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This article underlines the need to pay attention to institutional design in the analysis of China's stated aim of leading the reform of global governance. The argument made here is that institutional choice and institutional design matter in relation to the larger question of how Chinese objectives are translated into its desired outcomes. The process of translation is hindered or enabled not solely by the embeddedness of normative ideas but also by design features such as membership criteria, informal or formal voting and procedural rules, the relative power and status of various institutions, together with the relative power of China within these institutions. The ways in which institutional design affects what China is actually able to achieve is shown in reference to two UN-related and one Beijing-initiated international organization that deal with human rights, an issue area where China's determination to effect reform or revision is largely agreed to be significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]