ABSTRACT
Although the concept of “non-traditional” security remains outside the mainstream in Western security studies, it enjoys considerable popularity in China. Both scholars and policy makers in the PRC quickly embraced the key tenet that defining national security primarily in military terms is potentially misleading, and could, over the long term, serve to increase global insecurity. 1 One recent example of China’s warmer reception of non-traditional security is the announcement, following the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Party Congress in November 2013, that China plans to establish a “National Security Committee” ( Guojia anquan weiyuanhui ) in order to coordinate national security efforts across a full spectrum of both traditional and nontraditional security issues. Although the idea of creating such a body was initially floated at least 15 years earlier under the leadership of Jiang Zemin, resistance from within the bureaucracy as well as the Chinese military slowed implementation. In the interim, coordination and decision making have been overseen since September 2000 by the Party Central Committee’s National Security Leading Small Group ( Guojia anquan lingdao xiaozu ). 2 However, the appearance of new multifaceted challenges in more recent times has served to highlight the need for a centralized formal advisory body at the upper echelons of the Party-state with manpower and resources sufficient to formulate, coordinate and execute national security policy, particularly with nontraditional security threats currently on the rise. In explaining the Party Congress’s resolution to establish the committee, current Party General Secretary Xi Jinping observed, “Our nation is facing pressures both to safeguard its sovereignty, security, and development interests externally, and to uphold its political security and social stability internally, and a rising number of dangers of all sorts that are foreseeable as well as some that are difficult to anticipate.” 3 Accordingly, unlike the National Security Council, the Washington, DC counterpart after which it is partially modeled, the new Chinese organization is tasked with broadly defined responsibilities over both foreign policy and domestic security, including relations with Tibet and unrest in non-Han majority areas such as Xinjiang Province; however, like the Department of Homeland Security, the US agency created after the September 2001 attacks, China’s new National Security Committee will also coordinate anti-terrorism efforts and monitor cybersecurity threats, calling in the Public Security Bureau to participate on the committee when it discusses matters of domestic
stability. 4 As Major General Li Shengquan of China’s National Defense University explained in Study Times , the official journal of the Central Party School, insofar as national integration remains incompletely realized in the People’s Republic, the new committee would of necessity draw no distinction between traditional and non-traditional threats in the protection of Chinese political security, territorial sovereignty, and social stability against the three rising dangers of terrorism, separatism, and extremism. 5 Indeed, in his address to the initial meeting of China’s National Security Committee, Xi emphasized that the newly formed group would “pay attention not only to external security, but to internal security” and “emphasize not only traditional security, but non-traditional security,” and would view “political, territorial, military, economic, cultural, social, technological, information, ecological, natural resource, nuclear and other forms of security equally within the overall system of national security.” 6 The resulting decision-making body thus represents an ambitious new organizational hybrid designed to redress China’s persistent problems with inter-agency cooperation in the security sector, including bureaucratic “stove-piping” and jurisdictional conflicts characteristic of policy making within a “fragmented authoritarian” system, 7 with an expansive remit with respect to national security.
