(TibetanReview.net, Sep17’25) – While seeking to expand its influence at the UN, promoting itself as the leader of an alternative to the US-led world order, with US President Donald Trump increasingly stepping away from multilateral co-operation, China has been delaying the settlement of annual dues it owes to the world body later and later each year, exacerbating a funding crisis at the global body. Besides, it pays negligible amounts in voluntary contributions, the main source of UN funding, reported the ft.com Sep 17.
China’s unexplained late settlement of its mandatory dues for the UN regular budget has crept from two months overdue in 2021 to 10 months overdue in 2024, the report said citing a Financial Times analysis of publicly available data.
As the world’s biggest economies, China and the US, which is also regularly in arrears at the UN, are the top contributors to the UN budget, the report noted.
“We can’t implement our budget fully or efficiently; we cannot plan our spending with confidence … if all member states do not pay in full or on time,” UN Controller Chandramouli Ramanathan has said, discussing the world body’s finances.
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Member states finance the UN and its agencies through two streams: “assessed contributions”, which are treaty obligations and cover the UN’s $3.7bn regular budget, including the general assembly, as well as its $5.6bn peacekeeping budget; and “voluntary contributions”, which account for the majority of its income.
China’s share of the regular budget was stated to have grown from 0.99% in 2000 to 20%, or $680mn, in 2025, just shy of the US at 22%.
The US owed about $1.5bn and China $597mn as of Apr 30 in unpaid contributions to the 2025 regular budget. The US owed another $1.5bn and China $587mn to the peacekeeping budget, the report said.
“The Chinese always pay late and do not give reasons,” a diplomat in Geneva who works with the UN has said. Along with the US, China’s late payments threatened to “create a pretty huge liquidity crisis for the UN”, the diplomat has added.
In fact, Pew Research Center has found that only 53 of the UN’s 193 member states paid their regular budget contributions on time every year since 2019, while UN data showed 41 remained in arrears as of the end of 2024.
Under UN rules, any unspent funds each year, even if they are submitted late, are credited to dues owed for the following year — meaning delayed payments force UN operations to go underfunded and save donor countries money, the report noted.
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In addition to late regular dues, China makes relatively low voluntary contributions to the UN’s web of humanitarian agencies, their main source of funding, relative to its size, the report cited experts as saying.
The budget shortfalls come as China is manoeuvring to gain influence at the UN through appointments and a planned restructuring of its agencies.
David Scheffer, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has said that, given China’s focus on influencing the UN system towards its point of view, “I find it a little inexplicable why they’re delaying payments”.
Beijing has promised to step up WHO funding to fill the gap left by the US withdrawal under President Trump. But it has yet to commit significant voluntary contributions and its past donations have lagged behind the US, the report noted.
Washington paid a total of $13bn to the UN system in 2023, three-quarters of which was in the form of voluntary contributions, according to UN data. China paid $2.3bn that year, only $150mn of which was voluntary, the report noted.
“In the two-thirds of the stream that really funds the UN, China pays negligible amounts,” Courtney Fung, an associate professor at Macquarie University, has said.