China’s UN Diplomacy on the Russo-Ukrainian War

This article examines how China conducts its diplomacy on Ukraine within the United Nations framework and assesses whether its stated principles align with its actual behavior. Using corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and UN voting data from 2014 to 2025 across the United Nation Security Council (UNSC), General Assembly (UNGA), and selected UN technical bodies, it analyzes the relationship between China’s words and its deeds. A comparison with the Palestine/Gaza corpus shows that China applies more attribution and selective framing, challenging the notion of a uniform ‘principled neutrality’. The findings show that China’s abstention doctrine is conditional, and that its UN behavior reflects strategic differentiation across political and technical arenas of global governance.