The rise of Chinese humanitarianism

China had set their international standard - a dual standard.

Firstly, embodying the spirit of John Quincy Adams, China would be a nation that "respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own", therefore it would never "go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy".

And secondly, when humanitarian interventions would occasionally proceed in the absence of Chinese assistance and despite Chinese objections, the professed moral motivation would never be trusted. Such interventions would be ill-disguised exercises in 'shadow imperialism' – what John Paul Sartre described as "honeyed words" in order to supply "alibis for our aggression".

Without question, humanitarian intervention has a fraught history: a history of deceptive application, hypocritical implementation, and operational limitations. It was after all, a humanitarian ethic that Hitler espoused as justification for the invasion of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland in 1938, and more recently the self-professed justification for Russia's invasions of South Ossetia and Crimea.

But the misappropriation of a principle should not discredit the principle itself. Humanitarian intervention is always best vindicated by its absence. The poignant example of this was Rwanda, where Force Commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), Canadian Major-General Romeo Dallaire, estimated that as few as 5000 adequately trained international troops would have been enough to halt the violence. Instead, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 912 reducing UN troop numbers from 2558 down to 270. The international community watched passively as 800,000 people were killed, 500,000 women raped, half the country's total population displaced, and neighbouring countries dragged into the ethnic conflict in only three months of fighting.

International inaction in Rwanda had scarred our collective conscience in way that misappropriation never could. Through its absence, the moral value of humanitarian intervention became irrefutable.

Yet China seemed to be unaffected by such a visceral lesson, and continued to behave as if they held no moral responsibility to human suffering beyond their own borders.

Immediately after the genocide, China, in direct violation of international arms embargoes, helped to resupply the Rwandan military. In 2008, as Robert Mugabe's authoritarian government struggled to contain a popular uprising in Zimbabwe, China sold him the arms he needed to suppress the population. And rogue regimes such as Syria, Iran and North Korea receive constant protection, courtesy of the Chinese veto powers in the United Nations Security Council.

Yet, China's amoral international peak came during their inexcusable support for Khartoum during the Sudanese civil war. Chinese arms sales to North Sudan increased by 137 times during the period 2001 to 2006, a proliferation that corresponded directly to exponential increases in atrocities committed upon South Sudanese population centres. The state-owned Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) closely followed this violence, providing the necessary infrastructure in order to exploit seized oil reserves, even going so far as to allow Chinese oil developments to be used as military launching-pads for further attacks.

The international history of modern China is defined by a self-imposed moral absenteeism. Yet this intransigent stance appears to be finally shifting. China has recently been undergoing a subtle, though still perceptible, sea change in its understanding of international moral responsibility. The Chinese are slowly becoming global humanitarians.

This is a process that has been significantly hurried along by two disparate events, a Japanese constitutional revision and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

Recent Parliamentary approval for the amendment of Japan's pacifist constitution sent echoes of trepidation through the international community – yet, no one was affected quite like China. The proposed amendment was itself fairly innocuous. It would allow Japan, where it could not before, to come to the defensive aid of allies, and importantly would allow previously forbidden participation in international humanitarian missions.