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China, the biggest contributor of peacekeeping troops among the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and the second-biggest financial contributor to the UN's peacekeeping programs, has the potential to become a world leader in peacekeeping, said Zhou Bo, a senior colonel in the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA).
"China has good reason to beef up its peacekeeping commitments," Zhou, director of the Center for Security Cooperation at the Office for International Military Cooperation in China's Ministry of National Defense, wrote in an article published in Foreign Affairs on Wednesday.
Titled "How China can improve UN peacekeeping," the article noted that supporting global governance would boost China's image "as a responsible nation on a peaceful rise."
In his address at the Leaders' Summit on Peacekeeping at UN headquarters in New York in September 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to increase China's support to UN peacekeeping missions.
China, he declared, will take the lead to set up a permanent peacekeeping police squad and will build a peacekeeping standby force of 8,000 troops.
The country has "stepped up further" since then, said Zhou. This September, China registered a peacekeeping standby force of 8,000 troops; in August, the first contingent of Chinese helicopters arrived in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region; the country has trained 1,100 foreign peacekeepers in Beijing and plans to train 900 more by 2020, according to the senior colonel who manages the PLA's multilateral cooperation programs.
Meanwhile, Chinese peacekeepers play a key role in South Sudan, a nation established six years ago and has been torn by a prolonged civil war.
The Chinese Navy launched its first overseas support base in Horn of Africa country Djibouti earlier this year, a move aimed at enhancing China's capabilities to conduct escort missions, peacekeeping and humanitarian aid in the Gulf of Aden and the waters off Somalia.
"Thanks to its deep resources and major interests in global stability, China has the potential to become a peacekeeping leader," Zhou wrote, adding that China's commitments could become more significant as the United States "seems likely to scale back its own role at the UN."
He suggested that China should improve not only the quantity but also the quality of its peacekeeping efforts. It should build better "enabling units" – the special forces, engineering, transport, communications and aviation troops – to ensure its peacekeepers' success, he said. More female peacekeepers should be trained to work with female civilians more conveniently, especially in Muslim communities, he added.
In Zhou's view, China and the US should strengthen collaboration on peacekeeping, which would contribute to both stability in Africa and the improvement of "the world's most important bilateral relationship."
(CGTN)
