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expand the mandate of that mission to humanitarian relief. China’s attitude
became more critical when the UN force (mostly American and Pakistani)
began to clash with Somali militias. In Rwanda, mass killings and ethnic
cleansing led the Security Council to authorize a French-led force to establish
a safe zone for refuges in the southern part of the country. China abstained
from supporting this effort on the grounds that it amounted to interference
in a civil war. Again, in Haiti in 1994, when the Security Council autho-
rized a PKO to restore to power a president ousted by a military coup, China
abstained.
China explained its opposition to the UN’s increasingly interventionist
and militarized PKO in terms of opposition to use of force. Resort to military
force simply was not conducive to negotiated settlement of conflicts, Beijing
said. But as Taylor Fravel notes, this “tells only half the story.”^47 The other half
is that upholding the norm of strong state sovereignty was linked to China’s
own security. China’s leaders feared some type of uprising in China, or pos-
sibly a conflict with Taiwan or in the South China Sea, in which the United
States and other Western countries could mobilize international intervention
via the United Nations. By upholding the high moral principle of strong state
sovereignty in regions of the world distant from China, Beijing was eroding
the ability of the US hegemonists to mobilize an international coalition and
UN legitimization for some type of armed intervention against China.
It is ironic that the UNPKO that had the fullest and most important support
by China—that in Cambodia—was also the most blatant example of United
Nation’s “nation building” and “regime change” for which Beijing would re-
ject other UNPKO. In Cambodia the UN Transitional Authority Cambodia
(UNTAC) would actually take over and administer an entire country for two
years, setting up a new government and eventually a new state, dissolving and
recreating a military in the process. It’s hard to imagine a clearer example
than UNTAC of the sort of “interference in internal affairs of a sovereign
state” to which China would later repeatedly object. Yet China did not ob-
ject, but fully supported UNTAC in Cambodia. Taylor Fravel’s explanation
is that in the Cambodian case, China’s own direct national security interests
trumped China’s indirect security interest in upholding the global norm of
strong state sovereignty.
The Serendipitous Reinforcement of the Narrative
of Aggrieved Nationalism
Two of the momentous influences on China’s foreign relations in the early
1990s were events that no government planned or foresaw: US congressional
opposition to the city of Beijing’s hosting of the 2000 International Olympics
Games, and US high-sea interdiction of a Chinese merchant vessel suspected