Be My Friendly Reviewers: How China Shapes its UN Human Rights Reviews

Authoritarian states are often vulnerable to naming and shaming for their human rights abuses. This paper shows that China uses its economic clout to influence United Nations (UN) member states overseeing its human rights reviews, shielding itself from severe criticisms within the UN system. I argue that paying for lenient reviews is possible, but its effectiveness depends on the extent to which reviewing states prioritize economic benefits over normative principles. Using text-based coding of over 90,000 UN Universal Periodic Review reports, I demonstrate that countries with strong economic ties to China through Chinese overseas development projects tend to offer more lenient reviews of China’s human rights record. This effect, however, is conditional: it is pronounced in “middle” countries whose stance on human rights norms is neither too aligned with nor too distant from China's. Another “distant” group, which is furthest from China’s human rights vision, is resistant to providing lenient reviews in return for economic favors. Contrary to the conventional belief that human rights monitoring mechanisms are deeply politicized, I find that the peer-review monitoring system does have normative resilience: that commitments to democratic values and human rights matter. There is a nuanced interplay between economic interests and norms in states’ interactions: authoritarian great powers using economic incentives in exchange for favorable human rights reviews do not always succeed in doing so.