Any traveler who has picked up an international guidebook knows the UNESCO designation as shorthand for a must-see cultural destination that’s worthy of a detour.
But the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has also become the target of an intense Chinese influence campaign in recent years as Beijing has sought to increase its reach over educational curriculums, historical designations and even artificial intelligence.
President Trump’s decision Tuesday to withdraw the United States from the group removes a powerful check on China’s effort, in the latest example of how the White House retreat from international institutions offers an opening for China to advance its soft power.
The United States was once the largest UNESCO backer, accounting for nearly 25 cents of every dollar. But Washington has had an on-again-off-again relationship with it for years, especially since Mr. Trump first took office in 2017, and China has stepped up to take its place. A Chinese official is now UNESCO’s deputy director general, a post that diplomats said is often awarded in exchange for political or monetary favors.
UNESCO has lent support to major priorities for China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, including the global infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing has also lobbied heavily for World Heritage designations and is jockeying to surpass Italy as the country with the most culturally significant sites. Some of those sites are in oppressed regions like Tibet and Xinjiang, where many local residents view them as an attempt to appropriate and control their culture and history.
And while UNESCO wields tremendous clout over what counts as history, it is also the U.N. agency in charge of setting artificial intelligence guidelines. UNESCO has an agreement with iFlytek, a major Chinese A.I. company, to cooperate on higher education in Asia and Africa, according to Chinese state media. (UNESCO said it has partnerships with many artificial intelligence companies worldwide.)
“UNESCO is a battleground for cultural and intellectual power and influence,” said David Killion, who was an ambassador to UNESCO under President Barack Obama. “We are conceding the soft power realm to an expansionist, authoritarian great power.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, in a response to a request for comment on its influence in UNESCO, said that international organizations are “not arenas for geopolitical games.”
“China never intends to challenge or replace the U.S.,” the Embassy said. “We hope that all parties could see China’s positive role in UNESCO objectively.”
UNESCO said that, while China will soon be the biggest funder, it is underrepresented on the agency’s staff. “We are not in a position to comment on the diplomatic strategy of one member state or another,” an agency spokeswoman said in a statement.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment but issued a statement saying that UNESCO advanced “a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.”
The pullback reflects a broader American retreat from international bodies and Mr. Trump’s dim view of soft power, the longstanding idea that America’s cultural and economic influence abroad strengthens its hand in foreign affairs.
Mr. Trump has announced America’s departure from the World Health Organization and gutted the United States Agency for International Development. A White House review of U.N. agencies is due in early August, and experts expect the White House to defund others.
“The United States is no longer reliable,” said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. “China’s status and influence in the United Nations will definitely increase accordingly. This is certain.”
UNESCO was the first U.N. agency that Mr. Xi visited after becoming China’s leader in 2012. The United States had withdrawn funding under 1990s legislation requiring a cutoff of American financing to U.N. agencies that accepted Palestine as a full member.
That provided an opening for China.
Beijing got Mr. Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, appointed as a special envoy, and sent money to Paris that it earmarked for its foreign policy goals.
Tang Qian, a former UNESCO assistant director general from China, recalled in his 2020 memoir that his government viewed financing the agency as a way to expand Chinese influence, particularly in Africa.
Washington was not on the sidelines during this period, despite the funding cuts. The Obama administration kept its diplomats, like Mr. Killion, in Paris to work on issues like Holocaust education and countering Brazil and China on internet regulation.
But in 2017, the Trump administration announced it would withdraw from the organization completely, citing anti-Israel bias. After President Joseph R. Biden took office in 2021, Mr. Killion and others campaigned to get the United States to return.
“The void left by the U.S. is being filled by other major powers, like China, who understand the immense soft power opportunity that exists at UNESCO,” read a document that they circulated within the Biden administration.
Congress authorized a funding waiver and the United States rejoined UNESCO. The waiver explicitly mentioned concerns about Chinese influence.
The new ambassador set about trying to restore American influence, securing partnerships for tech companies like Microsoft and Netflix and leading a group, with the Ghanaian ambassador, that worked on artificial intelligence and digital learning in Africa, where Chinese companies had been making inroads.
Mr. Trump is hardly eager to empower China. He has launched a trade war and imposed export restrictions on American technology. But Mr. Trump favors economic and military might over foreign aid and cultural programs.
China views soft power as essential to expanding its global influence and UNESCO as key to establishing its culture and history as prominent on the world stage. China leads the world in the number of “intangible cultural heritages” — humanity’s most worthy creations, like the Spanish flamenco dancing, the Thai prawn soup known as tomyum kung and Jamaican reggae.
World Heritage sites attract so many tourists that a UNESCO designation can transform economies. Sites in Western countries have historically dominated this list, and Asian countries have lobbied heavily in recent years to have their history acknowledged, too. But persecuted ethnic minorities say that in the hands of Beijing, the sites become tools of appropriation and are not protected.
At a palace in Lhasa that was for centuries the home of Tibetan Dalai Lamas, the Chinese government erected two pavilions in 2020. The pavilions, built in a distinctly Chinese style, surround sacred stone columns that commemorate Tibetan history. UNESCO regulations require that countries alert the organization before making major changes to sites. The Chinese government did not do that.
Advocacy groups called on UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee to designate the palace as a site in danger at its meeting earlier this month. It did not.
Chinese officials have described the country’s efforts to get its historical and cultural sites designated by UNESCO as a key part of Mr. Xi’s Global Civilization Initiative. That initiative holds that each region has its own values and should not face pressure from countries with different values. Critics have described this as an attempt to undermine human rights and democracy.
U.S. defunding of UNESCO will mean less oversight of the heritage process, said Stephan Dömpke, chair of the Berlin-based nonprofit group World Heritage Watch. “Even now,” he said, “UNESCO cannot monitor about one third of the sites on the World Heritage List. The withdrawal of the United States will only accelerate this process.”
The American ambassador to UNESCO stepped down in January as Mr. Trump took office. Shortly afterward, a Uyghur linguist, Abduweli Ayup, discovered the risk of offending China at UNESCO.
The Uyghurs are a persecuted ethnic group in northwestern China who have been interned in camps, forced into labor, and barred from using their native language in schools. The Chinese government works aggressively to censor and beat back discussion of this repression.
In February, Mr. Ayup traveled to Paris with his family, expecting to make a presentation at a UNESCO conference on Indigenous languages. He had been invited to speak about how smartphones have contributed to a decline in Uyghurs using their native language.
On the first day of the conference, Mr. Ayup asked a Chinese state media anchor a question that was critical of Beijing. The next day, a few hours before he was scheduled to present, organizers abruptly rescinded the invitation.
Mr. Ayup’s question was the reason, according to three members of the conference’s academic committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The Chinese language learning company Talkmate was a major sponsor, and staff members feared offending the executives, one of the committee members said.
UNESCO, in its statement, said its management was not involved in canceling Mr. Ayup’s presentation and the agency had not received a request from China about it.
Before he left the conference, Mr. Ayup angrily scrawled on a sheet of paper and taped it to the wall of the conference venue. “UNESCO,” the sign read. “My presentation cancelled. Why? Why?”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.