What drives China’s peace engagement in conflict-affected countries: does China provide peacebuilding support where its help is needed the most or to advance its own interests? Despite a growing body of literature addressing this question, the analytical scope remains limited to China’s short-term peacebuilding measures and individual case studies. In this article, we build on longitudinal large-N data addressing China’s long-term peacebuilding. We detect a strong association between Chinese peace engagement and the economic needs of recipients. Mixed results are obtained regarding the role of China’s interests. While security and diplomatic interests appear to drive its peace engagement to some extent, there is no clear evidence of its economic interests influencing the engagement in conflict-affected countries. The article makes three contributions. First, we add to the growing literature on China’s peace engagement by adopting a broad definition of peacebuilding and, by doing so, expanding the analytical scope. Second, we contribute to the literature on emerging peacebuilding actors drawing on the case of China. Last, we make a policy-relevant contribution by demonstrating the complexity of peacebuilding actors’ motivation in engaging with conflict-affected countries.

A growing body of literature within international relations (IR) has attempted to understand China’s approach to peacebuilding, so-called developmental peace, mostly in relation to critiques of liberal peace. The literature shares an assumption that developmental peace is distinct from liberal peace and discusses whether Chinese peacebuilding efforts might function as an alternative to the liberal approach. The discussion largely draws on conventional IR perspectives involving only limited engagement with critical scholars. It therefore lacks analysis of hierarchies related to gender and local power relations. By contrast, this article critically interrogates existing arguments to examine the extent to which developmental peace differs from liberal peace and in what sense it can be seen as an alternative. Informed by feminist IR, the article explores three core elements of developmental peace: developmentalism, the absence of the political and South-South cooperation. It shows that developmental peace largely replicates and reinforces the limitations of liberal peace by marginalising women and minority groups, and failing to prioritise local needs. Based on these findings, it argues that China might be an emerging actor that, in a nominal sense, can diversify the field, but that developmental peace does not constitute an alternative perspective in any substantive sense.

Why does China challenge global norms in climate governance while selectively accepting norms in peacebuilding governance? We argue that the focus on domestic factors in much existing literature is insufficient to explain this difference. Instead, we propose an outward-looking approach centered on factors related to international institutions. We conduct a comparative analysis of explanatory factors using a theory of international regime complexity—specifically Henning and Pratt’s framework on the joint effects of authority and differentiation within regime complexes. This analysis utilizes Chinese official documents in English aimed at international audiences. We found that China partially accepts existing norms while proposing alternatives to hierarchical structures in situations where there is a leading institution overseeing similarly functioning institutions. This is the case in peacebuilding governance. In contrast, China largely challenges norms in global governance systems that lack a hierarchical structure and involve institutions with distinct, specialized roles. This is the case for climate governance. We argue that the variation in China’s contestation of global governance norms can be explained by the level of hierarchy and functional differentiation between institutions in each governance regime. The article contributes a new perspective to debates about China’s norm contestation in global governance.