ABSTRACT
The People’s Republic of China (PRC), after many decades of wariness and at times outright hostility towards the institution of UN peacekeeping missions (lianheguo weihe xingdong https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203718803/87595706-9a9a-4b48-ab1f-7402b34295bf/content/fig1_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>) has in the past two decades greatly reversed these policies. 1 China is now an enthusiastic supporter of UN Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKOs) and is seeking to deepen and widen its engagement with that institution. These changes have been in keeping with the country’s larger foreign policy strategy, during the past two decades, of supporting multilateral solutions rather than unilateral actions to address strategic threats. The Chinese government has sought to illustrate its growing support for UNPKOs by committing personnel to overseas deployment. China now supplies the largest number of UN peace forces out of all of the permanent five (P-5) Security Council members. The overall ranking of China’s personnel contributions has ranged from the 12th to 15th largest since May 2004, and China has been the seventh largest supplier of peacekeeping funding since 2009 2 and has promised that it would endeavour ‘to enhance language, psychology and technical training for the peacekeepers and strengthen legislation work, in a bid to meet the diversified trend of UN peacekeeping functions’. 3
