Introduction: China and UN Peacekeeping

After many decades of eschewing participation in UN peacekeeping missions, the People’s Republic of China has since the 1990s rapidly reversed its critical stance and become an enthusiastic supporter of and contributor to several different types of UN missions including, some that have involved non-traditional peacekeeping. Evolving Chinese peacekeeping policy has suggested that despite the country’s widely acknowledged rise to great-power status, within UN peacekeeping it still takes on the role of a middle power in its preferences for multilateralism and ‘norm-taking’. Although China has stated that it wishes to continue its deep engagement in UN peacekeeping within its established norms for the near future, its presence as a rising power has prompted much new debate on how the country will tacitly and directly shape peacekeeping policy.