The Chinese approach to peacebuilding: contesting liberal peace?

The rise of China in peacebuilding has invoked lively debate about its role vis-à-vis the dominant peacebuilding order, or liberal peace. Extant research revolves around the binary construct of challenger-versus-supporter, ignoring the nature and scope of challenges that China poses to liberal peace. Also, these studies tend to unidimensionally examine China’s stance on particular elements of liberal peace. There is scant research assessing China’s role against the overall normative structure of the liberal peace paradigm. This article proposes a typology of contestation that targets different constitutive parts of liberal peace. China’s stances on these constitutive parts are scrutinised based on a systematic review of its policy documents and interviews with scholars and practitioners in Beijing, Shanghai, Geneva and New York. This article finds that China has generally abstained from contesting the normative basis of liberal peace (validity contestation). However, it has been actively pursuing content contestation by reshaping the sequencing of existing elements of liberal peace and by incorporating the democratisation of the international system into the peacebuilding agenda. Moreover, China clearly opposes externally formulated or imposed peace solutions, whereby it advances application contestation against liberal peace.