{"id":12052,"date":"2017-01-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/savetibet.nl\/nieuws\/the-rise-of-the-chinese-national-security-state-under-xi-jinping\/"},"modified":"2017-01-04T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T23:00:00","slug":"the-rise-of-the-chinese-national-security-state-under-xi-jinping","status":"publish","type":"nieuws","link":"https:\/\/savetibet.nl\/en\/news\/the-rise-of-the-chinese-national-security-state-under-xi-jinping\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of the Chinese National Security State Under Xi Jinping"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\"Image\n
Image credit: CC by Beijing Patrol\/Flickr.<\/em><\/h6>\nWritten by Tai Ming Cheung and published by China Policy Institute<\/a>.<\/em>\n\nChina has flourished since it opened its doors to the outside world and embarked on economic development from the late 1970s. But under the tenure of Xi Jinping, domestic and external security concerns have risen to the top of his administration\u2019s thinking and in its policy priorities. This has led to the re-emergence of a national security state in which the leadership is more concerned with the protection of national borders, physical assets, the and core values, especially the rule of the Communist Party, and is also intensely nationalistic.\n\n<\/span>The Chinese authorities have been busy in building this national security state over the past few years. This includes the establishment of new institutional and regulatory mechanisms such as a national security commission and new expansionist national security-related laws to the implementation of more assertive domestic and external security postures such as island building in the South China Sea. This paper examines the underlying drivers and strategy behind the rise of Xi\u2019s national security state and the policy consequences.\n\nFrom Deng Xiaoping\u2019s Developmental State to Xi\u2019s National Security State<\/strong>\n\nBetween the late 1970s and the early 2010s, economic development was China\u2019s foremost priority, while national security issues were of secondary importance. This contrasted with the fortress-like military-national security state<\/a> that Mao Zedong had ruled over before then. Deng Xiaoping pressed ahead during the 1980s with economic reforms and opening up the country. But national security challenges regularly intervened and threatened to undermine the economic reform process, most notably in 1989 with the Tiananmen Square protests and again in the mid-1990s as tensions across the Taiwan Strait threatened to escalate into military conflict.\n\nUnder the tenures of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao between 1990 and 2012, there was an effort to find a more balanced relationship between economic development and national security, although economic issues remained the dominant priority. For Xi, the balance appears to have tipped decisively in favour of national security considerations. Economic development still remains a top concern for Xi, but it is increasingly defined in terms of ensuring social stability.\n\nDefining the National Security State<\/strong>\n\nThere are several types of national security state. In predatory security states, the security apparatus uses its power and influence to gain control of lucrative elements of the economy. Russia under Putin is a classic predatory national security state<\/a> in which the intelligence bureaucracy has extended its tentacles across the economy. A second model is the garrison state<\/a> in which the country finds itself under severe external threat and the military is the dominant actor. A contemporary example is Pakistan.\n\nA third type of national security state is the control state, in which the leadership oversees a sprawling system of interlocking bureaucracies dealing with internal and external security issues in an integrated approach that emphasizes seizing control not only of traditional security concerns such as military and public security, but also of legal security (the judicial system) and information diffusion (propaganda system). Xi is actively establishing a comprehensive control state in China.\n\nThe Drivers Behind the Emergence of a National Security State Under Xi<\/strong>\n\nA key driver behind Xi\u2019s intensive efforts to establish a potent national security state is the grave threats that he and the leadership believe that China is facing. In 2014, a newly established National Security Commission met for the first time and Xi was quoted<\/a> as saying that \u2018China now faces the most complicated internal and external factors in [its] history.\u2019 This is an extraordinary claim as the PRC has faced especially severe threats to its very survival between the 1950s and 1970s from the United States and the Soviet Union.\n\nThe rationale behind Xi\u2019s pessimistic threat assessment was spelt out in the outline<\/a> of the country\u2019s first ever national security strategy outline that was drafted in 2015. Admiral Sun Jianguo, a deputy chief of the People\u2019s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff, explained<\/a> that China today faced three major dangers:\n
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  1. Invasion, subversion, and \u201csplittism:\u201d<\/strong> This refers to the threats to the country\u2019s territorial integrity and sovereignty, both externally and internally. The external dangers primarily concern maritime sovereignty disputes in the South and East China Seas. China has been engaged in heated confrontations with Japan over the Diaoyu\/Senkaku Islands and with a number of Southeast Asian countries as well as the U.S. over islands, atolls, and rocks that make up the Spratlys in the South China Sea. On territorial integrity, this is related to ensuring that Taiwan remains a part of China. Subversion and splittism is tied to the ethnic unrest that China faces with its autonomous regions in the far west, namely Tibet and Xinjiang. There have been major upheavals in these two regions over the past decade and Uyghur separatists have been engaged in terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, other parts of China, and against Chinese targets overseas.<\/li>\n \t
  2. Undermining of reforms, economic development, and stability<\/strong>: Mitigating social instability is a first order priority for the Chinese authorities in the face of widening social inequality, pervasive corruption, deep-seated structural unemployment, and numerous other social problems. Admiral Sun points out that there are \u2018frequent occurrences of social contradictions and accumulating social contradictions.\u2019 The identification that \u2018undermining of reforms\u2019 poses a national security danger is highly unusual as this would equate opposition to Xi\u2019s reform agenda as a threat. Admiral Sun noted that \u2018reforms are entering a critical period,\u2019 which is a reference to the ambitious set of economic, social, and military reforms that were announced<\/a> at the Third Plenum of the CCP Central Committee in November 2013 but have been very slow in being implemented. There have been occasional reports in the official Chinese media indicating that reforms have run into difficulties. A widely published commentary<\/a> in the Chinese state media in August 2015 said the \u2018scale of resistance\u2019 against Xi\u2019s reforms \u2019is beyond what could have been imagined.\u2019 This resistance appears to be coming from entrenched political and bureaucratic interests that stand to lose from reforms, such as state agencies and state-owned corporations.<\/li>\n \t
  3. Socialist development of China being interrupted<\/strong>: The biggest concern for the CCP leadership is the threat to its hold on power, which it views as coming from numerous quarters domestically and externally. This includes a deeply-held view among CCP leaders that the West is seeking regime change in China, which has only been reinforced in recent years by the spectacle of \u2018coloured revolutions\u2019 in Europe and the \u2018Arab Spring\u2019 political upheavals that swept the Middle East. Closer to home, the CCP authorities were unnerved by the student-led political unrest in Hong Kong known as the \u2018Occupy Central\u2019 in 2014, which Admiral Sun likened as the \u2019Hong Kong version of the colour revolution\u201d stage-managed meticulously by a small number of radical groups in Hong Kong incited and supported by external forces.\u2019<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nXi\u2019s National Security Strategy<\/strong>\n\nIn the making of the national security state, Xi has put forward a new strategy that he terms as a \u2018national security path with Chinese characteristics\u2019 that is a mixture of assertive principles<\/a> coupled with deep concerns of vulnerabilities. A number of key concepts are behind the shaping this doctrine:\n