As Chinese diplomats and analysts close to the government have made clear in the months
since, the GSI marks a significant shift in Chinese foreign policy. It directly challenges the role
of U.S. alliances and partnerships in global security and seeks to revise global security
governance to make it more compatible with the regime security interests of the Chinese
Communist Party. During his first two terms, Xi transformed China’s approach to internal security in ways that caught the world off-guard—writing China’s first-ever national security
strategy and a host of new security laws, restructuring the country’s domestic security
apparatus, purging and jailing many of the security forces’ top leaders, building a massive
surveillance state, and intensifying repression at a speed that few outside observers predicted.
The guiding framework for those efforts was something that Xi called the “comprehensive
national security concept,” which was really a regime security concept codified as grand
strategy. Now, Xi is applying that framework to foreign policy, attempting to remake regional
and global security order to guard against threats to China’s domestic stability and further
consolidate the party’s grip on power.
Sheena Chestnut Grietens, University of Texas, Austin, says: "It was easy to miss GSI's
significance when it was announced in April. We had heard a lot of the phrases from the
Chinese political system before. Plus, the world was pretty focused on Ukraine. Early
scholarship on the GSI (from e.g., CICIR, etc) talks about it as an extension of the
comprehensive national security concept (which was also similarly vague when announced in
April 8 yrs. ago). But in Xi's first two terms, it transformed internal security in China. The
comprehensive national security concept resulted in a reorganization of China's militarysecurity organisation chart. A raft of natsec laws: NGO's, border security, criminal procedure,
counterterrorism, intelligence, data security, cybersecurity, Hong Kong, etc. I think the general
expansion of "int'l public security cooperation" as PRC leaders have termed it since ~2017, is
part of the trend I am describing. Not sure of the legal basis, but expanded use of police liaisons
abroad is being directly advocated by the MPS leadership since 2019.
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