline of international order. The global retreat of liberal democracy and the rise of right-wing populism provide a fertile ground for the Chinese government to amplify her ideational influence. The multilateralism that Xi’s China has championed is quite likely to be one with authoritarian characteristics, and countries sharing political values with PRC would be emboldened to uphold the illiberal rule and push back external pressure from international human rights monitoring mechanisms.