China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a Vehicle for Soft Power: A Quantitative Approach to Investigating the Relationship Between BRI-tagged Investment and United Nations Human Rights Council Member State Voting Patterns 2006-2017

Abstract

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has prompted international observers to question what kind of influence China could garner from the nation’s unprecedented investment in global infrastructure, particularly among developing countries. According to Joseph Nye, American political scientist, soft power is “...the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment. A country’s soft power rests on its resources of culture, values and policies.” Presently, some scholars predict China is likely to amass immense soft power from BRI, in turn having major implications for the international system. Simultaneously, since President Xi Jinping was elected in 2013, Beijing has become increasingly more assertive on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), illustrated by the nation’s vocal promotion of sovereignty and noninterference norms at the Council. Scholars like Ted Piccone assert that this strategy crystallizes Beijing’s goal of undermining the international human rights system. Thus, with China likely accumulating greater influence among BRI-receiving nations, who also tend to be member states of the UNHRC, can Beijing’s growing soft power be quantified through an investigation of country behavior on international bodies, such as the UNHRC? To disentangle this tension, my statistical analysis investigates how the dollar amount of investment may be affecting levels of vote agreement with China on the UNHRC over time (2006-2017), through a series of fixed effects models. Within the statistical models, the independent variable is always some iteration of BRI-tagged investment and the dependent variable is level of vote agreement with China, or “Percent Agree.” I focus my analysis on investigating 1) if receiving any BRI-tagged investment at all, compared to receiving no investment, is related to vote agreement with China at the UNHRC; 2) whether normalized BRI-tagged investments are related to vote agreement with China on the UNHRC; 3) whether cumulative BRI-tagged investments are correlated with greater vote agreement at the UNHRC with China; and 4) if moving between investment thresholds, specifically moving from a base category of no investment to higher investment thresholds, is related to level of vote agreement with China at the UNHRC. The investment thresholds I have created are “Low Investment,” “Medium Investment,” and “High Investment.” My findings from this empirical study emphasize that China’s BRI-tagged investment is not related to member state vote agreement with China at the UNHRC, conveying that foreign, bilateral investment does not necessarily buy China votes in its favor at the Council. Based on the coefficient results for the variables “Human Development Score” and “Civil Liberties Score”, there is some evidence conveying that Council member state voting behavior is related to a nation’s development stage and approach to human rights domestically. This analysis also suggests that the region a member state is located in might be related to the vote agreement variable, with nations in Europe maintaining lower levels of vote agreement with China at the Council.