ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders the evolution of China’s approach to collective decision-making in the Security Council: how it has learned to play its proper role; how it adapts to normative changes and accommodates power politics. It summarizes to what extent China’s views on sovereignty and non-interference, humanitarian intervention, curtailment of weapons of mass destruction programmes, collective security measures including sanctions and the use of force fit in or fall out of step with the normative developments in the UN. China’s UN Security Council policy has to date been a subject both important and insufficiently studied. There is a fair degree of continuity in China’s UN strategy between the 1980s and 1990s. A minimalist strategy also helped China manage the process of orientating itself and adapting to the rules and norms by following the ‘trend-of-history’ in symbolic terms, understanding the essence and meaning of concrete policies while incurring the fewest normative errors.
