"A New World Cop on the Beat? China’s Internal Security Outreach Under the Global Security Initiative" by CWP alum Isaac Kardon
Global outreach by China’s internal security agencies is expanding, and now plays an important, yet overlooked role in the overall foreign and security policy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nonmilitary security cooperation is emerging as the centerpiece of China’s signature security effort, the Global Security Initiative (GSI). The GSI externalizes and aims to build international support for Xi Jinping’s “comprehensive national security concept,” which centers on protecting internal regime security. Alongside traditional military diplomacy conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the PRC Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Political-Legal Commission (CPLC) now actively engage in security diplomacy and security cooperation with a growing range of foreign partners. This paper explores this activity using original data on China’s nonmilitary security diplomacy at the global, regional, and bilateral levels.
Under the banner and branding of the GSI, China is building new global architecture for security cooperation centered on law enforcement and police agencies, particularly the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum (Lianyungang) (GPSCFL). The PRC’s internal security agencies are also creating and strengthening mechanisms for regional security cooperation in Southeast and Central Asia and the Pacific Islands, while pursuing lower level but maturing outreach to Africa and Latin America. These engagements occur in tandem with robust bilateral outreach—over two hundred distinct interactions over the past three years alone. Global and regional security-focused diplomatic forums promote overarching principles developed by the PRC and propagate China’s preferred norms, standards, and practices around security, promoting a vision which regime security and global security are deeply entwined. This concerted diplomatic push in the nonmilitary security arena externalizes and legitimizes China’s approach to internal security, while explicitly constructing global security cooperation frameworks that offer an alternative to the Western-led security order, in part because they avoid competing with it.
by Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Isaac B. Kardon, and Cameron Waltz
Isaac B. Kardon, Ph.D., (孔适海博士) is a senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is concurrently adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and was formerly assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC), where he served as a research faculty member in the China Maritime Studies Institute.
Isaac’s research centers on the People’s Republic of China’s maritime power, with specialization in maritime disputes and the international law of the sea, Chinese global port development, China-Pakistan relations, and the People’s Liberation Army’s overseas basing. His writing appears in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Naval War College Review, as well as other scholarly and policy publications. Isaac’s book, China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order (Yale, 2023) analyzes whether and how China is “making the rules” of regional and global order.
At Carnegie, Isaac is building on his foundation of research on China in the maritime domain to explore China’s role in the wider global commons. High seas, deep seabed, polar regions, and orbital space are among the “strategic frontier issues” prioritized by China’s leadership—and thus key sites to observe China’s interests in and influence on vital global rules, norms, and standards. China’s interest in leading the nascent regime for deep sea mining is a particular area of research focus. He is also continuing “past the pier” on his existing stream of research on PRC ports to further study China’s development of transport and communications infrastructure networks with dual civilian and military functions.
Photo Credit: Daniel Suchenski
