The UN Is a Chinese-Captured Institution

Commentary

The United Nations was chartered in 1945 as a creation of American strategic vision—a Pax Americana scaffolding dressed in multilateral language that was intended to be a cornerstone of the American-made international order shaped after World War II.

That calculus has been fundamentally altered over time. The institution has been methodically infiltrated, staffed, and redirected by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the past 25 years, transforming the U.N. from a tool that the United States shaped into a platform Beijing increasingly controls—and paid for in large part by the American taxpayer.

Let us examine the issue.

Financial Subsidy of America’s Strategic Rival

In 2025, the United States was responsible for 22 percent of the U.N. regular budget and approximately 26 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. And according to the Congressional Research Service, the 2025–2026 U.N. peacekeeping budget alone is $5.4 billion.

The grotesque irony is this: China was assessed at roughly 20 percent of the regular U.N. budget in 2025—up from just 0.77 percent in 1994—and nearly 23 percent of the peacekeeping budget, making it the second-largest contributor to both after the United States.

While China grew its financial footprint and bought influence accordingly, the United States simultaneously funded the organization that China is using against American interests. U.S. voluntary contributions alone are seven times greater than China’s total contributions to the U.N. system, as noted by The Heritage Foundation. Yet Beijing has leveraged its smaller investment far more effectively.

U.S. unpaid assessments stand at $1.5 billion for the regular budget and $2.4 billion for peacekeeping—a vivid indicator that even successive U.S. administrations have sensed, however inconsistently, that the value proposition is broken.

China’s 25-Year Infiltration Campaign

The CCP’s political takeover of the U.N. was not accidental. It was a deliberate, patient, multi-vector strategy executed across personnel, finance, voting blocs, and norm-setting.

Financial Escalation

China’s mandatory and voluntary contributions to the U.N. rose by 1,096 percent and 346 percent, respectively, from 2010 to 2019 alone, according to the U.N. System Chief Executives Board for Coordination. Money buys access, gratitude, and votes in any institution.

Seizing Agency Leadership

Until 2006, a Chinese national had never led a U.N. specialized agency. In recent years, China has led more U.N. specialized agencies than any other nation. A Chinese national led four agencies in six of the seven years from 2015 to 2021, according to The Heritage Foundation.

The targeted agencies were not chosen at random. The CCP carefully chose clusters whose work could be interwoven with its domestic agendas, such as “Made in China 2025,” creating new global technology standards led by Chinese national corporate champions and linking them to Beijing’s foreign policy through the Belt and Road Initiative.

The International Telecommunication Union has had a Chinese representative serving for two terms, ensuring that Huawei’s standards are embedded in sparsely penetrated markets across Africa, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia.

Capturing Bureaucracy

The Lowy Institute pointed out that Chinese officials have led the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) since 2007, with diplomats noting that “DESA is a Chinese enterprise, everybody knows it and everybody accepts it.”

DESA sets the intellectual direction for economic, environmental, and social policy across the entire U.N. system. Peer-reviewed research confirms the mechanism: China forms coalitions with weaker states to control leadership appointments, and those China-friendly leaders then align U.N. bureaucratic language with Chinese-produced documentation. The CCP installs its people; those people rewrite the institution’s discourse.

Building a Voting Bloc

China wields significant influence in the Group of 77—a grouping of 134 countries making up almost 70 percent of all U.N. members.

African nations, as the largest regional bloc with about 28 percent voting share, have played a crucial role in supporting China’s rise, electing Chinese nationals to lead four U.N. principal agencies and securing deputy slots in nine others.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative investments in Africa have paid significant geopolitical dividends to Beijing.

Weaponizing UN Leaders

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Beijing has “cultivated” U.N. leaders, including Secretary-General António Guterres, to promote the Belt and Road Initiative and integrate it with the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. U.N. leaders have effectively become a marketing vehicle for Chinese geopolitical infrastructure.

UN Security Council: A Chinese–Russian Anti-US Veto Bloc

All nine of China’s formal Security Council vetoes in the past decade were cast in tandem with Russia. The two established a functional diplomatic counterbalance against the United States, the UK, and France—leaving the three Western powers effectively powerless—and the China–Russia alliance has only hardened as a result of the Russo–Ukrainian war.

China has blocked U.S.-backed resolutions on Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Burma (Myanmar), and Zimbabwe, using “sovereignty and non-interference” as cover for protecting regimes serving Chinese interests.

Most recently, on April 7, China vetoed a resolution drafted by Bahrain that would have authorized countries to use military force if necessary to open the Strait of Hormuz for the free flow of shipping and commerce.

China leverages its P5 position by threatening vetoes to water down resolutions it considers unfavorable, including resolutions against North Korea and Iran. Every time the United States has sought to use the Security Council as a pressure tool, it has had to seek Chinese permission first.

Human Rights and Norm Reengineering

An oft-stated CCP goal is to replace the American-designed international order with a new Chinese-dominated world order. A Chinese strategy to help achieve that is the systematic degradation of the U.N. Human Rights system.

A U.N. whistleblower alleged China’s use of intimidation, bribery, and document editing to remove unflattering facts about COVID-19’s origins and Xinjiang abuses. Despite its abysmal human rights record, China has been reelected to the U.N. Human Rights Council numerous times and sits in judgment of other nations while running its own concentration camps.

At the deepest level, Beijing seeks wholesale reform of global governance—what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls “a new type of international relations”—amounting to a systematic effort to undermine U.S. global leadership as the rivalry intensifies. The CCP’s attempts to steer away from human rights-related goals toward pure economic development are most visible in the U.N.’s social and economic bodies, in which Beijing has a relatively free hand as Western countries have gradually retreated.

Concluding Thoughts

The United States pays roughly 22 percent of the U.N.’s regular budget and 26 percent of its peacekeeping costs—the single largest financial subsidy to an institution that a hostile power has spent 25 years systematically capturing. The Chinese regime, assessed at nearly 20 percent today versus less than 1 percent in 1994, has leveraged that smaller investment with far greater strategic discipline: seizing agency leaderships, building a G77 voting bloc, creating a veto partnership with Russia, and redirecting U.N. institutional legitimacy to launder Belt and Road geopolitics.

Every purported benefit of U.N. membership—international legitimacy, multilateral burden-sharing on security, global norm-setting—depends on the assumption that the institution reflects shared values sympathetic to American ideals and is not captured by a hostile power. That assumption is now empirically false. An institution that Beijing controls cannot simultaneously serve as an extension of U.S. foreign policy. The cost-benefit equation cannot be rescued by pointing to programs that still function; the question is who controls the overall direction, and the above summary is unambiguous about the answer.

Finally, from a pure America First standpoint, the United States is the majority financier of its own strategic containment. The logical conclusion is straightforward: continued full-spectrum U.S. support for the U.N., as currently constituted, subsidizes CCP power at American expense. The U.N. must be fundamentally restructured or terminated accordingly.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.