China faced with security threats at home and abroad

The idea of creating an NSC was first mulled over in 1999 after two major events occurred that year: the encircling of Zhongnanhai, the CCP headquarters, by 10,000 Falungong practitioners on April 25, followed by the United States bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia on May 7.

Both events, one threatening China’s internal security and the other its external security, took China by surprise, and it was forced to review its overall security position.

No decision was taken at that time on an NSC because the situation was not compelling yet. Fourteen years later, it finally got off the ground.

Explaining the need to do so, Xi said: “China is facing two pressures: internationally, the country needs to safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests; domestically, political security and social stability should be ensured.”

He added: “The variety of predictable and unpredictable risks has been increasing remarkably, and the system has not yet met the needs of safeguarding state security. A powerful platform which can coordinate security work is needed.”

Thus, “a National Security Commission to strengthen the unified leadership of the state security work is an urgent need”, Xi explained.

In the past 14 years, NTSTs have become a global concern. Chinese think-tanks have identified several groups of NTSTs to which the country is vulnerable.

Most destructive are the so-called “three evil forces” of separatism, religious fundamentalism and international terrorism.

China’s own developmental needs have created a new set of security concerns – to safeguard and ensure uninterrupted supply of energy and raw materials.

Moreover, globalisation, aided by modern information technology, has blurred national boundaries so that an exogenous source of threat may be easily transmitted to China, like the 2008 financial meltdown of the West and the 2010 Arab Spring revolts.

These NTSTs rightly call for a stepping up of the security framework. Yet, domestic considerations are equally compelling. According to the document adopted last week after the CCP’s Third Plenum, the NSC was created as a means to enhance the “innovative social management” (ISM) programme.

The ISM concept was first introduced in China in 2009 to meet the wei wen – internal stability maintenance – needs of the 60th National Day that year. In essence, it means a new way of urban control using a “grid management system”.

Last Friday’s party document said this grid management system should be used to resolve social conflicts at their source before they escalate into major crises.

In such a system, the urban space is divided into cells or grids, each equipped with different sorts of law enforcement tools. In any given cell, not only are all fixed objects coded and positioned, but also any activities or contingencies – including cultural activities, public safety, criminal cases, mass protests and sensitive figures and their activities – are all sorted and coded, with information about them collected and reported continually. Based on the data, sensors and wireless equipment such as surveillance cameras and wireless routers would be deployed for further surveillance.

Professor Wu Qiang of the Social Science Faculty at Tsinghua University said that following the Arab Spring revolts and the Jasmine protests in China, the Chinese government experimented with this system of social control in major cities, which rendered its control more refined, precise and effective. The creation of an NSC means that this mode of social control would be extended to the whole country.

Xi’s decision to set up an NSC to enhance social control could have been prompted by his concern of a Soviet-style collapse. Ever since he took the helm in November last year, he has repeatedly mentioned the need to draw lessons from the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

During his trip to Shenzhen early this year, he analysed the causes of the Soviet collapse and lamented that when this happened, no one in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was man enough to save it.

Then, in his August 19 speech on propaganda, he stressed the importance of conducting ideological struggle in order to avoid a Soviet-style collapse.

Again last month, he urged all senior cadres to watch the TV documentary, “Stay Vigilant: On the 20th Anniversary of the Death of the Soviet Party and State”.

Xi’s overriding concern about avoiding a similar fate partly explains his decision to create the NSC. The Chinese NSC, therefore, is both externally and internally oriented, quite unlike its American counterpart.