In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged officials to adopt a “global vision in China’s national security work.” This exhortation by the Chinese leader has produced an expansion of international outreach by Chinese police. It was followed in 2019 by a call for the political-legal system, China’s internal security apparatus, to develop “a new system of international public security cooperation” and “promote the establishment of an international law enforcement cooperation and coordination system under the unified leadership of the Ministry of Public Security Party Committee.” These discussions also encouraged “foreign police training with Chinese characteristics” and included “enhancing the international influence” of China’s police work and “telling the story of a ‘Safe China.'”
Although these initial directives went largely unnoticed by Western media, China’s activities since have drawn increasing attention to this trend. Xi’s announcement of the Global Security Initiative at the Boao Forum in April 2022 is likely to amplify and provide further impetus to this work.
China’s policing activities abroad are multifaceted and vary by region of the world and country. Under Xi, the Ministry of Public Security has expanded its bilateral engagements internationally, especially in Asia. These efforts include high-level police diplomacy, exchanges, formal security cooperation agreements, assistance, capacity-building projects, and joint security patrols. These engagements often address counterterrorism and anti-corruption efforts but also regularly include discussion of “stability maintenance,” a Chinese term for social control and maintaining regime stability. In at least one case, the Ministry of Public Security has constructed a facility abroad (in Tajikistan), and FBI Director Christopher Wray recently testified over the bureau’s concern about the activities of Chinese “police service stations” established abroad.
The addition of police training and capacity-building is a relatively new phenomenon, occurring almost entirely since Xi’s 2017 directive. Increasingly, these efforts are grouped under and associated with the Global Security Initiative. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit last month, Xi invited member-states to participate in GSI, offering to train thousands of their law enforcement officers and otherwise help them build security and counterterrorism capacity. A similar proposal to a group of 10 nations in the Pacific Islands also included offers of substantial police and law enforcement assistance (although it was ultimately rejected), and police cooperation has been a notable feature of China’s growing relationship with the Solomon Islands.
China has also sought influence in existing international organizations that focus on policing and created new forums for “global security governance” as well. In 2017, Beijing hosted Interpol’s General Assembly, in which Xi offered support for the organization and offered to train 20,000 police officers. The PRC has also created new mechanisms, such as the regionally focused Lianyungang Forum, in which Chinese officials share best practices and Chinese surveillance and policing companies market their wares to foreign law enforcement agencies and officials.
The growing role of Chinese police internationally has occurred alongside, and sometimes in tandem with, a global expansion of Chinese companies marketing surveillance technology for policing. As of 2019, for example, Huawei’s Safe City projects appeared in dozens of countries. Chinese companies, like PRC diplomats, market their offerings as tools for governance and ensuring public safety in the face of nontraditional security threats, in keeping with Xi’s approach to regime security at home.
Chinese analysts describe the Global Security Initiative as a foreign policy extension of the comprehensive national security concept, the regime security framework that Xi has used to overhaul China’s internal approach to social control and repression since 2014. China’s international public security cooperation, therefore, should be viewed first and foremost as an extension of the party-state’s strategy to protect its hold on power. International police assistance and cooperation initiatives often meet a demand coming from recipient states but do so in ways that advance not just China’s national interests but the interests of the Chinese Communist Party.
Beijing’s offers of police and domestic security assistance seem designed to make China the internal security partner of choice for countries that might not want such assistance to come with the human rights conditions or the democratic accountability mechanisms that Western aid programs often demand. They are, therefore, not likely to contribute to, and may directly undermine, democratic consolidation and stability around the world.
Political security takes primacy in China’s national security thinking and the work of its police bureaucracy. China’s political-legal apparatus makes no clear division between the work of everyday law enforcement for criminal purposes and political policing that assures the regime’s hold on power, and the raft of national security laws passed under Xi blur the boundaries between internal and external. Together, these developments heighten the risk that recent instances of transnational repression by Chinese agents abroad could continue or substantially increase.
The United States and the international community are overdue in gaining a comprehensive picture of China’s police activities abroad, identifying more precisely the risks that these activities generate, and developing a strategy to ensure citizens and countries remain protected from those threats.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S CONFRONTING CHINA SERIES
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a Jeane Kirkpatrick visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program. She is currently writing a book about China’s approach to national security.
