China is not a threat to liberal international order. The country has been a leader in the growth of international women’s rights frameworks, showing crucial support for feminist goals which the U.S. lacks.

(Yiping Cai is a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine. She has received a master’s in Human Rights Law from Peking University. She is a feminist activist and journalist. Summer 2021, What Do Gender Equality and Women's Rights Have to Do with China's Global Engagement? Feminist Studies, Vol. 47, Issue 2, from Feminist Studies, Inc. //CPSW- GHS-LHM)

With China's growing influence in the world, there is increasing criticism and skepticism with regard to Chinese overseas investment and initiatives within the public opinion of recipient countries, leading to charges such as the "China Threat" and "neocolonialism." (9) In response, China is revamping its global engagement strategies to counter these narratives as well as to strengthen the mutual benefits and mitigate the negative impact of its relations with other countries. Telling "good Chinese stories" and sharing Chinese development experiences are just two examples of these efforts. Stories about women and girls' development in China are among those that China is willing and able to share. (10) One example is the story of Li Ziqi [phrase omitted] a thirty-one-year-old woman from Sichuan province whose YouTube channel celebrating rural life and Chinese culinary arts has acquired 14.1 million followers by 2021. One commentator on the state-owned China Central Television channel said about her, "without a word commending China, Li promotes Chinese culture in a good way and tells a good China story." (11) Another example is the way China highlights the contributions of women to coviD-19 pandemic prevention and control efforts as manifested in President Xi Jinping's speech at the UN event marking Beijing+25 on October i, 2020. (12) In an earlier speech, on September 27, 2015, Xi cohosted an event with UN Women called the Global Leaders' Meeting on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment: A Commitment to Action, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women. Xi highlighted the Chinese government's achievements and commitments to the UN's fifth Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS)--achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. China donated US$10 million to UN Women for implementation of the BPfA and the realization of Agenda 2030. China also pledged to help other developing countries build one hundred health initiatives for women and children, send teams of medical experts to provide services, and implement one hundred happy campus projects for schooling poor girls. Training programs in China will host 30,000 women from developing countries and 100,000 training opportunities will be provided in local communities of developing countries. This high-profile event that China cohosted in New York helps to put gender equality back on the political agenda after the Beijing conference in 1995, providing important momentum and legitimacy. Thereafter, at the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference as part of the Beijing+25 Review held in Bangkok in November 2019, Chinese delegates updated its partners on the progress made thus far and reaffirmed that all commitments would be fulfilled by the year 2020. (13) China has already launched some programs through multilateral and bilateral platforms to strengthen its cooperation with other countries on gender related issues. The report "Equality, Development and Sharing: Progress of the Women's Cause in the 70 Years since New China's Founding" enumerates China's achievements in promoting women's development and gender equality at the global level. (14) It states, for example, that China actively ratifies the UN's international instruments in the field of gender equality and fully promotes women's development progress. Furthermore, China has maintained friendly exchanges with 145 countries and 429 women's organizations and institutions as well as relevant UN organizations and special agencies. Through its aid projects, donations to UN Women, and other South-South cooperation projects, China has actively promoted the development of women's health, education, economy, poverty alleviation, and the environment in developing countries. On nine occasions, Chinese representatives have been elected to the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Nearly 1,000 Chinese women participate in UN peacekeeping missions, of which China is one of the major funders and the largest troop-contributing country among the permanent members of the UN Security Council. (15) Following that report, at the high-level panel discussion commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action held at the forty-third session of the UN Human Rights Council on February 25, 2020, in Geneva, Chinese representatives proposed to advance gender equality and women's development in three areas: advance women's cause through development, improve the protection of women's rights through laws and policies, and strengthen international cooperation with adherence to the principle of cooperation for win-win results. These efforts would take place on the basis of respecting the needs and contexts of individual countries, especially on issues of climate change, migration and the refugee crisis, and online violence against women. (16) Do these Chinese gender stories in the report reflect actual changes or are they merely self-congratulatory state propaganda? How are these narratives received and interpreted by the target audiences? To what extent are these stories reliable as well as reflective of the status quo of women's lives and the reality of gender equality in China? The answers to these questions are all subject to the judgment of global audiences. However, one thing China must prioritize in its storytelling is careful selection of the language used. Although the content of the stories is Chinese-specific, the language should be the universally recognized as conveying gender equality, human rights, sustainable development, and so on. It must be consistent with international conventions and policy frameworks, such as human rights treaties, BPfA, CEDAW, and SDGS in order to reach diverse global audiences and address their concerns. CHINESE GOVERNMENT'S POSITION ON GENDER-RELATED ISSUES IN THE GLOBAL ARENA In this section, I shift to a discussion of the low-key role and contradictory positions regarding gender that the Chinese government holds and the reasons behind them. There is a potential for China to play a more proactive role on the international stage in terms of promoting gender equality and women's rights. (17) Nevertheless, observing China's positioning in various global forums and negotiations at ICPD and Beijing reviews as well as the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN security council, the human rights council and other commissions, gender issues do not seem to receive much attention or visibility in China's foreign policy when compared with trade, security, international cooperation, counter-terrorism, climate change, and other major issues. Nor are there consistent, coherent positions on gender issues in the global arena. Instead, Chinese government representatives seemingly take a low-key role and hold ambiguous, sometimes even contradictory positions on various issues regarding gender, sexuality, and human rights. Such positions imply the potential role that China could play to promote gender equality in global contexts; however, they also show that gender equality and women's rights can be watered down or compromised as China negotiates instead for political and economic benefits and other priority issues. Unlike a handful of UN member states, such as Russia or the United States, who have blocked the process or voted against hard-negotiated agreements, China has joined the international consensus supporting all the outcome documents following reviews of the 4wcw and the ICPD as well as the SDGS and sessions of the Commission on the Status of Women. Thus, China supports gender equality and the inclusion of women's empowerment language, sometimes with compromises. For example, at the Asia Pacific Ministerial Meeting on Beijing+25 held in Bangkok in November 2019, organized by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), the US asked for a roll-call vote and then cast the only vote against the Asia Pacific Declaration on Advancing Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment. The Beijing+25 Review was adopted at the end of the intergovernmental meeting--not just the paragraphs on sexual and reproductive health and rights but the agreement in its entirety. Chinese delegates expressed reservation about the term "women human rights defenders" in paragraph nine, noting that there was no international consensus on what constitutes women human rights defenders and that the term was not well defined, but they agreed to adopt the declaration nonetheless. (18) China has been consistently aligned with the agreed-upon language of "gender equality and women's empowerment" in UN documents such as BPfA and SDG5. It also does not oppose the language of women's human rights. Its hesitation to recognize "women's human rights defenders" indicates that, concerning China's foreign policy, the matter of human rights is more fraught than that of gender or women, and it is more difficult to reach consensus on this issue.