Stigmatising Sanctions and China’s Counter-Stigmatisation

Abstract

Chapter 4 explains the Chinese leadership’s impetus in using its sanctions rhetoric and elaborates on the substance of such rhetoric. It suggests that China’s experience of being a target of Western sanctions since its establishment in 1949 had convinced its leaders that ‘the West’ was determined to stigmatise China through various forms of economic punishment, with the ultimate goal of undermining the Chinese government’s political legitimacy. The Chinese political elite therefore engaged in a rhetorical counter-stigmatisation strategy that sought to delegitimise the sanctions strategy of the US and its allies by depicting them as imperialist and interventionist. China also sought to gradually redefine, in the understanding of United Nations Member States, the notion of when and how sanctions could legitimately be employed.