China’s Stand on Humanitarian Intervention and R2P: Challenges and the Problematic 'West'?

Abstract

Has China’s global participation shifted from integration to assertive en-gagement? If so, how does this affect our understanding of China’s policies on issues of global justice? This article takes humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect (R2P) as an area to see why China’s alleged assertive use of ‘The West’ in its political discourse is flawed, thus bringing challenges to analysts who assess China’s position on the issue. Language is the first problem to be solved. To what extent is a dichotomy between ‘China’ and ‘The West’ legitimate? What is wrong with the use of catch-all term ‘Xifang’ 西方 in the official rhetoric and mainstream academic discussions? How ‘Chinese’ are the Chinese arguments? It is necessary to re-examine the discourse structure of and the role that identity politics plays in China’s official argument of non-interventionism, which is founded on a contrast with and attack on liberal interventionism in the Western developed world. Chinese assertiveness is in this sense associated with nationalism and Occidentalism – which include the making of the West as ‘The Other’ – the construction of Chineseness, and the emergence of an anti-Occident and anti-modern ‘Self’. Humanitarian intervention and R2P aim to serve the purpose of protecting the whole humanity, but the development of these ideas has been notoriously hijacked by Western discourses. It is questionable whether the application of ‘China-The West’ dichotomy will pave the way for China to put forward a more convincing agenda of global justice.