Who Really Runs the United Nations? How Beijing Turned the World's Top Multilateral Body Into Its Own Platform
The United Nations was built as a cornerstone of the post-World War II international order — largely shaped by American vision and financed with American dollars. Decades later, a systematic and patient campaign by the Chinese Communist Party has fundamentally altered that reality. What was once a multilateral forum has become, in critical areas, a strategic instrument of Beijing's global ambitions.
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A Club America Built, China Is Now Running
When the United Nations was founded in San Francisco in 1945, it reflected a worldview shaped almost entirely in Washington. The architecture — the Security Council, the specialized agencies, the language of universal rights — was American in its inspiration, even if clothed in multilateral dress.
That original design is under severe strain. Over roughly a quarter century, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has executed a methodical, multi-layered campaign to reshape the world's premier multilateral institution from within. Today, the United States remains the organization's single largest financial contributor. But the levers of institutional power increasingly point toward Beijing.
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Follow the Money — Then Follow the Power
The numbers tell a stark story. The United States currently contributes around 22 percent of the UN's regular operating budget and approximately 26 percent of its peacekeeping budget, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. China's assessed contribution now stands at roughly 20 percent of the regular budget — a figure that has skyrocketed from less than one percent in 1994.
That dramatic financial climb did not happen in isolation. According to data compiled by the Bruegel think tank, Chinese mandatory and voluntary contributions to the UN system surged by over 1,000 percent between 2010 and 2019 alone. Money, in any institution, buys access and influence. The United Nations is no exception.
What makes the situation particularly striking is the asymmetry between financial investment and political return. Despite contributing significantly more in total, Washington has seen its institutional influence plateau and, in some areas, recede — while Beijing has leveraged its growing financial presence with remarkable strategic discipline.
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The Slow Takeover: Agencies, Bureaucracy, and Language
Perhaps the most concrete evidence of Beijing's creeping institutional control lies in its systematic capture of UN agency leadership. According to research published in Global Policy and the Lowy Institute's comprehensive 2022 analysis, Chinese nationals have headed the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) continuously since 2007. DESA is not a minor office — it sets the intellectual agenda for economic, environmental, and social policy across the entire UN system.
As the Lowy Institute noted, diplomats privately acknowledge that DESA has become, in effect, a Chinese-run operation. China currently leads more than one UN specialized agency simultaneously — the only country to do so. Beijing heads both the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Telecommunication Union, the latter being critical for setting global telecommunications standards that directly benefit Chinese technology firms such as Huawei.
China's approach includes placing its citizens in key leadership positions, increasing staffing, and boosting unearmarked financial contributions to multilateral institutions — a strategy that not only enhances China's influence over global policies but also promotes its development model and geopolitical interests in the Global South.
The consequences go beyond personnel charts. Peer-reviewed research from the Review of International Organizations confirms the mechanism: China forms coalitions with weaker states to control leadership appointments, and those China-friendly leaders then align UN bureaucratic language with Chinese-produced documentation. Put simply: Beijing installs its people, and those people gradually rewrite the institution's discourse.
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Building a Voting Bloc: The G77 Strategy
China's ability to shape UN outcomes depends heavily on its relationships with the Global South. The Group of 77 — a coalition of 134 developing countries representing nearly 70 percent of all UN member states — has become a key vehicle for Chinese influence.
China's strong standing with the Global South gives it exceptional influence within the UN General Assembly, whose 193-member countries are mostly developing nations. African nations, who hold the largest regional voting share, have repeatedly backed Chinese candidates for agency leadership positions. Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, which has poured billions into infrastructure projects across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has generated substantial political returns in the form of votes, endorsements, and diplomatic cover.
China has associated the Belt and Road and Global Development Initiatives with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, effectively using the UN's own development framework as a marketing vehicle for its signature foreign policy project.
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The Security Council: Beijing and Moscow Block the West
At the UN Security Council, China and Russia have formed what amounts to a functioning diplomatic counterweight to the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Beijing has blocked 21 resolutions, and Moscow has joined in on more than three-quarters of the resolutions that China has vetoed.
This tandem veto strategy has paralyzed Council action on issues ranging from the Syria conflict to sanctions enforcement on North Korea and Iran. Any time Washington seeks to use the Security Council as a pressure tool against authoritarian regimes, it effectively needs Chinese permission first.
The Council's dysfunction has reached historic levels. In 2024, seven draft resolutions failed due to a veto — the highest number since 1986. The Council has become less a global security mechanism and more a stage on which great power rivalry is performed in public.
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Human Rights: The System Under Attack from Within
Nowhere is the contradiction more glaring than in the UN's human rights architecture. Despite documented evidence of mass detention of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, ongoing suppression of Tibetan cultural identity, and the systematic elimination of civil liberties in Hong Kong, China has repeatedly been elected to the UN Human Rights Council — and has used that platform to dilute scrutiny of its own conduct.
Beijing has made clear through a range of initiatives and proposals that it seeks wholesale reform of global governance. What Xi Jinping calls "a new type of international relations" is, in practice, a sustained effort to shift the UN away from individual rights-based norms — championed by Western democracies — toward a framework that prioritizes state sovereignty and economic development, removing the international community's capacity to scrutinize how governments treat their own citizens.
Practitioners of Falun Dafa and other spiritual minority groups in China remain among the most acutely affected populations in this dynamic — living under a regime that uses its growing UN influence as a shield against accountability for its own documented human rights violations.
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The Institutional Paradox: Who Is This Organization Working For?
The central paradox is this: the United States has for decades been the single largest financial pillar of the United Nations. Yet the CCP has used a smaller, more strategically deployed investment to redirect significant portions of the institution toward Chinese interests.
As China takes on leadership roles in key UN agencies, research shows that while such positions may enhance China's image in some countries, they simultaneously damage the perceived legitimacy of the UN itself. In other words, Beijing's institutional gains come at the direct cost of the UN's credibility as a neutral multilateral body.
The Trump administration has consistently questioned the cost-benefit calculation of deep US engagement with multilateral institutions, a position that reflects a genuine underlying frustration felt across the American political spectrum. Whether one agrees with the specific policy prescriptions or not, the analytical diagnosis is difficult to dispute: an institution that a geopolitical adversary has spent two decades systematically reshaping cannot simultaneously serve as an extension of American — or broadly Western — foreign policy interests.
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What Comes Next?
Reform proposals have circulated for years — expansion of the Security Council, abolition or restriction of the veto, stronger accountability mechanisms for Human Rights Council membership. None has gained sufficient traction to overcome the structural resistance of those who benefit from the current arrangement.
The strategic question for Washington and its democratic allies is no longer whether China has gained significant influence inside the UN — that is now well-documented by academic institutions, think tanks, and government research alike. The more pressing question is what kind of institutional architecture the international community wants to build for the next 25 years, and whether the current UN structure — as it actually functions, not as it was designed — is capable of delivering it.
The United Nations was built to prevent the horrors of a world war from repeating. Today it faces a quieter but equally consequential challenge: the slow, systematic redirection of its purpose by a state whose values and political system stand in fundamental opposition to those of its founding architects.
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Sources:
- Council on Foreign Relations – The UN Security Council: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/un-security-council
- Lowy Institute – Mixed Report Card: China's Influence at the United Nations: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/mixed-report-card-china-s-influence-united-nations
- Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – Great Power Competition in the Multilateral System: https://www.csis.org/analysis/great-power-competition-multilateral-system
- United States Institute of Peace (USIP) – As China Looks to Reform Global Governance, How Does It Approach the UN?: https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/09/china-looks-reform-global-governance-how-does-it-approach-un
- Bruegel Working Paper – China's Influence at the United Nations (Nov. 2024): https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/2024-11/WP%2019%202024_1.pdf
- The Review of International Organizations / Springer Nature – Mapping China's Influence at the United Nations: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11558-024-09571-2
- Global Policy / Wiley – Power Shifts in International Organisations: China at the United Nations: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.13368
- Security Council Report – In Hindsight: The Security Council in 2024: https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2025-01/in-hindsight-the-security-council-in-2024-and-looking-ahead-to-2025.php
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