From Material Power to Normative Influence: China, the Global South and the UPR

• In Event: China and IOs

Abstract

How does China influence global governance on human rights? We address this important question, paying careful attention to the multidimensionality of international human rights law and adopting an evidence-based approach. We focus on human rights norms as codified in global treaties. We examine how countries engage with these norms through recurring practices in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). We leverage state of the art text analysis tools to construct countries’ human rights scripts through recommendations they make during three completed review cycles from 2008 to 2021. To assess China’s influence on global human rights regime, we compare China’s human rights script to every other country’s script in each of the three review cycles. We believe that China’s influence on another country is indicated in greater and growing similarity between their human rights scripts. We argue that, with growing material prowess, China can shape international human rights discourse more to its liking. One way that China does this is by influencing the human rights script of those countries that receive development aid from China. We hypothesize that 1) countries who receive greater aid flows adopt human rights scripts more like that of China’s, and 2) countries who receive increasing aid flows over time display increasing similarity of its human rights script with that of China’s. We model human rights script similarity as well as changes in human rights scripts similarity. Preliminary findings offer strong support for our hypotheses and suggest fascinating questions for future research.

Authors

• Lucie Lu, Princeton University

• Xinyuan Dai, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign