Chinese peace and its discontents: China's peacemaking and peacekeeping in South Sudan

Abstract

China shows a growing commitment to peacemaking and peacekeeping overseas. Yet Chinese peace efforts have met considerable challenges across multiple conflict settings. This article seeks to understand the difficulties facing Chinese peacemaking and peacekeeping and asks how these experiences influence the future behaviour of Chinese actors towards peace and conflict issues. Previous scholarship has largely taken a state-centric perspective to explain China's engagement in peacemaking and peacekeeping. In contrast, this article harnesses an assemblage approach to reveal the diversity of Chinese actors and the significant role local actors and normative forms of power play in influencing China's broader peace efforts. In South Sudan, it finds that the political ideas advanced by warring factions and the legitimacy they placed on United Nations peacekeeping intervention, both undermined Chinese peacemaking and peacekeeping and held far-reaching effects for Chinese actors beyond the conflict. Consequently, these challenges in South Sudan pushed China's national oil company to adopt new risk management policies throughout its investments in conflict settings. The South Sudan experience also influenced China's foreign ministry by tempering its proactive approach to conflict resolution in other conflict-affected countries and to promote peacekeeper safety and support peacekeeping intelligence at the United Nations.

From Darfur to Syria, Ukraine to Palestine, United Nations officials, foreign diplomats and peace advocacy groups have called on China to play a larger role in brokering peace in some of the world's deadliest and most entrenched conflicts. Over the past decade and a half, China in turn has increased its engagement in peacemaking across numerous overseas conflicts and has emerged as an important contributor to UN peacekeeping missions. Consequently, in recent years, scholars have pointed to a distinctive Chinese ‘developmental peace’ model to settle overseas conflicts.¹ They argue that ‘developmental peace’ represents China's approach to UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding, and can act as a complement to the western-led ‘liberal peace’ model.² Unlike ‘liberal peace’, which advances institution-building by transforming state and non-state actors through democracy and human rights promotion, the idea of ‘developmental peace’ sees security and stability as a product of building state capabilities to spark economic growth and development. The significance of the ‘developmental peace’ approach is increasingly seen in Beijing's official policy, too. In its 2020 white paper on Chinese engagement in UN peacekeeping operations, China's State Council implicitly adopted ‘developmental peace’ when calling for a larger share of international peacekeeping resources to be allocated to development efforts.³

Yet the viability of China's peace engagement overseas is under stress. Just as the ‘liberal peace’ approach has its limitations and contradictions in practice,⁴ Beijing faces considerable hurdles in fulfilling the aspirations of ‘developmental peace’. Scholarship on China's peacemaking and peacekeeping efforts in Sudan, Mali, Myanmar and elsewhere finds that China's peace efforts struggle to support stability and development in face of a myriad of political, security and governance challenges.⁵ This article contributes to understanding the difficulties facing Chinese peacemaking and peacekeeping by asking how these experiences influence the future behaviour of Chinese actors in conflict-affected countries. To date, scholarship often takes a state-centric perspective on this issue by focusing on Beijing's motivations for increasing its peace efforts. Analysis of how experiences in peacemaking and peacekeeping affect the behaviour of a diversity of Chinese actors on peace and conflict issues has been largely neglected. By drawing on the assemblage concept, this article helps to fill this gap by revealing the diversity of Chinese actors engaged in China's peace efforts and the significant role that normative power held by local actors plays in influencing their future behaviour. As such, it establishes the beginnings of a conceptual approach for explaining how the experiences of Chinese actors in conflict settings affect their broader engagement in peacemaking and peacekeeping.

The article begins by reviewing the largely state-centric research on China's peace efforts. It then explains the conceptual underpinnings of the assemblage approach and how the approach is operationalized methodologically to study not only the multiplicity of actors but also the normative forms of power that influence China's peacemaking and peacekeeping behaviour. Third, the article explores how the political ideas of warring sides in South Sudan interact with the—at times—conflicting interests of Chinese diplomats, oil companies and arms dealers to undermine China's peacemaking efforts. Consequently, this peacemaking assemblage in South Sudan pushed China's national oil company to adopt new risk-management policies throughout its investments in conflict settings that had previously been neglected. It also influenced China's foreign ministry to shift away from a proactive approach in conflict resolution to a more cautious engagement in other conflict-affected countries. Fourth, the article examines how the rise of China's peacekeeping engagement interacts with the normative power of legitimacy among warring sides in conflict-affected countries. Despite China being a close partner to South Sudan, South Sudanese political leadership and armed forces regarded Chinese peacekeepers as part of a hostile intervention from the UN peace mission. This view contributed to the deaths of Chinese and other peacekeepers during fighting in South Sudan's capital, Juba, in 2016. As a result, the produced effect of this peacekeeping assemblage led China's foreign ministry to shift from a proactive approach in South Sudan to promoting peacekeeper safety and backing peacekeeping intelligence within the United Nations as part of a more cautious approach to conflict-affected countries. Finally, the article addresses the wider conceptual and policy implications of China's efforts to foster peace and stability in South Sudan.

Moving beyond state-centric perspectives on China's peacemaking and peacekeeping

Much of the current research on China's peacemaking and peacekeeping analyses the various motivations the Chinese state has for increasing its engagement. First, scholarship views China's peace efforts as being underpinned by motivations to protect overseas economic and national interests.⁶ Many Chinese companies, particularly in the energy and infrastructure sectors, deliberately sought to avoid intense competition from their American, European and Japanese counterparts in the places where they initially invested. This included in war-torn countries, such as present-day South Sudan, where Chinese firms later experienced insecurity and political risk.⁷ Second, research also points to the motivation to gain overseas military experience as central for Chinese peacekeeping participation.⁸ The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has undergone significant reform and expansion under President Xi Jinping, but nonetheless the Chinese military has not fought in an overseas conflict for over four decades. Peacekeeping offers an avenue for the Chinese military to gain experience overseas and interact with foreign militaries. Third, scholars argue there are various foreign policy aims behind China's peacemaking and peacekeeping. Following China's short international isolation after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent crackdown, peacekeeping was an avenue to improve diplomatic relations, particularly regionally.⁹ More recently, scholars see China's peacemaking and peacekeeping as means to bolster its international reputation as a responsible stakeholder.¹⁰ In 2007, for example, then-president Hu Jintao called on his Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir to ‘solve the Darfur issue’, and China sent a peacekeeping engineering unit to the UN mission in Darfur.¹¹

Scholars going beyond such material motivations for China's peacemaking and peacekeeping engagement see identity rationales as the predominant driver. They argue that the evolution of China's national identity into a rising superpower shapes its increased peace efforts in overseas conflicts.¹² This partly stems from China's concerns with United States' interventionism since the Cold War, in Iraq, the Balkans and elsewhere.¹³ Indeed, the Chinese policy-making community has taken on a greater role in reframing established international norms on security and development in line with China's own norms, such as strong adherence to state sovereignty, and on conflict prevention, intervention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding.¹⁴ Rosemary Foot finds that the strong congruence between China's and the UN's interests and values provides fertile ground for growth in Chinese engagement.¹⁵

Altogether, however, much of the research on China's peacemaking and peacekeeping engagement takes a top-down approach, focusing on Beijing's motivations. Similarly, case-study analysis of China's efforts to foster peace and stability largely maintains a similar state-centric perspective by examining the main traits of China's ‘developmental peace’ compared to western approaches.¹⁶ These studies do help explain the challenges facing China's peace efforts from local actors, but without deeply assessing the impact of those engagements on the future behaviour of Chinese actors. Some exceptions, such as the research of Courtney Fung, explains how feedback mechanisms from peacekeeping deaths in Mali and South Sudan prompted China to underline the importance of peacekeeper safety in its policy-making.¹⁷ Yet this work does not disentangle the diversity of Chinese actors engaged in peacemaking and peacekeeping, nor does it deeply reflect on the effects from interactions with local actors and normative forms of power in conflict-affected countries.

An assemblage approach for understanding the effects of peacemaking and peacekeeping

The assemblage approach provides the field of vision necessary for a comprehensive analysis of China's peace efforts and the effects of these experiences on future peacemaking and peacekeeping from Chinese actors.¹⁸ Initially developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, assemblage theory challenges hierarchical structures in social sciences by emphasizing the interconnected parts that can both function independently or act as constitutive parts of an assembled whole.¹⁹ As advanced by Manuel DeLanda, this approach sees no absolute divide between individual and society, or the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’, but argues that both are context-dependent according to their interconnected, interacting components.²⁰ Consequently, for the fields of International Relations and security studies, assemblage theory challenges conventional thinking on notions of power and territoriality.

First, the approach views power as relational rather than as possessed hierarchically through state sovereignty.²¹ The question of which actors are powerful and which are weak becomes an empirical one, and reveals the diversity and dynamism of agency.²² Rather than being ontologically given, power is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through the interaction of actors, but also of technologies, practices, norms, ideas and policies. Recognizing the relative autonomy of these parts—how they can be recombined into new wholes and the contingent nature of their interactions—allows for a more intricate understanding of political systems and policy, moving the focus toward processes of arrangement and the power relations influencing them.²³ Second, the assemblage approach exposes the limits of conventional territorial boundaries in international relations by breaking down analytical domains of the local, national and international. For Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, assemblages are intricate social constructs that, while grounded within formal national territories, can extend across borders through the interaction of various actors, technologies, ideas and norms.²⁴ This view of power relations is thus spatially dispersed. Such deterritorialization, for example, recognizes that the policies of a government have a territorial scope in legislative terms, but can nonetheless be strongly influenced by diverse elements such as transnational policy actors, ideas and practices.²⁵ At the same time, assemblage theory reveals how local actors are sites of power in connections that cross over to global spaces.²⁶

The assemblage approach, acknowledging a relational view of power and a deterritorialization of its effects, provides a conceptual framing to understand how multiple Chinese actors interact with local actors and normative forms of power in conflict-affected countries. In such countries, both local and Chinese actors can be categorized as either state and non-state actors, but within these broad categories actors still hold distinctively different interests and advance both converging and conflicting policy agendas. Conflict is a contingent social process in which local actors, such as political leadership, ethnic factions, rebel groups and local communities, transform according to their relations with one another and with external actors.²⁷ Similarly, the assemblage approach is in line with the analytical perspective of scholars who see multiple Chinese actors as shaping foreign and security policy, from the general secretary of the Communist Party of China (hereafter CPC), who concurrently serves as the country's president, the Politburo leadership and the Central Committee of the CPC to various government ministries, provincial governments and state-owned enterprises.²⁸ Private companies, as well as Chinese think tanks and epistemic communities, have likewise played a role in shaping ideas, debates and discourses around China's emerging policies towards overseas development.²⁹ This variety of Chinese actors breaks down the idea that Chinese decision-making on foreign and security policy is somehow monolithic. When it comes to China's policy towards conflict-affected countries, the ministry of foreign affairs aims to advance China's acumen as a conflict mediator, the PLA to fulfil the mandate of a UN peacekeeping mission, and a Chinese national company to maximize profits and its market share.³⁰

In relations between Chinese and local actors in conflict-affected countries, the assemblage approach can also capture how normative forms of power come into play to shape outcomes. In international relations, for example, ideas represent subjective beliefs or descriptions of the world which can have important effects on political outcomes.³¹ The ideas of political elites in conflict-affected countries can hold significant consequences for the direction of peace and security. At the same time, legitimacy represents another normative form of power that affects relations between actors. Peacekeeping studies show the level of legitimacy local actors place on missions—in other words, whether the intervention is right, proper and appropriate in their eyes—can influence the ultimate effectiveness of peace operations.³² Other normative powers, such as knowledge of local history and political affairs, can offer a tool for actors like foreign diplomats and conflict mediators to create order through effective peacemaking on the ground.³³

Second, the deterritorialization of power relations advanced by the assemblage approach provides a lens to explain how China's experiences in conflict-affected countries in turn shape the future policy behaviour of Chinese actors on peace and conflict issues. Indeed, as the peacekeeping experience intertwines with domestic politics and security practices, the main effects of UN peace operations may lie in the home countries of contributors rather than the host countries of missions.³⁴ This inverts the conventional analysis of peacemaking and peacekeeping, because it explores the far-reaching effects local actors and normative forms of power have on contributors within and beyond conflict-affected countries. These assemblages can generate new forms of governance and authority that transcend traditional state boundaries by reflecting both localized and international influences.³⁵

The article focuses on South Sudan as a significant case to understand China's peace efforts between 2012 and 2022. First, South Sudan is widely argued to be a ‘pilot project’ or ‘laboratory’ for China's peacemaking efforts.³⁶ Leading Chinese diplomats also see China's crisis diplomacy efforts in the war-torn African country as a ‘new chapter’ for China's foreign affairs.³⁷ Second, South Sudan is a prime venue for China's peacekeeping engagement. China rose to become the world's tenth largest peacekeeping contributor overall, but this exaggerates the breadth of its engagement, given that 46 per cent of its personnel were stationed in South Sudan in 2023. Among the top ten troop and personnel providers, only Rwanda and Senegal have deeper personnel concentrations in individual missions.³⁸

Operationalizing the assemblage approach methodologically is an intense empirical exercise. Analysing assemblages requires careful investigation and tracing of how different actors, technologies, ideas, values and other forms of normative power interact in seemingly distant locations to productively shape broader dynamics.³⁹ As Tom Baker and Pauline McGuirk argue, research using this approach requires thick empirical description across ‘sites and situations’ rather than static geographical areas. It involves inductive methods, such as interviews and documentary examination, to interrogate the roles, agendas and interplay between actors and to bring to light the varied components of assemblages and their resulting effects across diverse and distant spaces.⁴⁰

The research for this article firstly involved extensive document analysis of reports from non-governmental and multinational organizations, Chinese and international media and other secondary sources, both to describe initial behaviour towards peace and conflict issues and to understand critical sites and situations where Chinese actors engaged with local actors and normative forms of power in peacemaking and peacekeeping. This was followed by extensive fieldwork across multiple sites, namely South Sudan, China and the United Nations headquarters in New York. This fieldwork spans a decade to trace the changes in behaviour among Chinese actors and possible far-reaching effects from experiences in South Sudan. The research involved more than 30 interviews with, among others, South Sudanese government bureaucrats, Chinese oil company managers and UN officials, all with expert knowledge on possible changes in the approaches of Chinese actors. It also included participation in an in-depth consultation session in 2016 between managers of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and visiting South Sudanese civil society representatives in Beijing to assess the company's response to South Sudan's civil war, as well as extensive interviews with UN officials involved in peacekeeping operations which contributed to understanding China's broader reaction to challenges in South Sudan.

The complexities of peacemaking

The assemblage approach reveals diverse and dynamic sources of both material and normative power that shape outcomes for China's peace efforts and demonstrate far-reaching effects on the behaviour of Chinese actors. In South Sudan, a peacekeeping assemblage involved China's foreign ministry and national oil company when the leaders of South Sudan decided in early 2012 to suspend oil production in the newly sovereign state. After decades of civil war and political and economic marginalization as part of Sudan, South Sudan had gained independence in July 2011.⁴¹ However, the South Sudanese economy continued to rely on oil pipelines traversing Sudanese territory to reach international markets. By late 2011, Sudan had begun to unilaterally confiscate South Sudan's oil in lieu of a transit fee agreement. As a result, South Sudan announced that it intended to shut down its oil production completely, to end what it viewed as blatant theft.

China had much to lose if South Sudan shut down its oil industry. It was both the largest investor and trading partner for Sudan and South Sudan, which prior to South Sudan's secession had provided on average 5.5 per cent of total Chinese oil imports between 1999 and 2011.⁴² Together with other international mediators under the aegis of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an East African regional cooperation organization, Chinese diplomats urged South Sudan to continue its oil production and called on both parties to negotiate an agreement on the pipeline. Liu Guijin, China's special representative for African affairs, engaged in active shuttle diplomacy with both sides in an effort to help resolve the crisis. At IGAD-convened negotiations in Addis Ababa, Yang Jiechi, at that time China's minister of foreign affairs, met with South Sudan's President Salva Kiir while Jia Qinglin, a member of the CPC's Politburo Standing Committee, engaged Sudan's President Bashir in the hopes of adding further diplomatic heft to settling the oil pipeline dispute.⁴³ The involvement of CPC leadership demonstrated the significance Sudan and South Sudan held for China's foreign policy in Africa at the time. Such direct involvement in conflict resolution marked a notable difference from China's position on the Darfur crisis which began in Sudan in 2003, close to a decade earlier. In the initial years of that conflict, then-deputy foreign minister Zhou Wenzhong underlined that his country strived to ‘separate business from politics’ and stood behind its longstanding foreign policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other countries.⁴⁴

Outside of party-state committees and central government ministries, other Chinese actors engaged in peacemaking in South Sudan. The CNPC was the most prominent. It made considerable efforts to stem tensions over the oil industry by offering Sudan a temporary financial compensation package if it allowed South Sudanese oil to flow without interference.⁴⁵ The company, one of China's largest, has a deep history of political influence within the Chinese government and CPC. One of its former chief executives, Zhou Yongkang, went on to serve in China's top leadership in the Politburo Standing Committee until 2012. As a result, and similarly to other major Chinese state-owned enterprises, CNPC holds considerable autonomy over its investment decisions.⁴⁶ This included its move to enter Sudan's (later South Sudan's) oil industry' in the 1990s.⁴⁷ When it came to conflict, however, CNPC initially stayed out of peacemaking, virtually shunning publicity beyond small-scale corporate responsibility initiatives.⁴⁸ The company did make calls on Chinese leadership and the military to provide better protection for its commercial activities in ‘hotspots’ like Sudan and South Sudan.⁴⁹ But South Sudan's independence and the ensuing threat that its new government would shut down oil production jolted the Chinese national oil company into unprecedented political action.

However, neither the Sudanese nor the South Sudanese political leadership would bend to China's diplomatic and corporate pressure. South Sudan closed down its oil production in early 2012. In the months that followed, a border war erupted in which some of Sudan's remaining oilfields were targeted and heavily damaged. As a result, Sudan and South Sudan both dropped down the rankings as suppliers of oil to China, and for the first time in its history the CNPC reported a decline in its total overseas oil production in the wake of insecurity and instability.⁵⁰ It was a striking outcome. China's ‘developmental peace’ approach underlines economic growth as a key driver of stability and security. Yet the decision of South Sudan's leadership to shut down the economy's main revenue-generator demonstrated that other ideas were guiding their thinking.

Representing a normative form of power held by local actors, the political idea of overturning Sudan's leadership resonated among key decision-makers in South Sudan in the face of demands from Chinese and other foreign actors to make peace and focus on development. Underlining this divergence in perspective, and the limited knowledge of Chinese actors in the country despite their increased engagement in peacemaking, South Sudan's deputy oil minister commented in September 2013 that ‘China is changing its policy from non-interference to inference without understanding … South Sudan's history and politics’.⁵¹ Indeed, President Salva Kiir and his leading advisers believed that closing down the oil industry would hurt their counterparts in Sudan more than themselves and would usher in regime change that would advance South Sudan's long-term influence over Sudan.⁵² After decades of civil war, Kiir and his advisers saw controlling power and wealth in Sudan as necessary for South Sudan to fully manage its own affairs. This subjective belief in the necessity to topple Sudan's ruling party to attain full independence overshadowed the severe economic consequences for South Sudan of shutting down its oil production. The outcome demonstrates how within the peacemaking assemblage of Chinese diplomats, oil companies and South Sudan's political elites, the normative power of ideas, expressed by otherwise relatively weak local actors, nonetheless affected the material interests of the larger, more powerful foreign states and state-owned enterprises.

Although oil production was restarted in South Sudan in mid-2013, the breakdown of the country's economy after the production shutdown fed political divisions between its top leadership and set off a civil war in December.⁵³ China again engaged in peacemaking. With a commitment to backing regionally-led peace initiatives, the incumbent special representative of the Chinese government on African affairs, Zhong Jianhua, engaged both the South Sudanese government and the opposition, and later acknowledged that his negotiations with both sides marked a significant change in China's traditional non-interference approach.⁵⁴ Demonstrating the strong commitment of China's foreign policy establishment to help settle the conflict, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi also engaged in peace talks with both the South Sudanese government and opposition forces in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in January 2014.⁵⁵ The following year, Wang led a special peace consultation session, alongside IGAD mediators, where he presented a four-point peace plan to the warring sides. At the meeting, Chinese foreign ministry officials also sought to protect China's economic interests by offering financial inducements for opposition forces not to attack the remaining operating oilfields in Upper Nile state.⁵⁶ Indeed, while African, American and European diplomats involved in the regional peacemaking efforts welcomed China's decision to engage in the wider mediation, they viewed its overall engagement as ‘sparing and inconsistent’, peaking when opposition forces threatened Chinese-run oilfields.⁵⁷ In line with the ‘developmental peace’ approach, China's special representative Zhong argued that rather than China's interests alone, it was the economic importance of oil for South Sudan's eventual post-conflict recovery that warranted the industry's protection.⁵⁸

Beijing's crisis diplomacy ultimately showed limited results. Not only did the conflict continue, but the oil industry languished, with fighting taking place at South Sudan's largest oilfields in Upper Nile state just months after Beijing's special consultation. Opposition forces present at the peace talks were not responsible, however. Rather, a breakaway faction of South Sudan's armed forces that hailed from the region launched the assault. The normative power of political ideas possessed by local actors was again at play. In South Sudan and in other overseas conflicts, militias fighting under the banner of the government or opposition forces are often preoccupied with maintaining power and control in their own immediate territory, and occasionally change loyalties at the national level to advance their local agendas.⁵⁹ Thus, in Upper Nile, the militia led by Johnson Olonyi switched sides in the conflict, seeking greater regional autonomy for Olonyi's Shilluk ethnic group from another pro-government ethnic group, the Padang Dinka.⁶⁰ Olonyi's subsequent march to the Palogue oilfields—at the heart of South Sudan's oil economy—forced hundreds of Chinese and foreign oil workers to evacuate, disrupting the CNPC's economic interests in South Sudan.

Strikingly, the military push by Olonyi's forces towards Chinese-run oilfields was contingent on their having been supplied with 12 Chinese-made machine-gun mounted amphibious vehicles by the South Sudan government before the faction defected to the opposition.⁶¹ Paradoxically, China's peacemaking engagement in South Sudan and other conflicts has increased alongside its sharp rise as one of world's leading suppliers of arms.⁶² This episode reveals the diversity of Chinese actors engaged in peace and conflict issues in South Sudan and how their interests have at times been contradictory. Between 2014 and 2018 Chinese arms exports to sub-Saharan Africa were second only to those of Russia.⁶³ Major Chinese suppliers included the China North Industries Group Corporation and the China Poly Group Corporation, among others. This relates to direct sales to the government of South Sudan, but Chinese arms also entered South Sudan indirectly when purchased by Sudan and passed on to South Sudanese opposition forces. Alternatively, they can change hands if factions such as Olonyi's change allegiances and confiscate Chinese-made military weapons and vehicles. Indeed, in the hands of opposition forces, Chinese-supplied weapons and ammunitions threatened Chinese-run oil fields on numerous occasions in the conflict.⁶⁴

In an interview in 2014, China's special representative for African affairs Zhong Jianhua explained that he saw a lack of knowledge of South Sudan's political and security dynamics as the root cause of China's struggles to foster peace and stability. From Zhong's perspective, China was a newcomer to multilateral peace talks, and it would take decades for its understanding of local politics and history to match that of other foreign powers. In an implicit recognition of the influence of think tanks and experts on China's foreign policy-making, Zhong placed the blame for his country's knowledge deficit on China's Africa scholars.⁶⁵ In contrast, some Chinese scholars pointed to the fact that Chinese diplomats had little experience in dealing with the comprehensive engagement necessary in conflict resolution.⁶⁶ Altogether, despite its unprecedented peacemaking intervention in South Sudan, China joined other foreign powers—mainly the United States and European countries—in falling short in its efforts to bring peace and stability to South Sudan. As Malte Brosig finds, ‘China had very little influence on events happening on the ground’. The 2018 power-sharing agreement that stopped South Sudan's civil war was advanced mainly by regional mediation efforts in combination with increased coercive diplomatic pressure from western powers—positions China resisted.⁶⁷

The political ideas of South Sudan's leadership not only upset the peacemaking efforts of Chinese actors but also had important effects on Chinese behaviour beyond the conflict. After the failure of its peace efforts, Chinese foreign ministry officials in South Sudan noted a fair degree of resignation towards local leaders in terms of the latter recognizing the importance of peace and development: ‘South Sudan's leaders should not rush to fill their pockets but to help their people.’⁶⁸ Chinese foreign policy experts in Beijing questioned the rationale for continual engagement: ‘South Sudan has been a burden for China and we shouldn't invest more time and resources there.’⁶⁹ This position reverberated to other conflict settings. After its failed peacemaking in South Sudan, scholars of China's peace engagements in African conflicts see Beijing reverting to a less proactive approach, for instance in Ethiopia and Sudan, compared to its past involvement in the South Sudan conflict.⁷⁰

At the same time, there was a broader effect on Chinese state-owned enterprises. The South Sudan experience spurred on strategic thinking and policy development on managing political and security risk for CNPC, its overseas subsidiaries and industry counterparts.⁷¹ According to one CNPC senior analyst, the company moved from ‘passiv[ity] to prevention and preparedness’.⁷² Other CNPC officials explained that this shift included enhancing commercial intelligence in-house, as well as engaging with multiple stakeholders in corporate responsibility efforts that went beyond CNPC's previous position of dealing almost exclusively with the host state. These reforms went beyond South Sudan, targeting all the countries where the company operated in conflict areas, such as Nigeria and Iraq.⁷³ One CNPC consultant commented that while the first generation of CNPC executives and managers had an ‘army style’, stemming from the company's military-like drive to find oil at home, the second generation came from a science and technology background, and after experiences in South Sudan, the third generation had developed an appreciation of societal risks in overseas operations.⁷⁴

The dangers of international peacekeeping

South Sudan also represents a central venue for China's international peacekeeping engagement. It is the country where China sent its first combat forces in 2012 and where, three years later, it green-lighted its largest ever deployment of battle-ready troops with a 700-strong battalion to the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). While research to date largely takes a top-down approach to understanding the Chinese government's motivations for its increased peacekeeping in South Sudan and other missions, the relational understanding of power assumed by the assemblage approach reveals how different Chinese and local actors come together with the normative power in conflict-affected countries to influence China's peace efforts.

Ultimately directed by the CPC leadership, there is still a multiplicity of actors with different interests shaping Chinese peacekeeping. Notably, the Chinese foreign ministry has been proactive in advancing peacekeeping to demonstrate China's goodwill as a global power and expand Chinese diplomatic influence. In contrast, the PLA and the ministry of national defence prefer gradual growth in scope and size to allow Chinese military forces to gain overseas experience without taking exceptional risks.⁷⁵ At the same time, however, local actors and the normative power they possess affect outcomes for Chinese actors. In South Sudan, the lack of legitimacy attributed by local actors to the UN intervention in which Chinese peacekeepers participated had broader effects on Chinese actors. After decades of gradually expanding its participation, the resulting peacekeeping assemblage brought about a closer alignment between the position of China's foreign ministry and that shared by the PLA and defence ministry.

It was not until the 1990s that China began to test the waters of international peacekeeping. After decades of criticizing UN peace missions as unjustified interference in the domestic affairs of foreign countries, China's initial approach was small-scale and selective. It did not send combat troops, but deployed so-called ‘enabler’ personnel—engineers, logisticians and medical staff. In the early 1990s, an engineering corps represented China's initial contribution, which was to the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), where China suffered its first peacekeeper casualties. In the 2000s, however, China's participation grew commensurately with the number and size of UN peacekeeping missions worldwide. It dispatched specialized ‘enabler’ peacekeeping personnel to Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sudan, among others. The CPC leadership viewed NATO's 1999 intervention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with alarm, since it was not authorized by the UN Security Council. Chinese president Jiang Zemin stressed the importance of UN peacekeeping operations in maintaining international peace and security.⁷⁶ By the end of 2009, with support from its top leadership, China had overtaken France to become the largest troop contributor among permanent members of the UN Security Council.⁷⁷ Then, in 2012, the Chinese government took another significant step forward when it sent its first combat unit to a UN mission—to South Sudan, to protect Chinese peacekeeping engineers.⁷⁸ The following year, 400 Chinese infantry troops were deployed to Mali, where a UN mission was tasked with stabilizing the country following attacks by insurgents and Islamic extremists. Then, after the outbreak of South Sudan's civil war in late 2013, China sent a full 700-person battalion.⁷⁹ It has taken on several UN force commander positions and other top mission posts, for instance in Western Sahara, Cyprus and South Sudan, and has sought leadership of the UN's peacekeeping department.⁸⁰

China's motivation to live up to its global power status and address what it has described as unfettered western intervention in overseas conflicts help explain its enhanced peacekeeping presence in South Sudan and elsewhere. For example, this identity rationale comes through in the Chinese government's 2020 white paper on peacekeeping, which presents South Sudan as a prime example demonstrating its contribution to global peace and security.⁸¹ When it comes to economic interests, protecting overseas investments may not be central to China's new calculus of participation in peace missions, but the Chinese government does demonstrate a strong tendency to leverage its peacekeeping engagement when its hard interests are in jeopardy. For instance, Chinese peacekeepers in South Sudan worked in cooperation with the Chinese embassy and Chinese businesses to maintain daily contact and knowledge of the location of Chinese nationals in the country, often exploiting access to information from the UN mission.⁸² Indeed, when the civil war first broke out in December 2013, Chinese peacekeeping police directly helped in the evacuation of Chinese construction workers.⁸³ Second, prior to the deployment of the Chinese battalion to UNMISS in early 2015, the Chinese diplomatic delegation at UN Headquarters in New York helped push through wording in the mission's mandate to the effect that peacekeepers protect not only South Sudanese civilians, UN staff and aid workers, but also South Sudan's oil industry.⁸⁴ Leading UN peacekeeping officials cautioned against the political optics of Chinese peacekeepers directly being stationed near Chinese-run oilfields, but China nonetheless pushed ahead with the mandate.⁸⁵

The assemblage approach, however, shows that beyond the motivations of the government in Beijing, there are multiple sources of material and normative power at play that influence China's peace efforts. When fighting broke out in South Sudan's capital Juba in 2016, Chinese peacekeepers were caught between South Sudanese armed forces and opposition fighters. Tasked with protecting the UN base, adjacent to camps for internally displaced civilians, six Chinese ‘blue helmets’ sustained serious injuries when their armed personnel carrier was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. After Beijing was informed, Chinese diplomats made a direct plea to the South Sudanese government to allow for an immediate medical evacuation. Despite China's position as South Sudan's largest trading partner and investor, the demand went unanswered for well over a day.⁸⁶ By the time the South Sudanese army permitted an evacuation, two Chinese peacekeepers had died from their wounds. UN officials later reported that it was South Sudanese soldiers, armed with Chinese weapons, who were responsible for the killings.⁸⁷ From Beijing's perspective, Chinese peacekeepers were caught up in the conflict while protecting the UN mission's home base and adjacent camps for internally displaced civilians. However, a UN report published in January 2017 found that during the fighting it was unclear whether the protection camps and UN mission premises and personnel, including Chinese peacekeepers, were hit by crossfire or deliberately targeted by South Sudanese soldiers.⁸⁸ The report also related that the South Sudanese armed forces obstructed the medical evacuation of critically wounded Chinese peacekeepers.

The assemblage approach helps to demonstrate how the normative power of legitimacy played a role in this outcome for Chinese peacekeepers. Despite Chinese troops representing one of the most powerful militaries in the world, once they donned the UN's blue helmets and uniforms, South Sudan's political leadership and armed forces viewed the Chinese peacekeepers as part of an illegitimate UN intervention. Ostensibly, South Sudan's government approved the peacekeeping mandate set out by the UN. However, the South Sudanese government often restricted the movement of the peacekeeping mission and harassed its staff.⁸⁹ President Kiir even accused the UN mission of supporting opposition forces by sheltering its fighters and hiding arms caches in its bases and civilian protection camps.⁹⁰ Altogether, regardless of their nationality, in the eyes of the South Sudanese armed forces, UN peacekeepers were acceptable collateral damage, if not legitimate targets for attack.

The lack of legitimacy held by UN interventions for local armed forces holds historical precedent for China beyond South Sudan. In 1993, two Chinese engineering peacekeepers deployed to UNTAC died in Cambodia when their detachment was shelled by the Khmer Rouge, a communist faction which had received significant support from China while in power in the country in the late 1970s. Cambodian officials later suggested the killings were accidental.⁹¹ But for the Khmer Rouge, UN peacekeeping represented an illegitimate intervention in their domestic affairs⁹² and, despite China's traditional role as an ally, its troops lost their legitimacy when they joined UNTAC. More recently, the integration of China's soldiers into the UN stabilization mission in Mali and their consequent association with wrongdoings perpetrated by other country contributors, similarly made Chinese peacekeepers the target of rebel attacks.⁹³ As such, the assemblage of the material power of local armed forces with the normative power of legitimacy produces violent outcomes for Chinese and other peacekeepers.

China's troubled peacekeeping experiences in South Sudan have had multiple effects beyond the mission. First, in the wake of peacekeeper casualties suffered in South Sudan and Mali and through China's foreign ministry representation at the UN, the Chinese government has emerged as a policy leader on peacekeeper safety and security in the UN.⁹⁴ Most notably, as a direct result of its South Sudan experience, in 2020 China advanced the unanimously endorsed UN Security Council Resolution 2518 on the safety and security of peacekeepers that emphasized the host state's responsibility in defending peacekeeping forces.⁹⁵ After China suffered peacekeeper casualties, western diplomats at the UN noted a marked uptick in the participation of their Chinese counterparts on discussions around peacekeeper safety and a dampening of China's previous efforts to frustrate the Office of Military Affairs in the Department of Peace Operations to build assessment teams to analyse threats to peace operations.⁹⁶ After the 2016 attacks on Chinese peacekeepers in Juba, China also sponsored what became widely known as the Cruz Report on improving peacekeeper safety,⁹⁷ emphasizing the report's recommended measures on preventative and protection measures for peacekeepers over those that called for more robust military responses to attacks on UN forces in the field.⁹⁸ China remains keen to ensure such reform is confined to peacekeeping activities and does not spread wider in the UN system, but officials at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations also observed that Chinese UN representatives became less obstructive of efforts to push forward UN peacekeeping intelligence, the use of situational analysis, human intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance to inform peace operations.⁹⁹

This evolution of China's policy behaviour on peacekeeper safety at the UN signalled a closer alignment of the positions between Chinese actors. Encouraged by the CPC leadership from the early 2000s to enhance China's role in international peacekeeping, the foreign ministry had long been keen to demonstrate China's commitment to global peace and security by increasing mission contributions. While the PLA and defence ministry saw this elevated engagement as a tool to reshape the domestic and international identity of the Chinese military,¹⁰⁰ peacekeeper safety was a longstanding concern that made military officials caution against moving too fast in expanding peacekeeping activities. At the inaugural peacekeeping work conference in 2007, for example, PLA officials underlined the importance of peacekeeper safety before broadly committing Chinese troops.¹⁰¹ Indeed, well before the 2016 attacks on Chinese peacekeepers in South Sudan, PLA officials advocated improving intelligence support for peacekeeping missions; this was similar to the engagement to which Chinese UN representatives became more open after the Juba attacks.¹⁰² From this perspective, the peacekeeping assemblage in South Sudan aligned the Chinese foreign ministry's policy position more closely with the more longstanding position of the PLA.

There are also differences between the effects that peacekeeping assemblages have on Chinese actors, even within the Chinese military. Experience in UN missions led some Chinese peacekeepers to diverge away from the Chinese government's official stance and dovetail more closely with the Cruz Report's more robust recommendations on military intervention to protect peacekeepers. For instance, the Cruz Report found that ‘some [troop-contributing countries] remain risk-averse and unwilling to use force, leaving attacks unpunished and undeterred’ and called for aggressors to be pursued and then prosecuted at the International Criminal Court.¹⁰³ After experiencing first-hand the insecurity of serving in the UN's peacekeeping mission in Darfur and the deaths of dozens of African peacekeepers, a Chinese senior colonel lamented on the inability of the mission in question, the African Union/United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID), to punish aggressors, undertake sanctions or even prosecute the aggressors' leaders at the ICC.¹⁰⁴ These differences in thinking may exist at the individual level, but they demonstrate diversity in the effects on Chinese actors involved in peacekeeping.

Conclusion

The assemblage approach provides a conceptual lens empathetic to the complexities of a globalized world. Its empirical groundedness helps explain how disparate power in faraway conflict settings, such as South Sudan, can engender policy and behaviour changes in foreign capitals, within corporate boardrooms and among individuals. This offers a conceptual contribution to the study of peacemaking and peacekeeping by demonstrating the multiplicity of effects such engagements can have on contributors. It inverses the perspective frequently adopted in research that peacemaking and peacekeeping are unidirectional—mainly affecting the host country of a mission, rather than also having an impact on troop contributors.¹⁰⁵ This article provides conceptual added value by demonstrating the multiplicity of actors involved in peacemaking and peacekeeping and how ideas, legitimacy and other normative powers held by local actors are instrumental in affecting the behaviour of those contributors beyond the conflict. This perspective open avenues for future research to disentangle how local actors and normative powers shape external actors engaging in peacemaking and peacekeeping.

Where do these findings leave China and its policy aspirations as a peacemaker and peacekeeper? After three decades of growing involvement in peace efforts in conflict-affected countries, outcomes in South Sudan suggest that Chinese actors are taking a more cautious approach to engaging in politics and security in conflict-affected countries. This does not suggest a return in practice to a strict adherence to the official longstanding policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. The implicit acceptance of the advancement of UN peacekeeping intelligence activities, for example, indicates an interventionist approach by China in delving into the political and security matters of conflict-affected countries. But it is a risk-averse change in behaviour, as it entails a multinational approach through UN peacekeeping operations.

Ultimately, however, empirical context matters. Future studies can explore the influence, or lack thereof, of local actors and normative forms of power from conflicts in neighbouring countries, such as Afghanistan and Myanmar, on Chinese policy behaviour. The national imperatives these conflicts hold for China's leadership compared to those occurring in Africa and other distant locations may produce alternative effects on Chinese actors engaged in peace efforts. At the same time, as this article demonstrates, the interests of multiple Chinese actors—such as arms dealers and oil companies—can oppose one another in overseas conflicts.

Nonetheless, the politics and security prevalent in peacemaking and peacekeeping assemblages in South Sudan demonstrate the challenges facing the economically anchored rationale of China's ‘developmental peace’ approach. This extends beyond the difficulties that Chinese actors encounter when engaging rebel groups or the local communities in Sudan, Mali, Myanmar or other conflict locations. Chinese officials also struggle to manage relations with political and security elites. Indeed, despite China's unprecedented peacemaking and peacekeeping activities, South Sudan's political and security leaders both undermined China's peace efforts and threatened Chinese interests. This outcome underlines the imperative of understanding the significance of local actors and normative forms of power in their effects upon peacemaking and peacekeeping contributors. To help achieve peace and stability, the Chinese leadership must grapple not only with the task of coordinating the interests of multiple Chinese actors, but also with the challenges produced from the normative pushback and discontents of local actors in conflict-affected countries.

Footnotes

Author notes