The Dragon Roars Back by Zhao Suisheng;

Author:Zhao, Suisheng;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Xi’s first initiative in building strong institutional capacity to achieve a greater degree of coordination for national security was the creation of the State Security Commission (SSC) in 2013 as a platform to help manage the variety of predictable and unpredictable security risks. The SSC absorbed the NSLSG and functioned much more broadly than LSGs as a decision-making, elaboration, and coordination organization.13 Domestic and international security issues used to be handled in separate LSGs. The SSC is responsible for issues of both domestic and external security, both traditional and nontraditional security, and both development and security. Claiming that China faced a more complicated internal and external security environment than at any other time in history, Xi at the first SSC meeting in April 2014 proposed a concept of the “holistic national security” (总体安全观) to cope with an array of eleven areas of security threats, including the threats to Chinese culture, cyberspace, ideology, and political security, the coded words for regime security. The holistic national security concept gives the SSC comprehensive authority to consolidate Xi’s control over China’s vast security apparatus.14

Functioning behind the scenes, the SSC has kept low visibility. Xi pronounced at the second SSC meeting in 2018 that “the SSC has solved many problems that had long remained unsolved and achieved tasks that had long remained undone.” He mentioned four aspects of accomplishments: the construction of the main architecture of the national security system; the formation of the national security theory system; the improvement of the national security strategy system; and the establishment of a national security coordination mechanism. In particular, the SSC guided the making and implementation of the State Security Law and State Security Strategy Outline.15

Unlike the US National Security Council, the SSC has shown a marked orientation toward regime security, including domestic threats with foreign connections. The emphasis is on state security (国家安全), which in the Chinese language shares the same characters as the concept of national security but means protecting the Chinese party-state from domestic and foreign threats, not so much a reference to geography, China, or the Chinese people.16

Because of the SSC’s internal security focus, the FALSG was upgraded as the Central Foreign Affairs Commission (CFAC) in March 2018. While the precise difference between LSGs and commissions is unclear, commissions are more formalized with more bureaucratic power. Its mandate is also broadened to absorb the responsibilities of the PMRILSG. The upgraded CFAC represents the rising status of foreign affairs in the party-state hierarchy. President Xi is the head, Premier Li Keqiang the deputy head, and Politburo member Yang Jiechi the secretary-general and chief of its General Office. Xi at the inaugural meeting stated that the upgrade was to enhance the centralized and unified leadership of the CCP over foreign affairs, making sure party decisions within its purview are implemented across the bureaucracy.17

In addition to SSC and CFAC, Xi has convened high-level foreign affairs work conferences much more often than his predecessors to help bring together the senior bureaucrats and other players germane to the coordination process.

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