China pitches for English proficiency to step up peacekeeping

A lack of proficiency in English has been one of the main factors hindering Chinese peacekeeping forces in their missions overseas, officials said on Thursday at a new training centre outside Beijing.                                           

UN peacekeeping missions have given China, which has not been in an overseas conflict for three decades, a channel for diplomatic outreach and military experience as the People's Liberation Army modernises.                                           

China has sent more than 14,000 peacekeepers, mostly military observers, engineers and medics, to UN peacekeeping operations in the last 20 years. About 2,000 Chinese are currently serving, senior colonel Kui Yanwei told reporters.                                           

"The relatively low English standards of peacekeepers" ranks after general security issues and a lack of trained teachers with peacekeeping experience among the challenges they face, Kui said.

"We need English for better communications with the other UN personnel and teams," peacekeeping veteran Liu Zhao said, in fluent English, as he showed reporters around a compound modelled on the Chinese camp in Darfur.                                           

As China's economic muscle has given it greater clout in the United Nations, it has experimented with peacekeeping activities.

"Beijing's policymakers see engagement in peacekeeping and conflict resolution as a way for China to project a more benign and harmonious image beyond its borders," Chin-hao Huang, who co-authored a report for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told reporters earlier this month.                                           

China sees it as a way "to reassure neighbours near and far about its peaceful intentions, and in the long-term to gradually balance US and other Western influence by gradually but more firmly establishing China's status as a great power", he said.

Western countries seeking to engage China have also broached the idea of military cooperation on humanitarian missions. China sent naval ships to the Gulf of Aden last winter to protect commercial vessels against Somali pirates, and has now indicated it would further cooperate with NATO patrols there.                                           

The United States has floated the idea of Chinese support in Afghanistan, but Kui said China can only participate in peacekeeping operations organised by the United Nations. China's domestic media have paid most attention to its peacekeepers' work in Haiti, where it sent police units. "Chinese peacekeepers involved on the ground adds a layer of legitimacy because China is a developing country," Huang said.