Underrepresented Superpower: Explaining China’s Representation in the United Nations Bureaucracy

There is a growing public debate about China's increasing influence at the United Nations (UN) that fears the world organization turning into a “United Nations of China”. Although China has become a more prominent actor in issue areas such as human rights and peacekeeping, research has shown that China’s bureaucratic representation lags behind. Despite being the second largest contributor to the UN budget, the global superpower remains underrepresented among International Professional Staff (IPS). This article seeks to shed light on the puzzle of China’s underrepresentation in the UN bureaucracy by adopting a state-interests perspective. It argues that China’s representation in IO bureaucracies reflects its foreign policy priorities. Three variables are theorized to indicate state interests and explain China’s staffing pattern: Voluntary contributions to an IO, alignment of an IO's mandate with China's foreign policy objectives, and ongoing power rivalries. To test the theoretical framework, the analysis examines the variation in Chinese IPS across 31 UN entities from 2017 to 2022. The results of panel linear regressions show that the alignment of a UN entity’s mandate with China's foreign policy objectives, as well as the percentage of US international professional staff, have a statistically highly significant effect on the share of Chinese IPS across the UN system. These findings provide an explanation for China’s deviant staffing pattern in the UN bureaucracy and contribute to the literature on geographic representation in international organizations, highlighting the usefulness of a state-interests approach.