Xi’s Security Obsession

Since he came to power in 2012, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been laser-focused on ensuring the security of his regime. He has purged potential political rivals, restructured the military and internal security apparatus, built an Orwellian surveillance state, and pushed through repressive new laws in the name of national security. Undergirding all these initiatives is what Xi calls the “comprehensive national security concept,” a framework for protecting China’s socialist system and the governing authority of the Chinese Communist Party, including that of Xi himself.

In an article in Foreign Affairs last October, I wrote that China’s leadership had begun to project that concept abroad through foreign policy, pursuing a grand strategy centered on regime security. In an effort to ward off external threats to China’s domestic stability and head off any possible challenges to CCP rule, Beijing seeks to weaken U.S. alliances and partnerships and promote its own model of internal security abroad.

Much has changed since last October. The CCP abruptly unwound its harsh “zero COVID” policies after a wave of unusual public opposition. China’s post–pandemic economic recovery has faltered, with slow growth, a troubled property sector, and slumping foreign investment—in part because Beijing’s drive for security has led it to clamp down on foreign businesses. And as the war in Ukraine has continued, Beijing’s stance on the conflict has heightened tensions with Europe, one of China’s largest trading partners.

But none of this has dented China’s commitment to security, either at home or abroad. Early clues from Xi’s third term as the country’s leader suggest that regime security concerns will continue to drive Chinese foreign policy, heightening tensions with Western countries and with some of China’s neighbors. The paradox at the heart of Xi’s quest to neutralize all threats to CCP rule is that an ostensibly defensive goal at home, protecting regime security, demands that China take increasingly assertive actions abroad. These actions, in turn, invite responses from other countries that only heighten Beijing’s fears—an escalatory cycle with no obvious off-ramp.

STRONGER ON ALL FRONTS

In his “work report” to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, Xi reminded listeners that before he became China’s preeminent leader, the country’s ability to safeguard its national security had been “inadequate” and “insufficient.” A decade after adopting his comprehensive national security concept, however, he said that national security had been “strengthened on all fronts.” He called national security “the bedrock of national rejuvenation” and indicated that China would continue to strengthen its “legal, strategy, and policy systems” for national security. Although much of what Xi said in this address repeated what he or other party leaders had said before, giving these remarks a dedicated section in the party work report for the first time codified them at an authoritative institutional level. In so doing, Xi suggested that his approach will shape Chinese security policy for at least the next five years and probably longer.

In May 2023, China’s top leaders affirmed their commitment to comprehensive national security at a meeting of the Central National Security Commission, a body tasked with implementing Xi’s concept. Xi called on those present to grasp China’s “complex and severe” national security environment and to speed modernization of the country’s national security system. At the meeting, the CNSC approved documents related to risk-monitoring and early warning as well as public communication and education on national security.

These themes have appeared regularly in Chinese documents and speeches on national security throughout the Xi era. China has, for example, celebrated a “national security education day” on April 15 every year since 2016. That Xi highlighted these issues in his October 2022 report and the CNSC has since approved related documents suggests that the CCP is now pushing forward with implementation of policies around them.

Xi now talks about security as a precondition for development.

Xi’s recent personnel appointments also indicate that the CCP intends to stay the course it has staked out on national security. Experience with internal security has become an important requirement for promotion to the top echelons of China’s political system. Cai Qi and Ding Xuexiang, both new members of the powerful Politburo Standing Committee, previously ran the CNSC’s General Office, a key role for pushing through Xi’s national security priorities. Other top leaders, including Zhao Leji and Li Qiang, who were named vice chairs of the CNSC alongside Cai at the May 2023 meeting, have worked either within China’s political-legal apparatus or in the party’s discipline and supervision system, which Xi reorganized and empowered to ensure that China’s security forces are responsive to party control. Xi has long seen efforts to root out corruption and strengthen party control over the military and coercive apparatus as important to regime security. A national security leadership team that blends experience in public security, party discipline, and Xi’s particular approach to national security suggests that these forces will operate in increasingly tight lockstep to uphold CCP rule.

Other senior appointments also hint at Xi’s priorities for his third term. Chen Wenqing, the new chair of the Central Political-Legal Commission, is a member of the Politburo and a former minister of state security—and the first state security official in decades to fill this role. The new minister of state security, Chen Yixin, was the point person for Xi’s recent anticorruption and “education and rectification” campaigns within the internal security apparatus. Their appointments, in October, were followed in April by the passage of a revised Counterespionage Law that significantly broadened the scope of the law’s potential targets, rendering everything from market research to academic inquiry potentially suspect.

SECURITY ABOVE ALL

Xi’s fixation on state security should not come as a surprise. Shortly before he came to power, the Chinese authorities discovered and disrupted a network of CIA informants in China, news outlets including Reuters and The New York Times have reported. One of the first official documents circulated during Xi’s tenure—the infamous Document No. 9—warned that an infiltration of Western values and ideology could destabilize China. And in a resolution on party history in 2021, the CCP Central Committee highlighted the risks of “encirclement, suppression, disruption, and subversion.” As the China scholars Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil have written, Xi’s rule has been marked by an extended anti-spy campaign and continued exhortations to be vigilant about foreign infiltration.

That is in part because Xi sees internal and external security as interconnected: in his view, many of the threats to China’s internal stability come from beyond the country’s borders. Even security initiatives that could seem purely domestic, such as the party’s mass repression of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang, have been motivated at least in part by Xi’s fear that external forces might infiltrate China and threaten internal stability. As a result, Xi has methodically tightened control over any organizations that could transmit foreign influence, including religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, and most recently, foreign businesses.

But more than fear of foreign infiltration is driving the securitization of China’s economy and society. During Xi’s tenure, the CCP has also fundamentally rethought the relationship between economics and security. Whereas Chinese leaders once elevated economic growth above all else, Xi and other senior officials now talk about security as a precondition for development. In the October 2022 party work report, for instance, Xi mentioned using a “new security pattern” to safeguard China’s “new development pattern,” phrasing that he repeated at the CNSC meeting in May.

This rhetoric holds important clues to where China’s foreign policy is headed. The “new development pattern” refers in part to what the CCP sees as a necessary shift toward greater economic self-sufficiency to insulate the country from external “headwinds”—part of an attempt by Xi and other senior party leaders to ensure that foreign powers cannot cripple China’s economic security and stunt its progress toward “national rejuvenation.” Efforts to boost domestic demand, secure supply chains, and bolster scientific and technological innovation all fall under this heading, as does the 2021 Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law.

Beijing has said less about its new security pattern than its new development pattern, but officials have hinted at both its importance and its reach. In April, Minister of State Security Chen Yixin called it “the main task of national security work in the present and the future.” At the CNSC meeting in May 2023, Xi called on party officials to “take the initiative to shape a favorable external security environment for China.”

Like previous iterations of China’s national security discourse, this one recycles phrases used in the past. In 2017, Xi called on officials to adopt a “global vision” for national security work and stated that China should proactively shape its external security environment. One feature of Xi’s governance is that official concepts sometimes start as vague phrases, with policy details filled in later. (Other times, buzzwords appear and then fade into irrelevance, but the centrality of national security to Xi’s agenda suggests that it is not likely to disappear.)

Despite the vagueness of Xi’s directive, China is seeking to strengthen its position abroad even as it justifies its more assertive behavior on defensive grounds. To protect his regime from outside forces, Xi believes, China must make the international realm more favorable to CCP rule. This is the central paradox of Xi’s preventive theory of regime security and of his view of where threats originate: ostensibly defensive ends at home require increasingly assertive means abroad.

XI’S GAMBLE

Xi’s favored vehicle for externalizing the comprehensive national security concept is the Global Security Initiative, announced in April 2022. Early writing on the GSI by Chinese analysts portrayed it as an effort to harmonize China’s “domestic security and the common security of the world.” A GSI concept paper released by China’s Foreign Ministry in February 2023 begins by referring to “Xi’s new vision of security announced in 2014,” a seemingly veiled reference to the comprehensive national security concept. Xi’s October 2022 work report also described political security—that is, the security of the CCP, its leaders, and the system it runs—as “the fundamental task” while referring to international security as “a support.” The goal of the GSI, in other words, is to use foreign policy to bolster regime security.

How exactly this will work probably won’t be clear for several years. The concept paper is vague in places, likely to give the Chinese political system time to flesh out specific initiatives. But it echoes some of the core principles of the comprehensive national security concept—the indivisibility of security and development, and of domestic security and common international security, for instance—and then outlines a long list of well-known regional and global security challenges.

In a speech marking the concept paper’s release, Qin Gang, then the foreign minister, was more pointed. He emphasized that “external suppression and containment against China keep escalating,” criticized “Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation,” and warned that just as China could not develop without a peaceful international environment, the world could not be secure “without the security of China.” His remarks echoed previous official statements, including China’s February 2022 announcement of a “no limits” partnership with Russia, that highlighted threats posed by the United States’ network of alliances on China’s periphery—threats that Beijing sees not just as traditional external military challenges but also as fundamental threats to China’s internal security and the stability of CCP authority over Chinese society.

Through the GSI, Beijing aims to create new forms of global security governance that bypass or reduce the importance of the U.S. alliance system, thereby blunting Washington’s ability to contain China or foment “color revolutions” inside it—something Chinese leaders fear. This new security architecture does not completely jettison the old; the GSI affirms the importance of the United Nations, for example. But it also seeks to construct new regional and global security orders that advance the priorities and interests of the CCP.

For Beijing, ostensibly defensive ends at home require increasingly assertive means abroad.

China has already called for changes to regional security arrangements in the Middle East, such as a reconciliation agreement that it brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023, publicized on the first anniversary of the GSI’s announcement. Beijing has also begun to build new forums and networks to address nontraditional security challenges (such as terrorism and domestic unrest) that are highlighted in the comprehensive national security concept. In November 2022, for instance, China hosted the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, a gathering of law enforcement officials from around the world.

Beijing is also promoting its model of domestic security and social stability to other countries. In 2021, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Public Security hosted representatives from 108 countries at a “Peaceful China” summit to show off Beijing’s approach to policing and surveillance. Such events seek to portray China as a paragon of domestic security and normalize its approach abroad while the GSI works in parallel to offer police and law enforcement training to those who might wish to emulate China’s example.

To support these efforts, China’s internal security officials have increasingly become international diplomats. In 2021, for instance, Chen Wenqing, then the minister of state security and now the chair of the Central Political-Legal Commission, participated in a meeting of regional intelligence officials hosted by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. In May 2023, he met with the head of the Russia’s National Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, suggesting that China is making good on its February 2022 promise to increase cooperation to oppose so-called color revolutions and “attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability.” Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong has been even more visible. Since the 20th Party Congress, he has held a videoconference with counterparts from the Pacific Islands, hosted the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, welcomed the secretary-general of Interpol to Beijing, spoken at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, promoted the GSI at the Islamabad Security Dialogue forum, and met with a half-dozen bilateral counterparts.

Conventional wisdom suggests that economic headwinds might prompt China to look to the outside world to stimulate growth. And indeed, Chinese authorities have at times tried to portray the new development pattern as compatible with continued economic openness. But because Xi sees securitization, not economic growth, as the guarantor of regime security, he is willing to accept higher economic costs in order to continue tightening control at home and improving China’s security environment abroad. This is a gamble, given that economic woes can themselves pose problems for regime stability, but Xi’s course appears to be set.

WINDOW OF NECESSITY

China’s efforts to externalize the comprehensive national security concept through the GSI pose serious challenges for the United States. Policymakers should not underestimate the potential for Beijing’s approach to gain traction, both because of the strenuous efforts of Chinese officials and because many world leaders perceive a lack of good alternatives. Too often, the United States has portrayed itself as the chief defender of an international security order that others see as either excluding them or simply failing to solve their most pressing problems. Washington has scolded countries for entertaining Beijing’s solutions while failing to put forward viable alternatives of its own. Yet countries care primarily about solving their own security challenges. They will not reject an initiative that benefits them simply because it also benefits the CCP.

But the fact that Beijing is concentrating on building new forums and networks in areas where existing international order is weak or absent, such as nontraditional security threats like crime, terrorism, and domestic unrest, also presents an opportunity for the United States. Washington has a chance to identify areas of cooperation with countries that are dissatisfied with the current global security architecture and offer them an alternative to China’s revisionist approach. For example, U.S. security assistance in Asia, which is largely focused on the military realm, leaves a gap in addressing the region’s many nontraditional security challenges—one that China’s Ministry of Public Security and the GSI have offered to fill.

Xi is willing to accept higher economic costs to tighten control at home.

In offering alternatives, the United States should manage expectations. In the short term, Beijing will likely succeed in marketing itself as a “security partner of choice” to repressive leaders whose primary perceived security threats come from their own people and who find the authoritarian elements of China’s model appealing. But as the United States learned during the Cold War, security partnerships without broad popular support can be precarious and sometimes backfire. A positive alternative to China’s plan to address nontraditional security challenges wouldn’t win over everyone, but it could have a far-reaching impact on the institutions and norms of the international system—if the United States acts quickly.

The Biden administration has thus far focused its coalition-building efforts mainly on strengthening its existing network of allies and partners. It should complement this approach by seeking to shore up relationships with countries that have not always had close ties with Washington, demonstrating that there is an American vision for a new and inclusive security architecture that meets the needs of a changing world—on crime, on climate security, on migration, and on public safety. Unless the United States adopts a more proactive strategy, it will miss key windows of opportunity—and necessity—to build that architecture, even as Beijing pushes for a new security order aimed first and foremost at cementing long-term CCP control.