How China Is Reordering Global Governance From Within

On June 17, the State Council Information Office published “More Just and Equitable Global Governance: China’s Principles, Proposals and Actions.” Its most revealing line was also its most conservative: “All countries should firmly uphold the international system with the U.N. at its core, safeguard the international order based on international law, and uphold the basic norms governing international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter, instead of reinventing the wheel.” 

On July 16, 29 governments signed the founding agreement of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai. The new body, headquartered in China, invokes the United Nations Charter and a “people-centered” approach.

Together, these two events capture Beijing’s method for remaking global governance. Rather than propose a rival constitution, China preserves the institutions and texts of the postwar order while reweighting their principles and creating new, China-led venues to operationalize them. China’s visions stresses sovereign equality, noninterference, state-led development, and negotiated consent gain weight; independent scrutiny, adverse judgment, and claims beyond governmental mediation all recede.

Reform Without Rupture

Looking for a “status quo” or a “revisionist” China sets up the wrong binary. As Alastair Iain Johnston argued, there is no single international order that a state accepts or rejects; China takes different positions toward issue-specific orders. Beijing calls this “reform,” and the new white paper shows what it looks like in practice.

China’s President Xi Jinping launched the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Plus meeting in Tianjin on September 1, 2025. Its concept paper identified three deficits: Global South underrepresentation, weakened rules, and institutional ineffectiveness on development and new domains such as artificial intelligence. The paper proposed five principles – sovereign equality, international rule of law, multilateralism, a people-centered approach, and “real results” – while insisting that reform meant neither overturning the existing order nor constructing one outside it.

The initiative draws on older concepts: the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, the “democratization of international relations,” and Xi’s “community with a shared future for humanity.” The June 2026 white paper presented development, security, civilization, and governance – the four subjects of China’s global initiatives – as a “complete action framework” covering material promise, stability, plurality, and institutional direction.

However, a coherence imposed after the fact should not be mistaken for a master plan fixed decades ago. Chinese order-building has been cumulative, experimental, and uneven. Today, those scattered positions now form a doctrine institutionalized through coalitions, organizations, and routines. Along the way, China casts itself not as an insurgent but as a guide to an evolution it presents as inevitable.

Sovereignty as a Rule of Interpretation

China’s argument draws from the U.N. Charter, whose commitments have never sat comfortably together. Article 2 affirms sovereign equality and limits U.N. intervention in essentially domestic matters; the preamble, Article 1, and Article 55 also invoke dignity, human rights, development, and fundamental freedoms. Postwar multilateralism joined a plural society of states to an incomplete society of rights-bearing persons.

Sovereign equality is neither Beijing’s invention nor merely authoritarian self-protection. For smaller states, former colonies, and societies exposed to coercion, it protects against empire, tutelage, and great power privilege. China’s “democracy in international relations” recasts equality as a demand to narrow the gap between legal equality and unequal influence. The emphasis on equality also lets China speak as both a major power and a developing country advocate against inherited hierarchies.

But for China, sovereign equality becomes the primary lens through which every other norm is read. The GGI calls it the “foremost premise” of global governance and links equal participation abroad to noninterference and each government’s right to choose its political system and development path. A principle that shields weaker states externally can then insulate public authority internally.

Two forms of democratization must therefore be separated. Fairer representation can democratize relations among states. Holding governments accountable to the people they rule concerns relations within states. The first does not require weaker scrutiny of power, just as political plurality does not require silence about coercion within borders.

China’s “international rule of law” reveals the same tension. Beijing’s objections to unilateral sanctions, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and selectively applied rules are often well founded. Powerful states have used law to discipline others while reserving exceptions for themselves. Yet a legal order needs authoritative procedures and a willingness to remain bound after consent has been given, even when the result is adverse.

The 2016 South China Sea arbitration is a revealing test case. The tribunal did not decide sovereignty over land; it addressed maritime entitlements, feature status, and conduct under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. China said the tribunal exceeded its jurisdiction and violated state consent, and on the award’s 10th anniversary again declared it illegal, null, and void, and without binding force. Annex VII of UNCLOS, however, specifies that refusal to take part in arbitration does not halt proceedings, and awards are final and must be complied with. The question is whether treaty procedures remain binding after a tribunal upholds its jurisdiction and a state rejects that ruling.

Western governments weaken any rule-of-law critique of China when they reserve comparable exceptions for themselves. But inconsistency by others cannot answer the question Beijing leaves open: Can international law constrain a great power when an adverse judgment cuts against what it defines as a core interest?

The People and Who Speaks for Them

The GGI calls the people of all nations the “fundamental actors” and ultimate beneficiaries of global governance. Yet Chinese texts understand “people-centeredness” chiefly through peace, development, health, security, technological inclusion, and competent delivery. These are substantive goods; economic and social rights are not lesser rights, though Western governments have often treated them as secondary.

Development, however, does not reduce persons to beneficiaries of governmental performance. The U.N. Declaration on the Right to Development makes the human person its central subject, active participant, and beneficiary and treats all human rights and fundamental freedoms as indivisible. The decisive institutional question is: Who defines the public interest, who participates, and who may challenge a government’s account of success?

The joint communiqué after the May 2026 meeting of the Group of Friends recorded agreement on U.N. centrality, Charter principles, reform, practical cooperation, and protecting and promoting human rights. In accompanying remarks, Foreign Minister Wang Yi offered nine Chinese priorities “for further discussion and consideration,” including a “recalibration” of human rights governance and rejection of “human rights above sovereignty.” Those were Chinese proposals, not group consensus.

The distinction clarifies Beijing’s method. Katrin Kinzelbach found that China’s U.N. diplomacy contested the implications of human rights norms more often than their formal validity, especially monitoring and consequences for violations. Xinyuan Dai and Lucie Lu, analyzing more than 93,000 Universal Periodic Review recommendations, show that China increasingly champions economic and social rights, a preference shared by many Global South states. 

Rather than remove human rights, China seeks greater state authority to rank and interpret them and regulate the institutions through which they are invoked. Its people-centeredness is state-mediated and weighted toward performance rather than claims individuals can press against their government.

Who Buys in

Which countries support China’s vision for global governance? The official counts require disaggregation. The Group of Friends began with 43 members in December 2025; by May, Wang said membership exceeded 60. The June white paper claimed nearly 160 countries and international organizations had welcomed or supported the GGI. These figures describe different degrees of association, not a verified bloc. Membership, attendance, support for reform, and endorsement of China’s full program are not interchangeable.

Even so, China’s argument is persuasive to many other governments because much of its diagnosis is accurate. Africa constitutes 28 percent of U.N. membership yet has no permanent Security Council seat. The IMF’s 16th quota review approved a 50 percent equiproportional increase while leaving relative shares unchanged. Developed countries first exceeded the annual $100 billion climate finance goal in 2022, two years late. OECD data put the 2024 total at $136.7 billion, but only about one-quarter supported adaptation and flows remained concentrated in middle-income countries.

The West’s selective legalism, expansive sanctions, uneven responses to war, and technology controls are experienced elsewhere as hierarchy in a new idiom. China makes strategic use of these fissures, but they would still exist without the propaganda. An argument can be opportunistic and still identify a real failure.

That is not to say that the developing world is in lock-step with China. The Global South is not a constituency awaiting a leader. Governments may welcome Chinese finance, demand Security Council reform, oppose unilateral coercion, resist Chinese maritime claims, and preserve strategic autonomy simultaneously. 

From Interpretation to Institutional Practice

The GGI matters because Beijing is building channels through which interpretation becomes practice. The United Nations supplies universal standing and authoritative vocabulary. The SCO, BRICS, the Group of 77 plus China, and the Group of Friends offer venues for coalition-building and agenda preparation. Sectoral bodies can translate principles into standards, training, finance, and bureaucratic presence.

Jack Taggart, Han Cheng, and Sebastian Haug described a comparable Global Development Initiative strategy as “institutional layering”: embedding new practices, principles, and alliances in established frameworks rather than immediately displacing them. WAICO offers an early illustration. Its influence remains untested, and one body does not constitute a parallel order. Yet it links U.N. legitimacy to a China-convened platform in an unsettled field, giving Beijing a durable address and agenda-setting capacity.

At WAICO’s launch, Xi pledged 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries, cooperation centers with regional organizations, and access for 30 countries to an AI-powered meteorological warning system. These are concrete deliverables, not the underwriting of an entire order. China may gain influence without assuming the full costs of leadership. The economic focus is also a vulnerability: a program promising “real results” will be judged by sustained delivery, not diplomatic uptake.

The Test of Reciprocal Constraint

China’s proposal should be judged by the conduct its principles demand when compliance becomes costly.

Representation provides the first measure. Beijing is right to challenge Africa’s exclusion from permanent Security Council membership. Yet China holds a veto, and its public GGI documents do not specify how permanent membership should expand or how veto privilege might be constrained. Equality becomes persuasive when it addresses hierarchies from which its author benefits.

International law poses the harder question. China’s jurisdictional objections in the South China Sea deserve reasoned examination, but categorical dismissal of an adverse award sits uneasily beside demands for equal and uniform application of international law. Western exceptionalism does not excuse Chinese exceptionalism; if anything, it makes reciprocal restraint more urgent.

China’s “people-centered” order faces a different test. Can individuals, civic groups, journalists, experts, and international bodies advance meaningful complaints when the government concerned rejects external scrutiny or suppresses domestic dissent about its development path? If not, development becomes state performance, participation becomes intergovernmental consultation, and accountability stops at the border.

These standards apply equally to the United States and European powers. They must accept adverse legal constraints, curb selective coercion, support reforms that dilute inherited privilege, and deliver more reliable climate and development finance. Otherwise, criticism of Beijing reproduces the asymmetry from which the GGI draws much of its force.

Cooperation with China remains necessary on debt, climate finance, pandemic preparedness, artificial intelligence safety, cyberspace, and outer space. Yet sovereign equality cannot become governmental immunity, nor can development substitute for political agency. A more representative Security Council, meaningful voting-power reform in international financial institutions, dependable public goods, restraint in sanctions and extraterritorial power, and less selective fidelity to international law would address the failures Beijing has learned to mobilize.

China’s white paper matters precisely because it does not abandon the postwar order. Beijing has learned to inhabit its institutions, invoke its texts, and organize coalitions around one side of inherited tensions. The future of global governance may turn less on whether the U.N. Charter survives than on who may interpret it, through which procedures and institutions, and whether any great power will accept that interpretation when it ceases to serve its interests.