CCTV9英语新闻11月：中国在联合国安理会的领导作用（在线收听）

By CCTV correspondent Stephen Fee

With political strife in Syria and Sudan, Yemen and Central Africa, the United Nations Security Council is expected to take a leading role in global diplomacy in the coming weeks. And this month, China assumes the Council's rotating presidency. The 15 members of the UN's premier peace and security body have much to consider.

Liu Jieyi, Chinese ambassador to UN, says, "Now during the presidency of the Security Council China of course will be guided by the principles of objectivity, impartiality, efficiency, pragmatism, and transparency."

In a month squeezed by holidays and procedural business, Liu says the 15 Security Council members will meet thirty times this month on some 20 agenda items.

"But the actual work of the Council might be even more for the month of November, as there are issues that we see on the horizon which will most likely be dealt with," Liu says.

Indeed, with conflicts in Mali and the Central African Republic, for example, changing by the day, the Security Council has had to become increasingly nimble and less reliant on a formalized agenda.

Bruno Stagno, Publisher of Security Concil Report and also served as Costa Rica's foreign minister and UN ambassador, says, "It's interesting to see that November, we're seeing a lot of these informal formats coming to the fore. These are very good because they enable the Security Council to perform better on the early warning side."

Syria's brutal civil war, he says, poses perhaps the thorniest challenge for China as it guides the Council.

"There is a general sense among Council members that although Syria is complying on the chemical weapons front, there has been absolutely no movement in terms of humanitarian access and in terms of basically addressing the wider conflict, the conventional war," Stagno says.

China now contributes more than 1,700 personnel to UN peacekeeping missions worldwide and is the sixth biggest financial donor to peacekeeping operations.

And Stagno believes that could go hand in hand with China taking a more vocal leadership role on the Council.

"I do think that it's about time that as they step up in terms of their political leadership, their desire to give a certain imprimatur to the way the Council operates and also so that we can have a more equitable distribution of the work," Stagno says.

And the Council's work will certainly be cut out for them. In addition to agenda items covering Bosnia, Somalia, Libya, and Lebanon, the council will receive their first briefing Tuesday from the head of the joint UN mission charged with overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons.