China’s Complex Leadership in G20 and Global Governance: From Hangzhou 2016 to Kunming 2021

Abstract

How and why have China’s G20 and thus global leadership changed since China hosted its first G20 summit at Hangzhou in September 2016? Since then the G20 has shaped global governance on an expanding array of subjects beyond its finance-economic core. China has consistently surpassed the other major powers in its economic growth, but also in its vulnerabilities at home. Its institutional leadership in long-established multilateral organizations has grown. The most systematic detailed account of China’s leadership in G20 governance from 1999 to 2015 argued that China was always a leader in G20 governance but never led alone, always doing so with another, different G20 member, as the subject changed. New findings arise by using an expanded model of China’s leadership, matching Xi Jinping’s priorities at G20 summits with the summit’s collective conclusions, commitments, compliance, and institutional development of global governance and examining the critical cases of climate change, biodiversity, infrastructure, and digitalization. This shows that China’s G20 leadership has become more complex and cautious since 2016, even as G20 performance has generally grown. In 2022 as China institutionally leads global governance on biodiversity and thus climate change, by hosting the United Nations biodiversity summit in Kunming in April and May, it can create cooperative leadership in the G20 from all the world’s great biodiversity powers of Russia and Brazil from the BRICS, Canada and the US from the G7, and Indonesia as G20 host.