Two incidents in the news suggest that China is attempting to use its influence to turn the United Nations away from criticizing Beijing’s internal policies and instead focus on environmental and human rights abuses in the West.
In the first example, a committee of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proposed that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage site, be listed as “in danger” from further environmental damage. That would obviously hurt Australia’s tourism industry and the Australians were outraged. It turns out that China is the current chair of the UNESCO committee and the Australians are charging that the Chinese are using UNESCO to get back at them as part of a very nasty downward spiral in relations. The Chinese naturally deny that.
In the second example, at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Chinese envoy Jiang Duan inveighed against Canada’s past mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and the recent discovery of the remains of more than 200 children at an Indigenous boarding school in Canada, the Washington Post said. The diplomat obviously was seeking to deflect Canadian and Western criticism, in general, of the treatment of the Uighur people in China’s Xinjiang Province.
The United States and other Western powers have long assumed that the United Nations and its vast bureaucracy of organizations was part of the West’s intellectual and political orbit. But China has the money, the people and the ambition to turn that equation on its head. The subversion of the World Health Organization is yet another example. The pattern is becoming clear.
