Why Does China Participate in Intrusive Peacekeeping? Understanding Paternalistic Chinese Discourses on Development and Intervention

Abstract

Why does China continue to participate in highly intrusive peacekeeping operations which, it can be argued, suspend the sovereignty of the host state and attempt to transform it into a liberal democratic, market capitalist state? This article highlights the significant role of Chinese paternalism in providing the ideological justification for intervening in states' domestic affairs. Focusing on the quasi-official annual publication, the China Modernization Report, and its discourses on development, this article contends that some Chinese discourses interpret modernization as a linear and universal process, and interpret different stages of development in distinctly hierarchical terms. This places China as superior vis-à-vis many underdeveloped states. Such notions of ‘superiority’, in turn, lead to paternalistic thinking that justifies China (and other relatively ‘developed’ states) intervening in underdeveloped states and societies in order to ‘guide’ them to the path of ‘development’.