More bickering in the UN

China has announced that it will vote against plans to expand the UNSC. Reported in ChinaDaily, Wang Guanya (China's UN Ambassador) says:

"The enlargement of the Security Council must give priority to increasing the representation and participation of developing countries, especially African nations," he said. "

Any expansion formula must make sure that small and medium countries have more opportunities to take turns to participate in the work of the Security Council, uphold the principle of geographical balance and ensure the representation of different cultures and civilizations."

Ok, China doesn't really participate in the UN much, except for blocking stuff it doesn't like. The UN isn't exactly the most useful thing in the world, and China's right about it already being divisive. It's just another forum to play power politics.

If we look behind the noble talk of sticking up for developing nations, China doesn't want the G-4 proposal to succeed because Japan is in that proposal. There has been reporting that China would support India's bid (although Pakistan wouldn't of course), but I have only read this from Indian newspapers and not Chinese ones.

I think the Chinese will have to make it look like they reject the whole G-4 plan, as opposed to outright saying "we oppose Japan full stop". That will make it quite obvious that this isn't an issue of sticking up for the developing nations but a regional hegemony issue. But it also wouldn't want to annoy other nations that China actually wants good relations with, e.g. India and Germany, and probably Brazil too.

China needs friends, but also needs an enemy to unite the population against every now and then.

According to the ambassador, council reform should follow the gradual process of democratic discussion with a view to reaching consensus and should not only represent the concerns of a few countries.

What is more "democratic" than the General Assembly voting? I think the votes of the General Assembly are a more "democratic" indication of what the world wants than the elites bickering amongst themselves, cutting deals, blocking bids even if it get 2/3 of the votes cos they don't think it should be so.

When China wants to take things slowly with "democratic discussions" I think this means permanent stalling.

Same thing with their own "democratic reforms", they want to say "let's not be too hasty, let us sort out our poor people first," which means never, because their poor people are getting poorer by the day.

Unfortunately, it seems the world has not evolved into a civil international community. It's still very much anarchic, based on power politics.

Nicole Kidman in The Interpreter. IMDB rating 6.6/10.

On a similar note, I can't believe they made that Nicole Kidman movie The Interpreter which I saw last week. They made it look like the UN can actually save the world. Well, it couldn't stop the Rwanda genocide, or stop the U.S. going to war in Iraq... it can't actually stop anything unless the countries would have done it themselves anyway regardless of whether the UN was there or not. So I guess Hollywood either likes to paint naive pictures of the world or pack them with sex and violence. Either sells quite nicely.