Will China Be the Next Global Security Leader?

Lindsay: If you’re an American, you might be accustomed to thinking about the United States as the world’s most powerful country: the most stable, robust economy; the mightiest military; the most influential political system. But if power rests in a country’s ability to shape what happens in the world—to set rules that others have to play by, to build coalitions—then, at least on some measures, China might be said to be the new rising global leader. But which world are we in? A China-led world, or an American-led world, or something else?

To unpack these questions, we’re joined by Sheena Greitens, a leading expert of authoritarian regimes, and especially China. Sheena is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program, and serves as editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review. She’s currently on leave to serve as visiting associate professor at the U.S. Army War College and is a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Sheena, welcome to Talking Policy.

Sheena: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here with you.

Lindsay: So I think it’s probably fair to say that the world has changed in the last, say, 30 years. Things aren’t what they used to be. If you had to come up with an image or a story that defines the world order as it was when you and I were growing up—and I think we’re around the same age, so let’s say in the nineties—and an image or a story that defines the world order as it is today, what would that be?

Sheena: I think that’s a great question, and let me give you two sort of turning points or hinge points that I experienced, that many of the folks listening probably remember from growing up.

One of the first things I remember seeing on TV when I was in elementary school was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the moment that the Soviet Union collapsed, that this bipolar strategic rivalry that had shaped decades of Cold War ended, and the United States emerged as the sole superpower. And so that’s sort of image one that I think about when I think about shifts in world order during my lifetime.

And then the second is the morning of 9/11. We had a campus commemoration of 9/11 here last week, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about that morning. I was actually a student, going off to college that fall, and actually had to drive to college because all the flights were still grounded. And so getting from Washington state to California, where I went to school, required me to drive because commercial airline operations were not back up and running after 9/11.It was a moment that I found baffling. The United States had been the sole superpower the entire time that I was growing up, what Madeline Albright called “the indispensable nation,” and yet 19 men with boxcutters could turn the American sense of security and world order upside down. And that really launched us into the Global War on Terror period, which is about two decades. And in that period, in some respects, Russia and China became security partners. Counter-terrorism was initially an area of collaboration between the United States and China after 9/11.

And as China has risen in its overall global power, and as it has become more repressive at home and more assertive abroad in ways that have challenged regional stability and global security, it’s taken an increased interest in rewriting the rules of global governance. We’ve especially seen that with Xi Jinping with the launch of his now four global initiatives. But I really think that those two moments I identify as world shaping, are giving way now to a very different security order that we’re still, frankly, really trying to understand, but in which China is playing a much greater and very different role than it did in either of the previous two periods.

Lindsay: Yeah, when I think of an emblematic image of where we are, I think about the meeting that Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted in early September of more than 20 leaders from around the world, during which he announced, as you mentioned, a global governance initiative, the fourth of these initiatives since I think 2021.

He painted a vision of a new global security and economic order. It seemed like a really important moment. What was this all about?

Sheena: That’s a great question. I was actually in Singapore with some colleagues from UCSD and other places for the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, this annual event that [IGCC] hosts and helps organize with counterparts from the Indo-Pacific. And so it was really an interesting moment to be there and to discuss with Chinese, Russian, South Korean, Japanese counterparts, how they saw what had just happened in China in the preceding week and the announcement of this global governance initiative. So let me talk a little bit about this initiative, because I do think it’s really important to try to understand where this fits in Chinese foreign policy, because that helps us understand what it means for the rest of the world.

This is the fourth major initiative that China has announced. It announced a Global Development Initiative, then a Global Security Initiative, then a Global Civilizational Initiative. And now that’s been followed by this fourth initiative, the Global Governance Initiative. What’s kind of interesting about that is that it really dovetails with the previous three initiatives, because each of those have a component of global governance embedded in them. So, you know, my work focus is mostly on global security, and it was clear at the conversations at NEACD in Singapore but also from everything I’ve read about the global security initiative in the context of these other global initiatives, that a big part of it is intended to operationalize China’s call to reform global security governance.

Xi Jinping has said, as early as the late 2010s, that global security governance is really inadequate for the international security environment that we live in today, it hasn’t addressed some traditional security challenges well or completely has failed to resolve them, and in particular, isn’t well suited to deal with emerging and non-traditional security challenges.

And so what I see in the Global Security Initiative is an effort to construct new mechanisms of global security governance at the global, the regional, and even the bilateral level, to basically redesign and reshape global security governance in ways that China thinks are better suited to meet the needs of this new era.

Lindsay: Yeah, I want to come back to global security in a minute.

But first, China has not always been a global leader or competitor to the United States. How did China get here? What’s the origin story of China’s rise?

Sheena: Yeah, so there were two things that happened back to back in China earlier in September, and I think, together, they actually do tell us a lot about how we got to the present moment and how China got to the present moment.

One is that there was a parade, and it was a military parade and it had specifically to do with celebrating and memorializing China’s contributions to the end of the Second World War. And so you saw a lot of effort to present a history that celebrated China’s contribution to the post-1945 global order. What was interesting about that, though, was that the set of countries that came to China to observe the parade were somewhat different than had been there in the past.

So the United States did not send a senior official to participate, but a number of heads of state, from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-Un, came, and listeners may or may not know this, but it’s very, very unusual for Kim Jong-un to leave North Korea, and so for him to leave North Korea to attend this commemoration alongside Vladimir Putin, alongside Xi Jinping was really a pretty significant moment. And most of the countries that chose to go were illiberal countries, and so it was also a sort of really interesting moment for thinking about the role that democracy and autocracy play in global governance.

The second event was a meeting of the leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which was one of China’s first forays into setting up regional security governance, regional multilateral security architecture, particularly for South and Central Asia. The SCO kind of emerged initially as this sort of counter-terrorism cooperation forum, and really has become one of China’s most institutionalized mechanisms for regional security cooperation in Central Asia. It’s not the only way that China engages with security governance in Central Asia, but it is very much a set of countries in South and Central Asia that are concerned about destabilizing effects of either non-state actors or terrorism.

But as your listeners may know, in China, terrorism is defined in a particular way that encompasses political objection to the CCP’s control over a place like Xinjiang, which is the Uyghur autonomous region in Western China, where the Uyghur Turkic Muslim minority population lives and has been subjected to really intense repression and political oppression in the name of counter-terrorism, using a very different definition of what terrorism is than we typically would use in our discourse, for example, about September 11th. And so the SCO sort of represents China’s emergence into building new forms of regional security architecture and global security governance that really serve China’s particular definition of security and its interests, including, you know, a deeply authoritarian approach to domestic governance.

Lindsay: Yeah, it seems like there is a lot of enthusiasm for China around the world, and antagonism towards the west, and to the United States specifically. What kind of a world order is China proposing or offering, and to the extent that China is connecting with audiences around the world, what is it that’s connecting with people?

Sheena: One, I think the core idea that binds all of China’s global initiatives together, if I had to pick one, is this idea of sovereignty, and protection of sovereignty from external interference, which has long been a concern of China, and also, increasingly today, sovereignty meaning the right of a country to determine its own development path, but also its own way of doing security, and that means  illiberal governance if that country’s leaders choose that. And that’s a core part of both the Global Civilizational Initiative, and it’s also part of the Global Security Initiative because security, for example, means security of a particular regime in power against Western-backed color revolutions, which might be pro-democratic opposition movements seeking to liberalize and set up a democratic government based on principles of universal human rights and democratic elections.

So I think that the reason why China’s approach to security, up to and including this idea of sovereignty, is really appealing to some countries in the global south or the developing world, is that many of them still struggle to have a high capacity sovereign state. And so many of the security challenges they face are actually around weak or weakly institutionalized governance in the country in question. And the idea of sovereignty in Xi Jinping’s, particularly the Global Security Initiative, is paired with an emphasis on non-traditional security threats, things like public disorder, lack of public safety, criminal groups compromising the state’s capacity to govern and maintain law and order.

And so in much of the developing world, I think it’s fair to say that the main security challenges citizens face and governments face are actually from non-traditional security challenges. The United States has over time sat and led at the apex of a security order that is centered on defense cooperation and defense partnerships that are largely military in nature, largely aimed at combating external threats to a country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. Which is really important, right? If you look at what’s happening in Europe and, and the sort of threat to the territorial integrity of Ukraine, that’s a huge issue. And those are huge threats to peace and security. But many of the countries in the world today have really serious security challenges that stem from what we would call non-traditional security challenges: terrorism, crime, political instability, and a high-end fighter jet doesn’t necessarily provide a solution to those.

And so Xi Jinping’s critique of the global security order is that it provides security for a set of more developed, largely democratic countries that are in the U.S. alliance and partnership network, kind of at the expense of everybody who’s outside that network. And that’s why you often hear the critique of zero sum security thinking. So, the pitch that GSI is making is we have a conception of security that actually encompasses more of the kinds of security challenges that you as leaders in these countries face. And we have a set of answers that the United States and the rest of the international community isn’t providing, but China will step up and provide those things.

And I think that’s appealing for legitimate reasons, even to democratically elected leaders. Public safety and public order are legitimate functions of democratically elected governments. Even if you look at the debate over crime in urban centers in the United States, that’s a major issue that citizens care about, that they want elected politicians to take care of. And so I don’t think it’s unreasonable or illegitimate for elected governments and democratic governments to be looking for a solution. And if China is sort of the only game in town in terms of providing a solution to those very real security challenges, it’s not surprising that parts of that vision will be of interest or appealing, even if other parts of that vision might give some democratically elected leaders pause.

Lindsay: And this kind of cooperation is happening even in Europe, as you noted in a piece that you wrote for Foreign Affairs last year. You wrote about how Hungary, which is a NATO ally of the U.S., is cooperating with China on internal security. Can you tell us more about that, and share some other examples of how this security cooperation is playing out in other countries?

Sheena: Sure, I can give a couple of examples. Hungary is a NATO ally of the United States, and has one of the strongest security guarantees, through its NATO membership, of its external security anywhere in the word. Nonetheless, signed an agreement last year to approach China for a partnership on security cooperation that largely seems  directed at police cooperation and internal security. Now, some of that may be, for example, they have Chinese police patrols in Budapest when Chinese tourists are visiting. That’s usually the example that that’s pointing to. But there’s been concern about the potential for misuse of this police and internal security cooperation agreement, given that Hungary is a backsliding democracy and now one of the least liberal countries in the heart of Europe. And so there’s concern about the potential for measures that are presented as an improvement in public safety to lead to repression that degrades democracy. And you can actually have both of those occurring at once.

One of the other partners that China has really focused on is the United Arab Emirates, which hosts U.S. troops and has been a significant U.S. security partner throughout the Global War on Terror, has significant tech cooperation with the United States, and is also building out a robust program of police and internal security cooperation with China. And the UAE Interior Minister, who has a leadership role in Interpol, has been one of the major global sponsors in his Interpol capacity of China’s effort to build something called the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, which is actually China’s largest global security gathering, and it’s based on police cooperation and law enforcement cooperation, not military cooperation. There’s a separate defense cooperation forum taking place that same week in Beijing. So the cooperation with the UAE again sounds like it might be helpful from a public safety standpoint, but there’s an element of it that involves surveillance technology, and in particular, Chinese security services being able to arrest and repatriate Uyghurs who are fleeing Chinese repression on the grounds of counter-terrorism, but a counter-terrorism that doesn’t mean what we as Americans would think of as counter-terrorism, but is more political opposition.

And so these partnerships tend to sort of mix law enforcement capacity building with repressive potential in ways that become really concerning.

Lindsay: The idea of Chinese police on the streets of Budapest is… that’s a surprise to me. What are the dangers of this kind of cooperation for human rights? For democracy?

Sheena: Yeah, so having a capable police force can be a force for good in a democracy, provided that that police force is well-trained and abides by laws that respect the civil rights, the privacy, and the fundamental freedoms of citizens, and that there is some democratic and rule of law oversight over a given police force. And so you’re right, that capacity building itself isn’t necessarily pernicious or repressive. But it does build capacity that can be used either way. And so that’s really where the sort of trick comes in.

So for example, China’s internal security cooperation with Vietnam, which is really robust and interesting because the United States is collaborating with Vietnam and the Vietnamese military to combat some of China’s activities in the South China Sea. But Vietnam’s domestic security apparatus is at the same time pursuing a really robust cooperation with the security agencies inside the People’s Republic of China, and that cooperation is aimed at combating color revolutions, these pro-democratic opposition movements that threaten the regime security of the Chinese Communist Party and the Vietnamese Communist Party. And so you have China and Vietnam collaborating on an internal security threat that they think comes from the United States—whether it does or doesn’t is kind of a separate question—and the United States collaborating with Vietnam on a threat coming from China, and that’s a really interesting, weird collision.

Lindsay: So what makes China a credible partner in supporting countries in their internal security? You mentioned, again, in a piece you wrote for Foreign Affairs, this one in 2023, that since he came to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has had “laser-focused attention on ensuring the security of his regime.” So what does that look like for people living in China?

Sheena: So surveillance is a really fundamental part of China’s approach to regime security and to public security inside the country. And that goes back to Xi Jinping’s idea that the core of national security, as he calls it, is not external defense, it’s actually the stability and protection of China’s political system, which means the Communist Party’s leadership and fundamental role in governing Chinese society. That is what he calls the foundation of national security, and so a lot of what China’s sort of security measures are designed to do is to protect regime security as the foundation of everything else.

Xi Jinping’s concept of how to address security threats is also fundamentally preventive. If anything, he’s criticized previous Chinese approaches to domestic stability as too reactive and has sought to have much more preventive tools. And so in 2015, the state council and the CCP central committee passed this directive where they called for the creation of a multidimensional information based prevention and control system for public and social security. It is really long in Chinese too. I’ll spare you the jargon. But basically that was the creation of a surveillance state that’s not just a bunch of fancy cameras. It’s actually also a backend platform that is capable of taking inputs from facial-recognition-enabled surveillance cameras, and matching them to a bunch of other existing databases and information inside the Chinese political system. Where you work, where your parents work, where you live, where your child goes to school, what welfare benefits you receive, have you been in any trouble with the authorities over protesting, petitioning, or any involvement with the criminal system? It’s able to put all of that information together very quickly.

For anybody who’s interested in what this actually looks like in practice, there’s a great video that’s about five minutes long where John Sudworth, the BBC reporter, who subsequently had to leave China because of pressure from the authorities, goes and has his face scanned by a public security bureau data center, and then takes a taxi and starts walking toward the train station and sees how long it takes for them to use that system to find him. And it took seven minutes for them to do that facial recognition match with the picture they had on file and take him into custody. It’s a really sophisticated surveillance system and COVID sort of supercharged that on public health grounds, but you know, once those measures are in place, they can be pretty difficult to walk back or provide oversight of, to prevent misuse. And so we’ve seen some discussion, even in Chinese sources, of concern about officials at the lower levels misusing or abusing the tools they have.

Lindsay: Yeah, that’s just extraordinary about the BBC reporter. You know, in a world where democracy already feels like it’s being challenged, the idea of authoritarian regimes cooperating around policing and surveillance to potentially squash dissent and protect their regimes, this doesn’t sound great. What do you worry about in this regard?

Sheena: So I think there are two or three different challenges. One is that I do think China is constructing a set of global security governance mechanisms through things like the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, but also these regionally specific versions of that, that are police dialogues and multilateral police cooperation frameworks, that have the potential, by building new mechanisms of security governance that address needs that those countries have that aren’t addressed by existing architecture, you run the risk of displacing or reducing the centrality of the existing global security architecture, which has some protections for democracy and human rights in the UN charter and things like that.

To be clear, China has said that it supports the UN-based international system, but it has also pushed for a leadership role in Interpol. And there’s great reporting from the ICIJ on how the Interpol Red Notice System and other parts of Interpol have been, in some cases, used to try to track down dissidents and fugitives without proper basis in what Interpol would normally require in terms of its documentation and standards.

So I think one issue is that we run the risk of a set of global security mechanisms that are police based, sort of becoming much more central to the way global security governance functions. And right now the United States and a lot of liberal democracies aren’t having a lot of input into that new wiring and that new architecture that’s being created.

Second is just the practical effect of autocracies collaborating on internal security amongst themselves, right? And that poses a challenge to global norms, but also just to how citizens are treated inside those countries, as those approaches become increasingly normalized.

And then the third challenge that I really worry about is that, as we talked about a moment ago, there are sort of two sets of countries that might find China’s security assistance appealing. One is the autocrats, or the aspiring autocrats, and that group is kind of its own security challenge, but there’s also a group of countries who, as we talked about, might just be weak democracies who have real crime and instability challenges, where China is the only actor providing security assistance. But if that’s not paired with really strong rule of law and surveillance oversight programs, then that system could be misused in the future and could lead to human rights abuses in the future.

And in a project that I’ve done with a former student of mine, Ed Goldring, one of the things that we’ve found is that when Chinese surveillance technology is exported, it actually has a worse effect in autocracies than it does in democracies, probably because those rule of law oversight mechanisms do provide some constraints on the abuse of the technology itself. And so these questions around democracy and autocracy interact with Chinese assistance and China’s growing global influence in ways that really do seem to matter for the experiences of citizens in the countries where that assistance is being provided. And I think that’s really important for us to know as we think about how to create individualized or more targeted solutions for the different kinds of challenges that China’s growing role in global security presents.

Lindsay: Is the focus on internal security a sign that these regimes are under pressure? That they’re threatened by dissent?

Sheena: It might be. In a number of cases, I think that that’s true. But one of the things my previous research taught me is that autocrats are sort of inherently paranoid and their perceptions of what threatens their security don’t always match well with what we can see from the outside because they’re such a closed information environment.

It’s really hard sometimes for us to assess where these security perceptions are coming from because they seem so disproportionate to us. One of the interesting things about China’s perception of security, is that China actually has a very Marxist, Maoist dialectical way of thinking about its own security.

So we tend to think as you get more powerful, you should become more secure. Power should lead to security. And in Xi Jinping’s thinking, he actually inverts that and says, as China’s power grows, as it gets closer to the center of the world stage, yes, the upsides increase, but so do the risks and the threats. And so instead of power leading to security in Xi Jinping’s framework, it actually makes China’s security problems worse, which I think is a fundamental point that helps explain behavior that Western observers find very hard to understand about China’s behavior.

How can a country this powerful seem to feel this insecure and therefore react in such disproportionate and repressive and assertive or aggressive ways abroad that seem to then rebound to China’s detriment?

Lindsay: That’s interesting. I just want to remark on some cognitive dissonance that I feel when I talk about this stuff, which is on the one hand, you have Xi Jinping, arms open to the world talking about cooperation and mutual benefit and mankind and brotherhood and stability and win-win solutions, and all these wonderful concepts. Investing in developing countries, et cetera. And on the other hand, you have leadership in the United States that is aggressive, combative, you know, imposing tariffs on friends. There’s a sense of instability. And positioning our country as being opposed to the sort of mutuality that Xi Jinping weaves into his public discourse.

And that feels—again, going back to the world as it was when we were young, or at least that we thought it was—it feels like the world is turned upside down. So I’m perplexed by that. Why does everything feel so turned around?

Sheena: Part of China’s pitch for global leadership is that it has a way of integrating its concept of national security with what it calls the common security of the world at large. And that is explicitly part of the Chinese argument, and I don’t think it’s an accident that on the heels of this anniversary, you know, that China was using that and invoking historical memory as a way to argue that it is protecting the useful aspects of the post-1945 world order and to try to portray the United States negatively as a disruptor and a negative force for global security and the global economy.

And, you know, on the one hand, this is what propaganda does. It takes pieces of the truth and uses them to present a narrative that advances the interests of whoever’s presenting that propaganda, whether the whole ends up being accurate or not. So I think that is very much the argument that China is trying to make, and the United States for a long time has provided the public goods that underpin the post-1945 liberal international order.

So we are in a moment where the United States is rethinking its role in world order, as is China, and the United States seems to be pulling back from world order in some ways and places in which China may choose to step in and fill that gap. Now, I don’t know that China is going to want to underwrite security to the same extent or in the same way that the United States has been willing to do for so long, and so what’s really interesting, and troubling, and evolving quickly about the moment that we’re in, is that there are parts of the global order where it seems like the old order is weakening or shifting and there are new forces pushing in and new parts of the order being built. But there are also just places where there’s not really a defined order. There may not be a defined order.

Lindsay: I was going to end by going back to the original question, which is “what world are we in?” You know, is it a China-led world or is it an U.S.-led world, or something else? But I think you just answered it, and it sounds like you would say that it’s something else, but we’re not quite sure what it is yet.

Sheena: I think we’re in a moment of transition, but I also think there’s no one single global order. I think we live in a world of multiple orders, whether it’s security, economics, normative democracy, autocracy kinds of norms, and that these orders interact with each other. And each of them is in its own transition, but they don’t all move in parallel or even in the same direction at the same time.

And so I do think we’re in a moment of transition, but also of new order being formed and other parts giving way. So yeah, it’s one of the really most interesting times, but with that comes both opportunity and some real anxiety about what the future holds.

Lindsay: Actually, I’ll ask you one last question.

All of the stuff that we’re talking about today, it’s pretty heady stuff. We’re talking about countries and policies and global order. But all of it ultimately affects ordinary people. With that in mind, what is at stake in all of this?

Sheena: So let me just say that, you know, as an individual person, I do take China’s call for improved public safety seriously. I was actually carjacked at gunpoint when I lived in Missouri several years ago, and that profoundly shapes your sense of safety and security. And that’s why, when I look at the perspective of developing countries where the police force struggles to get basic capacity to maintain public order, I recognize that that’s a legitimate goal for citizens to ask of their governments and for elected leaders to feel responsible for, because if that doesn’t happen, it has really serious consequences for individual citizens and their families. And so I think that in my view, we have to take that global security need seriously.

And that doesn’t mean, you know, getting on board with strengthening the repressive apparatus of authoritarian or illiberal states. There’s a very complicated set of policy decisions to decide when the United States or its partners and allies should provide security assistance and on what conditions and with what broader rule of law oversight tools, to make sure that that capacity is used for genuinely democratic ends. But it is also true that your sense of security can be profoundly shaped by being arrested by, you know, the knock on the door by a secret police organization in the middle of the night. And so I think having an understanding that at the individual level, people do think about security in terms of both safety from criminal violence and protection from government abuse and overreach are both really important, and countries should be capable of crafting a global security order that creates both types of security for citizens. They’re sometimes in tension with each other, but that’s governance. The fundamental question is going to be how good are we at protecting both types of security for citizens and societies?

Lindsay: Sheena Greitens, thank you for being with us on Talking Policy. It’s been so good to talk with you.

Sheena: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.