Chinese peace and its discontents: China's peacemaking and peacekeeping in South Sudan

China shows a growing commitment to peacemaking and peacekeeping overseas. Yet Chinese peace efforts have met considerable challenges across multiple conflict settings. This article seeks to understand the difficulties facing Chinese peacemaking and peacekeeping and asks how these experiences influence the future behaviour of Chinese actors towards peace and conflict issues. Previous scholarship has largely taken a state-centric perspective to explain China’s engagement in peacemaking and peacekeeping. In contrast, this article harnesses an assemblage approach to reveal the diversity of Chinese actors and the significant role local actors and normative forms of power play in influencing China’s broader peace efforts. In South Sudan, it finds that the political ideas advanced by warring factions and the legitimacy they placed on United Nations peacekeeping intervention, both undermined Chinese peacemaking and peacekeeping and held far-reaching effects for Chinese actors beyond the conflict. Consequently, these challenges in South Sudan pushed China’s national oil company to adopt new risk management policies throughout its investments in conflict settings. The South Sudan experience also influenced China’s foreign ministry by tempering its proactive approach to conflict resolution in other conflict-affected countries and to promote peacekeeper safety and support peacekeeping intelligence at the United Nations.