Dissertation Defense: Cathy Lee

Candidate: Cathy Lee

Major: Government

Advisor: Eric Voeten, Ph.D.

Title: China’s Engagement in the International Order: Through Human Rights Norms, Currency Adoption, and Security Rhetoric

The dissertation project advances our understanding of how China engages in the liberal international order in various aspects: human rights norms, currency adoption, and security rhetoric. The first article examines whether China is contesting the international normative order. While both China and the US mention “rights” exactly the same number of times in their Universal Periodic Review (UPR) recommendations, I argue that the two countries understand and use the norm differently, reflecting their divergent value systems and political views. Moreover, I posit that the varying contextualization of norms may be further affected by the audience as states have distinct semantic objectives to potential friends and adversaries. Using text embeddings on UPR recommendations, I identify the contexts in which core human rights norms such as “rights,” “equality,” “law,” and “justice” are used by different countries. I find that China deviates from the so-called “liberal script” that prioritizes individual-based rights and freedom. The deviation is more prominent in recommendations directed at non-democracies than democracies. Moreover, the findings suggest non-democracies tend to share China’s understanding of the norms than democracies do. The second article studies why China has loaned less in Renminbi (RMB) and more in US dollar (USD) for close to a decade since announcing its national objective to internationalize RMB in 2009. Using data on Chinese lending from 2000 to 2021, I find that while relational factors that determine one’s bargaining leverage are influential, the main driving force behind the currency denomination of Chinese loans is structural. Specifically, the global dominance of the USD and the excessive foreign reserves in China constrain China to denominate loans in USD. This demonstrates that China has only limited ability to compete with the US in the financial order, at least in the short-term. The third article explores how states’ security rhetorics are positioned relative to China and the US. It develops a two-step measurement model to estimate dynamic ideal points from the UN Security Council Debates. The first step uses the Fighting Words method (Monroe, Colaresi, and Quinn 2008) to distinguish terms that are used significantly more by China than the US and vice versa. These estimates are then imposed as a structure on a WordFish ideal point model. The findings indicate while China’s security rhetoric has become more distinct since around 2005, it remains isolated with only a few non-permanent members sharing rhetorical positions close to China.