Dr Xuwan Ouyang1
1University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Biography:
Dr Xuwan Ouyang is a researcher from the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect in the School of Political Science and International Studies at The University of Queensland. She obtained PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies from University of Queensland in 2024. Her research focuses on Chinese foreign policy in relation to peacebuilding, peacekeeping, humanitarian emergency response, and mass atrocity prevention in the Asia Pacific region.
Abstract:
China’s growing role in international peacebuilding and conflict management has sparked heated debate among scholars and practitioners regarding the motivations and implications of Chinese peacebuilding. A literature identifying a distinctive ‘Chinese peace’ or ‘developmental peace’ approach has emerged, emphasizing economic development, stability, and respect for state sovereignty as its core tenets. This literature focuses on official Chinese discourse, however, offering limited analysis of Chinese peacebuilding in practice. This thesis provides an in-depth examination of Chinese ‘peace engagements' in its important neighbouring country of Myanmar over the approximate time period of 2009 to 2020 and builds on semi-structured interviews with international and Chinese scholars, officials, businesses, and representatives from civil society organizations. It argues that contrary to the existing literature’s claims of an emergent “Chinese peace”, China has struggled to implement a consistent and conscious peace approach. Apart from its detailed and evidence-based analysis of the divergence between ‘Chinese peace’ rhetoric and practice, this paper contributes to the literature on Chinese peacebuilding by providing an analytic framework for analysing China’s peace approach in practice.