China ‘Usurps’ UN as Tool for Advancing Strategic Interests, Report Says

By Frank Fang & Eva Fu

The House Select Committee on China said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is advancing its vision and political agenda at the United Nations by leveraging its financial contributions, seizing critical posts, deploying its troops under peacekeeping mandate, and infiltrating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), according to a new report.

Shared with The Epoch Times ahead of its expected official release on March 20, the report draws on Chinese-language media, Beijing’s official documents, academic studies, U.N. data, and the committee’s own investigation. It said that China “has waged a systematic campaign” to exploit the U.N. and its bodies to advance a “malign agenda.”

“China is not simply participating in or driving initiatives at the U.N.; it is exploiting that participation to shape the U.N. to serve the ends of the Chinese Communist Party,” the report reads.

The committee is led by chairman, Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), and ranking member, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).

China’s financial contributions to the United Nations have risen sharply over the past two decades, increasing from about 2 percent in 2006 to just over 20 percent of the organization’s regular budget—second only to the United States at 22 percent.

The financial clout has given Beijing the power to “withhold and delay payments to gain political concessions.” For instance, deliberate delays in Chinese funding during the 2023 liquidity crisis were linked to efforts to block human rights inquiries in Sudan and elsewhere, according to the report.

The committee also highlighted China’s total contributions to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which amounted to about $362 million from 1981 to March 2026. During this period, China received around $1.3 billion in preferential financing from IFAD, meaning that a significant amount of financial resources was diverted away from poorer nations, allowing China to use the money for its rural development “at a relatively low cost.”

The report also sounds alarms about China having “strategically placed” its nationals in senior U.N. positions, particularly those connected to its interests in the Global South and its foreign policy of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The posts include Qu Dongyu as the director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, and Li Junhua, under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs at the U.N. Department for Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).

Washington and critics have criticized China for luring countries into the BRI, which finances infrastructure projects across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe, as part of an effort to expand its global influence through “debt trap diplomacy.”

The report highlighted three cases showing how the CCP uses “high-level staff as a channel to inject PRC ideology within the U.N. system,” using the acronym for China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China. In 2017, Wu Hongbo, former under-secretary-general of DESA, “reportedly expelled” a Uyghur activist from a forum despite his having been invited.

Under the U.N. peacekeeping structure, China has been deploying troops to regions tied to its “economic and strategic interests,” particularly in Africa, using “the guise of the multinational legitimacy” as it seeks to convert “Chinese soft power into hard power,” according to the report.

One key example is South Sudan, where 871 Chinese nationals serve in a 2025 U.N. mission involving a total of 11,379 personnel. The report explained that South Sudan “serves as a critical location” to China, given that Chinese state-owned firms had been operating in the country’s oil production.

Another key finding is that China has mobilized Beijing-backed NGOs, known as GONGOs—short for government-organized nongovernmental organizations. These groups “distort and misuse the consultative process” open to NGOs, helping China to “further its access, network, and malign influence” over the U.N. system.

Citing a 2025 report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the committee noted that 59 of 106 NGOs from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan are “closely connected” to the CCP.

The committee said its own investigation found that “several dozen” of these GONGOs “are either directly or indirectly affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front system.”

In a 2023 memo, the committee warned that the Chinese regime considers its network of United Front organizations a “magic weapon” serving multiple purposes, including intelligence gathering, shaping other countries’ political environments, and technology transfer to China.

The committee offers several recommendations, including having the secretary of state “develop and implement a strategy to counter China’s influence over U.N. bodies and processes.”

China’s portrayal of itself as a major multilateral partner masks a broader agenda, the report said.

“The PRC’s emphasis on multilateralism is not trying to bolster the existing international order,” the report reads.

“Rather, the PRC seeks to put forward the U.N. as the sole source of legitimacy at the same time as it usurps the U.N. as a tool for the PRC’s national agenda.”