The Origins of China's Total National Security Paradigm
Looking back to early explications of Xi Jinping's signature contribution to Chinese security theory
Summary
The Center for Strategic Translation has published two new translations. Both are essays written by state affiliated scholars that attempt to explain the implications of Xi Jinping’s “Total National Security Paradigm” for Chinese foreign policy and statecraft.
The Center has also published five new glossary essays on Deng and Jiang era tifa that the CPC used to reframe China’s Marxist heritage, prioritize economic development, assess the relationship between globalization and Chinese power. These essays trace the origin of these terms and their recent demise or ammendement in the age of Xi Jinping.
New Translations
Nine years ago Xi Jinping introduced a conceptual framework to guide cadres responsible for preserving China’s state security. Called the “Total National Security Paradigm” [总体国家安全观], this framework has traveled hand in hand with vast structural changes in China’s state security bureaucracy, assertions of national power abroad, and a revamped surveillance and censorship regime at home.
Why was all of this necessary? What were the problems Xi’s security framework was originally intended to address? To what extent are the defense and diplomatic policies that China adheres to today a response to recent geopolitical events, and to what extent are they the product of Xi’s original vision for preserving China’s national security?
To help analysts answer these questions the Center for Strategic Translation has translated two essays originally published just as the Total National Security Paradigm was first introduced to the Party: Chen Xiangyang’s “Seize the Opportunity to Plan China’s National Security Strategy for the New Era” and Liu Jianfei’s “An Evaluation of China’s Total National Security.”
Written in 2013 and 2014 respectively, both essays are authored by Party insiders whose careers have since intertwined with the new paradigm. Chen Xiangyang (陈向阳) currently heads the Research Center for the Total National Security Paradigm at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a quasi-academic think tank funded and staffed by officers from China’s premier intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security. Liu Jianfei (刘建飞) now serves as the dean of the Institute of International Strategic Studies at the Central Party School, where he is responsible for managing the foreign policy education of the Party’s most important rising leaders.
Xi Jinping’s security paradigm seeks to integrate internal and external security work. Both Chen and Liu’s essays attempt to sketch out what intertwining these two concerns might mean for Chinese diplomacy and grand strategy. Chen does this by breaking the years 2013 to 2049 into four periods, each associated with a projected future phase in China’s national security work. Liu, on the other hand, evaluates the role ideology plays in shaping China’s international security environment, arguing that diplomats and generals following the new paradigm must attach equal weight to threats to China’s ideological security as they give its geopolitical position or military strength.
Chen Xiangyang: Seize the Opportunity to Plan China’s National Security Strategy for the New Era
For Chen Xiangyang, the key to Xi’s approach to security is the recognition that “national security [now] includes an increasing number of increasingly broad domains.” His discussion outlines how Xi’s focus on non-traditional security threats fits into China’s longstanding grand strategy.
Chen does this by crafting a strategic timeline that stretches from the article’s 2013 publication through the PRC centennial in 2049. According to this periodization, the goal of Chen’s first two stages—the first ending with the 19th Party Congress in 2017, the second in 2020—of the Chinese state security work must be economic development. But in the 30 years after 2021 the aim must change:
Third, during the “30-year gap” between the centennial of the Party and the centennial of the People's Republic of China (2021-2049): our objective is to ensure stable domestic governance, sculpt the international security environment in a more proactive manner, increase the provision of "public goods" for international security, and realize a positive and complementary relationship between the broader domestic and international security landscapes. Meanwhile, during this period we need to achieve complete national unity and territorial integrity in an appropriate manner.
Resolving the Taiwan question, actively reshaping the international security environment, and nullifying threats to China’s domestic stability born from its integration into the current global order are thus the prerequisites for Chen’s final stage, which should be secured by 2050:
By the bicentennial of the People's Republic of China and the middle of this century (2050... [China should] become a major architect of the new regional security order and a major participant within a new international security.
Read the full translation HERE.
Liu Jianfei: An Evaluation of China’s Total National Security
For Liu Jianfei, viewing Chinese foreign policy from Xi’s “total” perspective starts with the recognition that China is not an “average” country. China’s unique political system makes it distinct from—and at odds with—the other nations of the earth. This means that any foreign policy problem must be considered from two angles: First, in terms of its effect on China as an “ordinary” geopolitical actor. Second, in terms of its effect on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics—in other words, in terms of its effect on the unique Leninist institutions, teleological aims, and political culture that set the PRC apart from other countries.
This will affect China’s relationship with the West:
It can be said that China as a rising power in an ordinary sense poses a concern only to large countries that have geo-strategic conflicts with China such as the United States, Japan, and India, as well as to small and medium-sized neighboring countries. But China as a rising socialist power poses a concern not only to the above-mentioned countries but also to many Western countries that are not able to view a country with a socialist system as one of their own.
It also shapes Liu’s attitude towards Taiwan. Liu does not believe that Taiwan can mount a meaningful threat to China’s military security. But as a Chinese speaking republic occupying territory the PRC’s claims as its own, Taiwan’s existence as an autonomous market democracy undermines the Party’s legitimating narrative and poses a threat to the stability of Communist rule. As he puts it,
Although Hong Kong and Macau are already part of the People’s Republic of China, their capitalist institutions and high degree of autonomy may be used by Western powers to interfere in China's internal affairs, or even as a position to spread Western values to mainland China. Although Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, and the fact that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the same China has never changed, the latent threat of Taiwan separatism still exists. On the security front, Taiwan currently maintains close relations with the United States and Japan, while on the ideological front it has obvious differences with the mainland. Therefore, if Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan are not posing a serious challenge to the “external environment of China,” their challenge to the “external environment of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” is more acute.
The rest of the essay outlines strategies the PRC can adopt to deal with these challenges.
Both Chen and Liu propose their preferred grand strategic aims in essays that affirm political security as the paramount concern of the new paradigm and argue that the security system must “focus on the internal as the top priority and the external as a secondary priority.” That both men then proceed to write so much about China’s external environment in essays ostensibly outlining a new framework for securing China's internal order suggests that for many of China’s national security insiders, the strength of its domestic regime cannot be disentangled from the shape of the international order.
Read the full translation of Liu Jianfei’s essay HERE.
New Glossary Entries
Paired with our translations are a series of glossary entries. Each entry is a small essay that summarizes the meaning and traces the history of key concepts invoked by the translated authors. Among our newest entries are “Period of Strategic Opportunity [战略机遇期],” “Moderately Prosperous Society [小康社会],” “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics, [中国特色社会主义],” “Initial Stage of Socialism [社会主义初级阶段],” and “Peace and Development are the Themes of the Time [和平与发展是当今时代的主题].” All of these terms were devised in the eras of Deng Xiaoping or Jiang Zemin: all communicated the Reform era conviction that economic development and global economic integration must be the central priority of the Party’s policy. Our glossary entries track these terms from their inception in the controversies of the 1980s, their flowering under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and their demise or ammendment under Xi Jinping, a General Secretary who does not share the Reform era vision of the CPC’s central task. Visit our glossary to read these entries and more!