Christian Shepherd and Lyric Li
The Washington Post/Policy Research Group
Saturday, Oct 22, 2022
The most-watched film in China this week, about daring officials who save Chinese citizens trapped overseas by war, neatly matches a central theme of leader Xi Jinping’s agenda at the twice-a-decade Communist Party meeting in Beijing — that the world is a dangerous place and China needs to protect itself.
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During the 20th National Party Congress, which ends Saturday, Xi has emphasized the party’s ambition to assume global leadership as the head of a socialist superpower depends on absolute security as much as economic growth. But the goal of building a world safe for autocracy is putting China on a collision course with other nations.
Central to Xi’s newly expounded idea of “Chinese-style modernization” — which excludes multiparty democracy, direct leadership elections or legal guarantees of individual freedoms — is an effort to guard against risks at home and abroad that could disrupt the country’s rise.
In a congress report released this week, the word “security” appears 91 times, up from 55 mentions in 2017 and 36 in 2012. Xi’s “comprehensive national security concept” — a slogan urging the active detection and management of threats in all areas of policymaking — has its own section for the first time. The “global security initiative” he announced in April was also included.
As China extends its reach through projects like the Belt and Road initiatives, its international security presence continues to expand. A recent policing agreement with the Solomon Islands, for example, was defended as necessary to protect its interests. But human rights groups fear repression will reach far beyond China’s borders.
Xi’s global security initiative, while still in its infancy, is likely to become a test for the country’s willingness to compromise with the existing global security order. “This is Beijing going from a negative agenda — ‘we don’t like the current order, which is Western-dominated and imposed on us’ — to China actually launching something like an alternative vision,” said Helena Legarda, lead analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.
Story and Analysis Continues
R&I~KC
Bugs Marlowe
Article URL : https://www.poreg.org/under-xi-china-wants-absolute-security-its-making-the-world-nervous-analysis/