 Well, good evening, good morning, or good afternoon, depending on where you are. My name is Steve Seng, I'm the director of the Sours China Institute. Delighted that we will have a fantastic seminar this evening, which will be given by an excellent, relatively younger scholar who has made her named very, very quickly in academia. And she is of course, Professor Sheena Chestnut Grattens at the Lentenby Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. Now, before I introduce her and the subject more, let me just remind you that for the webinar, you are welcome to raise questions or commands through the Q and A box at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. If you would like to raise your questions anonymously, you are welcome to do so. But even if you would like to do so, it would still be helpful if you could provide information about who you are. And that would give me a better sense of picking questions to put to the speaker. But if you say you would like to stay anonymous, your wish will be respected, neither your name or other things that will identify you would be mentioned when I put your questions to the speaker. Going back to the speaker and the subject, Sheena, as I said, is at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. She's also a senior non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Center for East Asian Policy Studies. She was educated at Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard, where she earned her PhD. She has published very interesting and important articles which have got a lot of attention. She's also the author of Dictators and their Secret Police which had won several awards, including the 2017 Best Book Award at Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association. She is currently working on a book project about China's domestic security policies and the importance for China's role in the world, which accounts for the subject of her webinar this evening, which is China's Changing National Security Strategy under Xi Jinping. And it is, of course, happening on a date when the EU introduced sanctions against a number of named Chinese government officials responsible for Xinjiang policy to which the Chinese government has responded very, very quickly by imposing sanctions against a number of named EU politicians and some institutions at the European Union. Now, with that, I think I will hand over to you, Sheena, for the presentation and then we'll come back with the Q&A. Over to you. Thank you. It's really a pleasure to be with all of you today. Although I will say that having done my masters in the UK, I very much wish that I could have joined you in person. It's been a long time since I've been able to get to the UK and my hope is that in the near future I'll be able to get back. Steve, I was also delighted to be referred to as a younger scholar because my children asked me over the weekend if I was around when dinosaurs were. So I very much appreciate the counter messaging on that side. What I'm going to do now is just move to a PowerPoint presentation and to talk about what it is that we've been seeing with respect to national security policy making and decision making during the period in which Xi Jinping has been China's preeminent leader and to talk about what I think is going on with China's national security strategy, what that term actually means and how it appears to be guiding and directing facets, important facets of both China's domestic political decision making and its external and foreign policies. So I wanted to start just by talking a little bit about this phrase national security strategy. This is the way that the Chinese side translates. It's term, but another way to think about it is what more commonly in the US or the UK we might call grand strategy. And so when I talk about national security strategy today I'm in essence talking about a state's theory of how it can cause security for itself. And we immediately sort of run into a lot of assumptions in Western academic scholarship that don't apply very well to China. And so I think it's worth pausing and teasing out what we do and don't mean by this term national security strategy because those of us who work in either a US or UK context may have very different assumptions or areas of emphasis in our heads that don't necessarily translate to the way that China formulates and deploys this term and formulate strategy in these areas. So many studies of national security or grand strategy focus on Western democratic great powers. The US and the UK are a significant part of this literature. And as a result, grand strategy or national security policymaking is usually assumed to be externally focused and heavily centered on the military, not solely. There are other instruments of national power that are deployed externally and in national security decision making, but the focus still largely tends to be external and military centric. In that discussion and in these discussions of Western grand strategies, internal factors are usually treated as means. They are things that constrain or enable the pursuit of external ends. That framework doesn't apply very well to the way that China treats national security or policy or national security strategy for the following reasons. China, as we all know, is a non-Western great power. It is a much later modernizer in terms of its military, by its coercive forces, both the internal coercive apparatus and its military forces. So it's what we call a late modernizer relative to many of the other countries that have been objects of study when it relates to grand strategy. It is not a democracy. And so it is a socialist non-democracy with a party-state system, which means that discussions of, for example, civil-military relations in the US or the UK context or a whole range of sort of cross-national contexts have to be adapted to think about party-military relations more specifically in the Chinese system. There's also a much heavier focus on internal security. And this is sort of a core point that I'll come back to and really center my remarks on today. But much of when China refers to national security, that term actually is also easily translatable and realistically translatable as state security. The term that China translates as national security in the context of a national security strategy or national security commission is translated as state security in, for example, the Ministry of State Security, which has a largely internal role. And so there's when China uses this term national security strategy or national security, there's a much heavier focus on internal security and the instruments of power that are thought about and deployed in, quote unquote, national security often tend to be as much or more civilian and internal security organizations as they are China's military apparatus and the PLA. The other issue here is that, especially in the extensive literature on American grand strategy, written strategy documents play a very prominent role, but until 2015 China did not have a written national security strategy document. Xi Jinping was the first leader to issue or create such a document and Chinese sources at the time talked about how that was a new thing for China to use the words of one commentator. There's also a real debate over what exactly China's theory of how it causes security for itself, its grand strategy is. And so the most common view I would say is what you see in the quotes here, which is that Xi Jinping's grand strategy is similar to his predecessors. This argument made in a book written in 2018 or in an article that was published last year by Avery Goldstein, who's looked very closely at China's grand strategy over time, that she has, yes, there are some things that are distinctive about it, but that Xi Jinping has not fundamentally broken with the strategy of national rejuvenation that has been pursued by China's leaders at least since the 1990s and arguably potentially even back to 1949. And so these arguments tend to see a lot of continuity in China's approach to national security. On the other hand, you have some other, another important argument that has gained, I would say increasing prominence in US policy and academic discourse of late, which argues that China's grand strategy has shifted under Xi Jinping, that China has abandoned the language of hide your power and buy your time and that China's grand strategy is now aimed over the long term at displacing the United States from its leadership role in the international system. So there's a book forthcoming by Rush Doshi from Oxford University Press later this year titled The Long Game that makes this case. It's an academic book, but Dr. Doshi is now in the US National Security Council forming China policy, right? So this is an argument that has a lot of or I would say increasing weight in both academic and policy discourse. The case I'm gonna make today is actually that neither of these are quite right. That China's grand strategy has changed that arguments that emphasize continuity are incorrect, inaccurate but that a focus on grand strategy as aimed at displacing the United States misses what China itself thinks about, writes about and talks about at the heart of its grand strategy which is fundamentally internal. And so thinking of national security strategy or grand strategy at aimed at an external goal of displacing the United States is not taking China's approach on its own terms and again sort of looking at this from a standpoint that overly emphasizes external policy and external security when China's own emphasis is by contrast quite heavily internal. So I wanna address the first piece of this argument first and to argue and I'll answer the second question about what the nature of that strategy is and whether it's internal versus external and how in the course of answering this first question which is about continuity versus change. And so I wanna lay out the criteria to answer the question how would we know if China's national security strategy has changed? And I would argue that you have to meet three criteria to say that there's been a fundamental shift in national security strategy or grand strategy. One is that you have to have an articulation of some change in China's national security threat environment. If there's continuity in the threat environment from before you might still have a change in strategy based on a radically new approach but it's also really important if China's leaders define the threat environment that they face differently now than they did 10 years ago. And so we need to ask is there a change in how China fundamentally perceives its national security threat environment? Second, is there on the table have China's leaders put on the table a new approach to address those threats? And third, does this approach that's been proposed on paper or talked about actually affect behavior? We can't, it might be interesting to read Chinese doctrine, Chinese writings and look at the content of the writings but ultimately what we want to know is does this actually produce a predictable and meaningful change in behavior? Does the internal logic of how China is trying to make itself secure produce different behavior in the end? And so here I would argue, is that new approach operationalized and things like force structure for the forces that are seen as relevant for securing the state or the regime is the organization different? Is the legal infrastructure that's deployed? Does it reflect a new approach? Do we have different personnel being put in place because of a change in the threat environment or a change in the approach? And do budgets and procurement decisions reflect a change in this underlying thinking? And so I would argue that cumulatively China has actually met all three of these conditions that we've seen a change in China's characterization of the threat environment under Xi Jinping that he has proposed a new approach to addressing that changed threat environment and that the sort of a whole raft of changes related to national security and justified explicitly by the presence of a new national security strategy have resulted in a large number of changes to force structure and organization to national security laws to the key personnel who are in charge of national security policies both internally and externally and to the direction in which budgets and procurement are directed. So the conceptual piece of this, the characterization of the threat environment and this proposed new approach have taken place gradually. And this is similar to other studies of grand strategy. Not everyone takes the US national security strategy as sort of the ultimate written arbiter of grand strategy or of national security strategy. You can infer methodologically, we can infer it from a whole range of documents and key sources. And so in this case, the sort of key conceptual emergence or emergence of a new national security concept, there's a brief discussion of it in November of 2013, very, very early in Xi Jinping's time in office. And then the sort of first major step was the promulgation of what Xi Jinping referred to as a comprehensive or holistic national security concept in April of 2014. And that was accompanied by the launch of a new government body, the Central National Security Commission or Central State Security Commission, depending on how you choose to translate it. And this concept really became core to Xi Jinping's way of thinking and talking about national security. I will add that he has now said and written enough about national security that even by 2018, so four years later, one could fill a book with his comments and writings about this topic. So we have a pretty robust body of texts both from him as the key leader and then at different levels of the party state hierarchy to show how this concept has been reflected and refracted down to the level of organizational practice and policy behavior. And then in 2015, in January of 2015, the Chinese leadership approved the first national security strategy as a document. That document is not publicly available. So we're relying on some of the sort of state media summaries of what was approved. It appears to be largely consistent with the remarks that Xi Jinping made in April of 2014 and the body of writings that we've collected and that the party state has collected on this topic. So this is sort of the key timeline of the core concept around which the national security strategy is formed. That concept is predicated on a different characterization of the security environment than the one that had been used before. So it was possible, prior to Xi Jinping's a sense of leadership, there were actually, there were challenges facing China, but it was possible to look at the security environment and actually see it as improving. Xi Jinping paints a much more complicated picture and he's done so consistently since this 2014-2015 period. When he launched the comprehensive national security concept he referred to China's security environment by saying that China now faces the most complicated internal and external factors in its history. Nope, not necessarily the most difficult, the PLA has been engaged in active combat and fought wars before. So it's not saying that the security environment is more difficult than that, but it's saying it's more complicated. That it's marked by increasing threats and challenges and importantly that those threats and challenges are interlocking and can be mutually activated. And here Xi Jinping pays particular attention to moving from an emphasis on traditional threats to non-traditional security threats and balancing attention to China's external security environment with attention to the internal security environment. And there are actually documents and commentaries from the time that emphasize and draw a distinction and say, okay, previously in the post-Cold War period China thought too much about traditional external security and we actually need to refocus on non-traditional and internal security concerns. That's an emphasis and a contrast that's drawn within the Chinese sources themselves. And so I think that that's important to note. After that, the comprehensive national security concept goes on to outline essentially a new approach for China to deal with this more complicated interlocking external and internal security environment. It reiterates that the center of gravity of national security work is internal. And so arguably it would be easier for all of us if we translated national security as state security which is also supported by the fact that when you read through the writings and explications of this term national or state security the foundation is explicitly political security. It's about the authority of the CCP Central Committee with Xi Jinping at the core is one common part of one common formulation of what it is that political security means and political security itself is seen as or described as the foundation of the comprehensive national security concept. So this is very much about regime security. And I think this explains, for example I was particularly struck by this tweet from Shinhua talking about and expressing as a red line regime security and the position of the CCP. So when we think of national security we don't think of necessarily the security or leadership of any one political party as determinative of the US or the UK's national security. I'll stick with those since I'm speaking to you from Texas and talking to many of you in the UK today. But notice here that national security is constructed and expressed as the security of China's socialist system and the governing status of the Communist Party of China. This is very much a regime security formation. Similarly Xi Jinping will say things like this is something from a political legal work conference in January of 2015. The whole country's political legal organs must take initiative in adapting to the new circumstances strengthen forward-looking work, effectively prevent and control various risks and carry out their great responsibility for protecting national security and social stability. So over time what's emerged from a lot of these remarks and writings is this emphasis on prevention and anticipating risks and dealing with them before they can materialize. And the phrase prevent and control here gets brought into the discourse in places where before you might have seen a reference to stability maintenance. The language of stability maintenance is not entirely gone but this phrase prevention and control comes in a lot and it tends to be used to signal a more active and proactive approach to intercepting potential instability even earlier in the process than the old stability maintenance framework might have. So what we see is Meng Tianzhu drawing a contrast in implicit contrast with the previous approach of stability maintenance in passages like this where at the same conference he argues stability maintenance cannot depend solely on suppressive control. It must instead work to diffuse and resolve problems and treat both symptoms and the underlying causes hard and soft approaches mutually reinforcing. We can't only deal with the end product of social contradictions but deeply analyze the source and intensify governance at its origin, right? That's one rough translation, my own of this set of remarks. And so what you see is this focus on very, very early prevention and control as the new approach that needs to be used for dealing with these national security challenges. The goal that's commonly described is this multi, it's probably better to say multi rather than three-dimensional, multi-dimensional information-based prevention and control system for public or social security. And I know that's a mouthful but that's a stock phrase that gets repeated quite a bit. And that should be achieved using things like this front-end social governance. So governance at the origin. There are recurrent metaphors of immunization and the invocation of a Maoist era story, the Fengqiao experience, which is explained as a way of dealing with problems on a local level but also early in time. So the idea that small things do not leave the village, major events do not leave the town, problems must be dealt with early before they escalate either up the ladder of governance or horizontally across Chinese society. The other thing that's interesting about this approach is that it kind of reverses the typical relationship that we would sometimes hear about between security and development. So if you think about a place like Xinjiang or Tibet, the sort of common assumption or approach has been if economic development is successful in these places that will resolve the social contradictions and the instability and unrest that the party state has seen there in these places. And under Xi Jinping, there's actually an explicit revising of that approach to either treat them as two wheels on a cart, so they operate in tandem or in some cases to actually argue that security is a precondition for development. You cannot have development if you don't have security first. And that reverses this relationship that argues that development will eventually lead to security. And I'm gonna come back to that in a few minutes because I think that that's important for understanding China's approach to a place like Xinjiang, which has been in the news because of the sanctions that Dr. Tsang mentioned this morning. So we see a revised characterization of the threat environment, this interlocking of internal and external factors, this more proactive approach that's being proposed and advocated for. And then we see that there are a whole set of operationalizations of this new concept. And that many of the changes are explicitly linked back to, okay, now we have the Comprehensive National Security concept, our old organizations, our old laws are outdated, therefore we're going to change all of them to adequately implement the new concept and the new national security strategy that we have. So the changes are explicitly linked to rhetorically and justified in terms of implementation of the new concept. So we actually see that it is affecting behavior, organizations, laws, et cetera. So there's a lot that we could talk about in terms of the operationalization of the new national security concept. Organizationally, the major changes were something I mentioned before, which is the launch of the Central National Security Commission. Again, originally a lot of folks who looked at this thought that it was going to function more like the United States NSC, it occurred around the same time that Japan was discussing the launch of the National Security Council there. And so there was I think an assumption or an intuition that turned out to be incorrect, which is that the Chinese National Security Commission might end up being more parallel to the US NSC. And that just hasn't been the case. The Central National Security Commission has met much more infrequently and tends to need to deal with internal issues. So one of the Central National Security Symposia occurred right before the escalation of counter-terrorism policy and the expansion of mass detention and collective repression in Xinjiang. It was in February of 2017, Chen Chuanguo returns to Xinjiang from the Central National Security Commission Symposium, holds a series of counter-terrorism rallies and gives out the orders to begin constructing the network of detention and prison facilities for which Xinjiang is now well known today. So the presence and creation of the Central National Security Commission as a coordinating body is one of these important changes. There were also changes to the command structure of the People's Armed Police, the reorganization of military regions. And importantly, the consolidation and reorganization of the discipline and supervision apparatus as a way of monitoring and keeping track of the government and the party itself. To the point where you occasionally now will see references to the discipline and supervision apparatus, the CCDI or the National Supervision Commission, which are co-located as the sharp sword of supervision paired with the knife, which represents the internal security forces and the gun, which represents the PLA. Now you've actually seen the creation of a sort of third part of that as in the construction of those as a trilogy, which I think indicates the importance of that change. There's also been a whole set of legal changes in the passage of new national security laws that have both internal and external implications that are not often clearly delineated. And that makes sense if you think about a Chinese conceptual framework in which internal and external are in fact interlocking and mutually activated. You would not write a law that cleanly separates the two. And so I'm putting up here a table of some of these changes. There are a few more that we could now add to the bottom of the list, most notably the Hong Kong National Security Law past last summer. But I think it's important to remember that the Hong Kong National Security Law did not take place in isolation. That these revisions to China's national security legislation happened almost immediately upon the introduction of the comprehensive national security concept and the national security strategy. We had a national security law counterterrorism law, foreign and geo management law, cybersecurity national intelligence laws, there was a pretty steady drum beat revising China's national security legal infrastructure. Sorry. Along with that, China's domestic security budget has continued to rise roughly proportional to overall increases in the budget. It's not eating the rest of the budget by any stretch necessarily, but it has grown substantially. And the role of surveillance technology and technologies of social control that are seen as being able to implement the national security concept and the national security strategy have gotten a lot of attention. The goal here, they're linked back to the national security concept via this phrase, that multi-dimensional information-based system of prevention and control. What that translates to in practice is the procurement and deployment of large amounts of surveillance technology. I think it's important on that surveillance technology to note that it's not just the collection of information that's important. And we sometimes miss that because it's much easier to look at the license plate readers or the CCTV cameras or the facial recognition-enabled sunglasses. But what's actually really important about some of these procurement and about some of this spending is on the back end, the use of big data platforms that try to integrate all of the different sources of information that China's collecting. So a couple of years into this process around 2017, Li Keqiang gives this set of remarks where he talks about, okay, we told everybody to digitalize governance and to start collecting more information and all of a sudden, we've got all of these government systems that don't talk to each other. And he called this problem Information Islands. And so a lot of the procurement, especially recently has been focused heavily on trying to solve this problem of Information Islands and to create this overall system for prevention and control that is information-based. We all seem related personnel changes. So some of that has been just due to retirement turnover and people aging out of the internal security or apparatus in the PLA. But a lot of it has been replacement of personnel through the anti-corruption campaign. And again, the anti-corruption campaigns themselves are framed as a challenge to national security because they threaten the party's political security. They threaten the foundation of the party and of the ruling party's governance to translate one way of characterizing this as a national security issue. Corruption is a problem because it erodes the foundation of party governance and thereby political security and the political security part of national security. So we've seen a lot of changes, particularly in the military and the internal security apparatus. In the anti-corruption campaign, there's been a huge focus on those two areas. And that's continuing under the rectification and education campaign that kicked off earlier this year. There was a pilot last year and the campaign is now launched and we'll continue, we're told for the rest of this year. Along with that, there's been an increased internationalization of Chinese law enforcement activity. So the Ministry of Public Security has an increasing number of partnerships, increased pursuit of repatriation agreements or extradition agreements, training activities between Chinese police forces and police forces abroad that occurs at both the central and provincial level of the Chinese political system. And Xi Jinping refers to this in some of his remarks around 2017, 2018 as pushing the Ministry of Public Security and the political legal apparatus to adopt what he calls a global vision of national security work. Really looking at the external factors that shape the political legal apparatus's operations and behavior at home. And then finally, we've just seen major changes to policy that are linked explicitly to national security. So one of the first more specific areas where Xi Jinping operationalizes the comprehensive national security concept about 10 days after the initial launch or premiere of the concept, he gives a speech specifically on national security and a lot of the focus in it is on counterterrorism. And so he talks about that as this area where internal and external security are interlocking, where you need that you know one solution or tool is sufficient to solve the problem. And in context that's saying, you can't treat this as a purely internal or purely external problem. You have to look at both dimensions simultaneously. And so one of the things that happens and I've written a piece that you can find on the international security journal website or on the website that was in the chat a few minutes ago is that part of what happened with the escalation of collective repression in Xinjiang is that China is responding to developments it sees externally, particularly contact between a very, very small number of Uyghur militants and Islamic militants, I'm sorry, Uyghur diaspora members and Islamic militant groups in Southeast Asia and some participation by small groups of Uyghurs in fighting in Syria alongside Islamic militant groups. And that activity really increases over the 2014 to 2016 period, parallel to the development of this national security concept. And so in some ways it becomes the early test case for how to apply the comprehensive national security concept and these external developments that don't seem like they're objectively that big of a change and they're certainly not necessarily affecting internal security in China become the pretext or the reason to engage in this collective repression and mass level attempt to immunize the population in Xinjiang which is a metaphor that by definition points out that you are immunizing people that are not quote-unquote sick, right? They don't have a political illness they have not displayed symptoms you immunize people before they come into contact with a quote-unquote political virus again to use Chinese language. So even that metaphor itself is very revealing about what it means to prevent and control an external development from infecting a population at home. It requires really aggressive and extensive intervention against people who have not necessarily shown any sign of politically problematic behavior. But I think that set of policies makes more that are otherwise pretty puzzling makes more sense if we look at it through this lens of the national security concept being deployed at the same time. So that's the overall argument that I think it's I think helps us understand a lot of China's behavior today that China sees the external and internal security environment as interrelated you can't address one without addressing the other and that security environment is more complicated and more challenging for China than it ever has been before. That there has to be a fundamentally new approach that's much more actively or aggressively preventive to resolve these threats. And to do that China has essentially overhauled multiple parts of its national security infrastructure laws, organizations, people, budgets and behavior. And so all of this adds up to me to a fairly fundamental change in course in China's national security strategy. So let me close by offering a couple of observations about what I think the implications are for those of us who sit outside China and are trying to understand how that might shape China's behavior and the parts of the behavior that we interact with and have most the highest stakes on. So China's national security strategy fundamentally is not necessarily like the United States national security strategy. Even though they're the two biggest powers in the international system, this is like comparing apples to oranges. And so part of this is a negative lesson that we just can't engage in mirroring that that would be making an analytical error if we sort of say, okay, what would we do in these shoots? That's not the right framework to adopt. And second, that the extraterritorial projection of this national security concept is not going to be what our theories typically focus on or might predict because it takes internal security as the center of gravity. And that it's very, very difficult to sort of accurately interpret Chinese behavior if that point is not kept front and center. Internal security is not a means to achieving external ends, it is the end. It is the goal, right? And that's a different way of thinking about the role of internal security in grand strategy than most of the academic literature frames, right? It treats internal security as a means to an end. In this case, internal security really is the end. And so grand strategy in this case or China's national security strategy is an externalization of internal security policy. And it's what Xi Jinping called is this global vision for state security work. And that means that the emphases and the things that China takes as priorities may not be the things that we would traditionally expect or consider. It also means that we should expect a lot of contestation over the Chinese diaspora and diaspora connections to China. One traditional way of defining a diaspora is that it's folks who are outside the state, meaning outside the physical boundaries of the polity, but who remain inside the body politic, outside the state, but inside the people. And so if you have a framework where that interconnection between internal and external is really sensitive and really prioritized, then the diaspora is going to be a particular site of contestation and struggle for control. And so we've seen, I think some of that already with pressure on the weaker diaspora with some of the issues related to Chinese talent programs, which have played a major role in American policy toward China under the Trump administration and that looks set to continue under the Biden administration. And I think that we need to think very, very carefully about the role that the diaspora plays to avoid either prejudice and racism, right? We've seen that in a sort of set of, a whole set of deeply concerning incidents in the United States, but especially this past week with a mass shooting in Atlanta. You need to be very, very careful about the language and policies that impact this group of people because of the sensitivity and the importance that is attached to them, both in the Chinese framework, but conversely, I think that puts a very, very high premium on and responsibility on external actors who are dealing with China to ensure that people are not unfairly targeted or put in the crosshairs and that the policies that are adopted toward the Chinese diaspora are well understood and factored into policies in the countries where diaspora members might live or reside. That's probably a very, very long and somewhat separate conversation, so I'll bracket that. But my point is that this is one of the areas that I think if we truly understand the framework that China is using, we might be able to be more attentive to and careful about policy formulation in this area. There are a number of other implications for technology policy, for Xinjiang, for what's happening in Hong Kong today, and I'm happy to talk about those in Q&A, but I have spoken for about 45 minutes now and I wanna stop and make sure we have sufficient time for questions. So with that, Dr. Song, I'll turn it back to you and look forward to the discussion. Thanks so much. Thank you very much, Sheena. Fantastic talk, as I was expecting it to be. It would not surprise you that I largely agree with what you say, but I would like to push you in how you frame it. I think I hope other people will take you up on the extraterritorial applicability of Chinese national security considerations, particularly the Hong Kong National Security Law, but let me focus on what I would see is the core issue here. I think you are absolutely right to say that we must not take a mirror approach to the Chinese national security strategy in the way that we see the American one, or that's the National Security Council. And I think you can pretty right there. You also write when you underline that it is really first and foremost about internal security. And there you would also write in using the term state security. Now, my question to you really is, why then do you actually frame it in the national security language rather than frame it in the state security language, which would then automatically trigger a caution that we simply cannot apply. What we take for granted in our disciplinary approach or the way how we usually frame it in understanding the US approach and the US institution in trying to project that to understand the Chinese approach. We are not unfamiliar with this Chinese approach. We know, you know perfectly well, I know you do, that China does not have the office of president. Xi Jinping is not the president of China. He's never called the president of China in China. For that obviously is chairman of the PLC. Okay, on that particular one, the Chinese were being naughty because they deliberately provide an official translation of his title and call him president. But in fact, they haven't done so necessarily with the national security concept. They use the Chinese term, Guozha Antuan, which I think if you ask the Chinese, frankly, they would translate as a state security as you highlighted that that would be the other translation. Why therefore then? Are you framing it in a way that help the Chinese to confuse us and get us to get confused in how we try to respond to what in effect is a very important issue and subject over to you. Thank you. It's a great question and honestly what I've been grappling with about part of it. So let me say that part of it is that writing in 2021, China's translation has been out and has been used for six, seven years now. And so part of it is that the concern that if you switch and use this language of state security that there may be some question about whether or not you're talking about the same thing. So some of it is a sort of more practical acknowledgement that China's had seven years to sort of socialize people to the translation national security. I have debated scrapping it and using state security. And actually in the written book manuscript, I tend to use both or to use national slash state security as a very clunky way of reminding people that there are two different ways to translate this term and that it's important that we not forget about one. If I was translating it in 2014, I would urge a lot of people to avoid the term national security because as you said, I think it's misleading. But part of it is struggling with the fact that we've had seven years of talking about this as national security and trying to get people to pivot to understand it in a different way. I was a little bit concerned that if I didn't meet the discourse where it is that it would be hard to convince people or that the people would simply sort of miss the argument entirely. But I'm sort of actively thinking about and debating that this very question honestly for the very good reasons that you raise. I think the other question has to do with why frame this as a matter of national security policymaking or grand strategy. And again, I think it's partly a question of who you want to talk to in this particular project. And so part of my goal here is what we are seeing especially in the United States is that there are an awful lot of people who are not specialists on China who are now doing national security work in the US context, the US meaning of national security that is very China focused. And so I'm trying to figure out in some ways how to explain what China is doing to people who are not as familiar with the Chinese approach who haven't been paying much attention to the comprehensive national security concept or how to translate this term or what Xi Jinping has said at this conference versus that conference. So for people who are security generalists and national security or strategic generalists what is the framework that they have in their heads and how do you communicate effectively to them about what it is that China is doing and how it's different? So I don't know if this is the most effective way to do that. It sounds like you're unconvinced and I will certainly take that feedback seriously as I finish the writing on this book project but those are probably more than anything it's a desire for the book to be read and for it to make sense and be a contribution for a group of people who are actively shaping and thinking about the US-China relationship but who are not themselves China specialists because I sort of feel like this is the argument about translating it as state security is something that a great many people who are familiar with China understand and are kind of able to read into the material but I was thinking about how to effectively communicate that point to a really important audience that is not specialists in the politics or foreign policy of the PRC. Again, I'm not done with the book yet so I'm glad to have this feedback so I can go back and think about whether that is the most effective approach. Thank you. The first question I picked is something which I think would be very beneficial to the student asking that question and it comes from one of our PhD students, Melia Hao and her question is, what are the key methodological challenges when you research this topic and how do you overcome them? That's a great question. I think probably the first thing to grapple with is this question that we were discussing a moment ago which is that this is a concept in a way of thinking about a problem for which there's not an obvious corollary or obvious immediate matching conceptual framework in the Western academic literature. So some of the literature on authoritarianism doesn't quite get at the security elements, the national security or state security elements of this conversely, as I framed it today, a lot of the ways of thinking about or theoretical frameworks that are used to understand grand strategy, this idea of how a state causes itself to be secure don't work very well either. And so conceptually that's probably the biggest issue that I've been grappling with which is how you explain a conceptual framework that doesn't translate super easily. Second at the sort of more methodological level is the question of, you know, there is the national security strategy is not publicly available. And so you are inferring a framework and a logic without access to some of the core documents that we would want, whether that's the national security strategy itself that was approved that appears to be sort of the core policy document guiding a lot of these decisions or a lot of the internal deliberations and conversations at the elite level that would tell us how that concept is actually translated into high level policy decisions. We have some of these internal documents in the case of Xinjiang, right? There have been documents that have been leaked to the New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. And that was actually very helpful because we had written this article on Xinjiang and the decision-making around Xinjiang before those documents were released. And I have to say that when we were in the process literally of, I think, page-proofing the article on Xinjiang when those documents became public and I have to say my heart dropped because it was sort of like, oh dear, now we have a really hard test which is, you know, are we going to see the argument that we're inferring from outside reflected in these internal documents? And we actually did and the journal very graciously let us put in a couple of references to them, their brief actually because of the editing and page-proofing process. But I think this is a standard issue in both the methodology and the methods literature on authoritarian politics where you're dealing with a political system that has areas that are opaque and information that is strategically concealed for a reason, that shapes the information that researchers can access in all kinds of different ways. And also something that folks who work on national security policymaking even in the US context deal with, right? The key documents and deliberations are often classified. And so you can either wait for documents to be declassified or you can try to work with the sources that are available at a given point in time. And the two fields have different approaches to doing that based on political context. But I see that as sort of a, you know, it's a particular challenge that has some features that are shared by folks working in those two different areas. Okay. The next one is in fact a pair of questions because I think they kind of come from different angles but much in parallel. And they come from Adam Sego and Jonathan Fembe. The question from Adam at the Council for Foreign Relations first. Couldn't Doshi's field sit beside your description of internal focus? Is CCP feel it necessary to shape external environment or display the United States for both internal and external security? Now, the parallel question from Jonathan Fembe is that how important are external national security concerns in shaping internal policy and what would be your examples to illustrate that? Those are two excellent questions. Let me try to be concise but clear in my answer. So directly to Adam Sego's question. Yes, it is possible for Dr. Doshi's argument in mind, I think to coexist. It may be more a difference of emphasis than, and I will say I'm also aware of the overall arguments of the book but I have not read the full manuscript. So I'm not going to be able to answer precisely. I think the book comes out in May. I think it's an important argument to bring in because it's a serious treatment of China's grand strategy but I'm necessarily going to be incomplete in my comparison of the two arguments because I have only seen one at a very high level. So yes, theoretically I think it's possible that the CCP feels like it's necessary to displace the United States because the United States is both an external and an internal security challenge. I haven't seen that explicit argument made in Chinese sources. That in other words, that connective tissue is not clearly drawn that the United States is a threat to the internal security of the PRC in its current position in the international system. What you tend to see are more that that came out in the peaceful conspiracy conspiracy. So what I was about to say there is that there are specific areas where the CCP perceives American behavior as threatening to regime security inside China itself. So for example, in Hong Kong, the common framing that you will hear is that the foreign-backed black hands are disrupting Hong Kong and that this is a threat to the sovereignty and the internal cohesion and security of the PRC. There is an earlier element of this in the sort of the peaceful evolution argument that you heard in much more than probably in the 1990s. So again, I'm going to bracket the question a little bit of what it is that somebody else argues because I don't want to speak for that book. But what I will say is that it's more a difference, I think, in emphasis that the motivation is the motivation fundamentally about what role China wants to play in the international system or about a view of what will make China and the CCP secure at home. And those two are very closely related. One of the things that I think is actually both fascinating and troubling about this is that the logic of retrenchment or the idea of hide and buy don't work very well if this is your underlying security concept because Xi Jinping has been quite clear that internal and external threats are potentially interlocking and mutually activated and you can't deal with just one facet of them. So if you do believe that there's an external development that is threatening to China's internal security, you will see simultaneous escalation on both fronts. And I think that that combination of this more preventive, aggressive approach to resolving sources of instability as the CCP perceives them is part of why you've seen a willingness to escalate security behavior on multiple fronts whereas previously China would have sort of chosen to only have one of these conflicts flare up at a time. It is quite notable that the CCP has been willing to have increased tension over Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the border with India just to pick the four, I guess that I can think of very quickly that all four of those had escalated tension at the same time. And that seemed to be something a risk or a level of tension that China was willing to accept. That strength is different than China's past behavior. And I think it's because of this idea that you can't resolve an internal threat through internal actions alone if the locus of the threat is partly outside the PRC's borders. So yeah, I do see them as compatible in a couple of different ways. I probably tend to emphasize more of the internal locus because I think it's important and because it's not always clear that displacement is the answer. The complete displacement in the international system is the answer. But again, I want to be clear that I will need to read the book before giving a more precise answer about exactly what the difference in argument is. Next question comes from Dana Barnes. Was the humanization metaphor for managing political sickness new in the last decade? Or did it appear in earlier political thought? Great question. It was, there are some, there is just some discussion of illness as a metaphor in other places in Chinese political discourse, but the specific idea that politically problematic thinking can be compared to a virus or to a tumor, which is interesting because they don't work quite the same way. But the idea that, of pathologizing security or medicalizing public security really appeared to escalate and to become a much more dominant framework after about 2015. So Meng Tianzhu actually used it in general to talk about the political legal apparatus's work in 2015. It was not a specific reference for Xinjiang at the time, but it got used then very, very heavily in Xinjiang. This metaphor of infection and the need to immunize the population. And the estimates at the time were that 20 to 30% of the population was susceptible to a political virus and therefore needed to be targeted for reeducation, which are numbers that actually track, that estimate on the Chinese side actually tracks pretty closely with some of the estimates of how many people have been detained for reeducation. I guess the other thing that I think it's important to note is that this has a counter set or a related set of implications for public health. So the phrase prevent and control also appears in China's discussion of how to deal with public health issues that it thinks have political resonance, like HIV AIDS in the 1990s, 1980s, 1990s. And so this idea of prevent and control, there's a version of that phrase in the formal name of the Chinese CDC. And so it kind of does double discursive duty in that it is a way of thinking about public health with political implications and public security through the metaphor of health and immunization. But the fact that those two kind of blend together, I think helps us understand why the public security system became so important and surveillance and grid management and tools like that that had been built up for public security purposes became really important in managing the coronavirus outbreak in China. But it also, so that's kind of the securitization of public health. But in some ways, what's more troubling is this flip side that the question brings up, which is the medicalization of public security. And as I said before, this use of these metaphors around immunization or cutting out a tumor before it can grow, which require intervention before someone has displayed any kind of symptomatic behavior to kind of extend the metaphor. And the issue for that under human rights frameworks in international law is that it means that repression is by definition disproportionate, right? You're targeting someone who has shown no sign of politically problematic behavior even under the Chinese framework. And so I think that metaphor itself points to exactly what's troubling about the concept and why you see these sort of profound human rights consequences in a place like Xinjiang. Okay, next question I picked comes from Graham Leslie. It's somewhat related. And he's asking you about the changes for the transfer of responsibility for overseeing religion from the government apparatus to the party and the immunization process. And would that explain the sudden heartline pressure being put on the Huai Muslims or the ending of the teaching of Mongolians to the Mongols in schools as ways to destroy their religions and their ethnic culture over time? I think they're related. I don't want to reduce all of China's minority policies and the changes that have occurred in minority policy to a single lens of national security because it strikes me that that's sort of an overly simplistic way to view the debate that China's had about minority policy and all the resultant facets of the way that the experiences of minority populations in China have changed. But I think it makes sense to me that the shift to a more assimilationist minority policy occurred in parallel with the development and deployment of the national security concept because the idea of preventing the source of instability or disloyalty directly bears on the sort of the idea of ethnic autonomy and difference. And if at the same time, you are also rejecting one of the dominant frameworks that the CCP has used to manage minority policy, which is that development will solve social problems over time, then you have to replace that with something else. And the replacement seems to be this much more assimilationist and ideological framework for minority policy. Again, I don't want to reduce that to simply viewing it through the lens of national security. But I see them as very, very much parallel and interrelated because of the effort to achieve what the CCP refers to as ideological security, which is kind of a mix of political and cultural security. And there are actually writings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies translated this fascinating document. So even if you don't read Chinese, you can go and look at this commentary that was written about the need to have ideological early warning mechanisms and early intervention in threats to the ideological security of the CCP. The CCP has a long history of viewing religion as a force that crosses boundaries. So it gets at this internal-external security nexus and it's a source of ideological sort of justification and authority that it falls outside the CCP's framework. And so if you look at, for example, the way the CCP saw the role of religion in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, religion was regarded as particularly important and threatening in that process. And so controlling religion, particularly forms of religious practice that cross state boundaries and have independent locuses of authority outside the CCP framework are sort of areas that have been particularly targeted. So I think that's part, although not all of what's going on with the changes in China's minority policy, even in areas that haven't been especially unstable at this point. Okay, next again would be a set of two questions because they really are kind of in parallel. The first part of it comes from Matt Kennedy, a source alumni. How do you see Japan and Russia as influencing China's national security strategy? The second questions come from a student from UCL, Lois Fernando Junqueria. I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. And the question is about where is the place of Taiwan in China's national security law or national security strategy? Okay, so on Taiwan, let me start there. I think that's probably, well, yeah, let me start there for a couple of reasons. You know, Taiwan falls into the traditional framework of its part of, from the CCP standpoint. It is part of China. It should be under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Outside forces should not intervene to prevent that from happening. It's the idea that Taiwan is a renegade province that eventually needs to be brought into the fold is pretty, I think there's actually some, there's a fair amount of consistency on Taiwan policy. The key question is, you know, on what timeframe this problem needs to be resolved. And there's been a lot of debate about this in the United States and in Washington recently about whether or not Xi Jinping's indication and putting certain benchmarks on the timeframe for achieving national rejuvenation, whether that puts a specific expiration date on the status quo with Taiwan. And I don't know the answer to that. And I don't think the national security concept gives us an answer to the question of on what timeframe these things need to be addressed. The strategy is not necessarily one that lays down at least in the materials. We have specific temporal benchmarks. So what we have are comments that Xi Jinping has made about the need to resolve the Taiwan challenge, you know, during his tenure was one reported set of remarks and the sense that this isn't something that the CCP will let go forever. And so as they talk more and more about nearing this, you know, we're now at the 100th anniversary of the founding of the party. So now we're looking at this period between that and the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the PRC that maybe we might now be working on a clock that's running down. But the short answer is that I think that the CCP position on Taiwan is essentially the same and that I don't think this strategy in particular tells us that much new about Taiwan because that's an area that we knew a little bit more about before and it doesn't give us as firm sense of the timing. Similarly on Japan, I think, you know, we knew that the territorial conflict over the Senkaku and Diaoyu Islands was important to China before. And so I think, you know, in some ways the value of the national security concept is less what it reveals about these areas where there are territorial disputes because we had a lot of information about those before and what I'm seeing is largely, you know, largely consistent. There's not necessarily a new policy on the Diaoyu Islands. But I think it suggests certainly that there's not going to be a lot of room for compromise on places that have now been defined as internal and part of China's state security concept. So one of the things I think that this strategy suggests or this framework suggests to us overall is that fundamentally, if what has to be secured is the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the ability of outside powers to compromise with or reassure China is more limited than we might hope because we're not necessarily, so you think about it a classic deterrence framework, you deter behavior in part by either denying or punishing the other side for trying to get what it wants, but you also offer some reassurance that if they don't take those steps, they will get something out of the deal, okay? And I think what this suggests is that we may be in a period where deterrence is hard because the thing that has to be reassured about is the political position of the CCP. And that's going to be a much more difficult or unpalatable thing for the United States, for Japan, for Taiwan, for much of the democratic world to wanna give any sort of reassurance or guarantees about, but that has the potential to really heighten the security dilemma on both Taiwan and Japan and the territorial conflicts there. Okay, the next question is a very long question which I would not normally put to you because it's not really China policy focus, but since it actually falls within your areas of competence, I'll put it to you. And the question comes from- Oh goodness, okay. It's from about US policy towards China. The question comes from Philip Lim, who is a source alumni, and he's referencing to the imitation of George Kennan's long telegrams that came out about two months ago. And what he really wants to ask you are two specific questions, apart from your general reactions to that proposal. In particular, he wants you to focus on what you thought about the proposal that the United States should reach out to the moderate elite factions within the Communist Party in order to encourage a leadership change within China that could change things. The second is to ask you about the idea that the United States should take a very robust line, draw a clear red line, say on Taiwan or South China Sea on the assumption that the Chinese leadership always just respect strength and nothing else. Do you agree with either of them? Let me take them one at a time and try to answer them quickly. First, while there is a diversity of views in the Chinese political system, we have also seen that Xi Jinping has a pretty clear ability to remove people for deviating from the overall direction that he's set for the CCP. So I'm not sure that it's, I think we have to think about the possibility of investing in relationship, if you were to embark on that strategy as a thought experiment, you could be investing in people who could be gone next year. So first of all, it's not clear how much of a moderate faction, right? Separate faction remains. A lot of the people who've been purged at the elite level were purged on the accusation that they were trying to form such a faction. So it's not clear to me that that that's a coherent sort of group within the CCP that can be encouraged because to do so might indicate that those are the next people Xi Jinping should purge. In fact, that's exactly what I'd expect under this national security or state security framework. And second, the United States has not always been great at predicting who's going to be a moderate once they ascend to the leadership, right? There were some speculation about who Xi Jinping would be. I'm saying with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. So I think it's a very, very risky business to try to bank on a leadership change in an authoritarian regime going in a particular direction. 50% of the time when autocracies fall and are replaced by a new regime, it's another autocracy. So I'm just not sure that that will actually produce a fundamentally different set of security behavior. It's just not clear to me what the prospects for realistic success are there. You have to, the decision tree forks in so many different places. And only one of those leads you to what we might consider policy success that I would have to think very, very carefully before that kind of strategy made sense. Now, should the United States be very clear about, I think to use, I think it was Zellick use the phrase, deal with China as it is today while hoping for the China of tomorrow and trying to persuade or create the China of tomorrow. I think that's a realistic and strategy for the United States and one that we've seen parts of the US policy establishment have for a long time. And I wouldn't have a problem with that as the core approach or sort of philosophy that we need to adopt. To the second question about that the US lay out certain red lines and this gets to the point that I raised a moment ago about deterrence and the flip side of deterrence being reassurance. And is that something that the United States can actually engage in credibly right now when the thing that has to be reassured is the political leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. It strikes me that by China's framing it that way and I would put a fair amount of the bonus here on the CCP framing that by making it about the political security of the Chinese Communist Party as in that Xinhua tweet that I put up a moment ago earlier in this afternoon's talk that China has made it much harder for the United States certainly and probably some other countries to engage in the reassurance part of a deterrence framework. And so that, you know, the United States I think can lay out red lines and that's important to do, right? It's important to do that credibly to have deterrence be viable. But my concern is actually that Chinese framing and behavior has sort of cut off or put the United States and other countries in a position where one of the key or core aspects of deterrence that you need for the whole framework to work is increasingly politically non-viable. And again, that's largely because of a framing that's coming from the Chinese side. So I think the implications for stability are potentially bumpy. Okay, next questions come from a source graduate Francesca Marie Monti. You talk about the shift from stability maintenance to proactive prevention. Would you say that the Chinese social credit system is a tool of the grand strategy of preventions under the national security strategy? The short answer is yes. I see social credit is one of these tools that tries to, again, get at this element of ideological security of social stability and that tries to get what some Chinese writings refer to as infrastructural information, right? Basic information about patterns of behavior that can be integrated with current indicators very quickly to suggest a course of action for the CCP. And so what I see a lot of these platforms and the project of data integration is about getting a set of information integrated very quickly to suggest an optimal course of behavior. Do you try to offer this person compensation because they're really, really mad because they're below the minimum livelihood threshold and they can't get work and they have an ailing parent and so you could really co-op this person and demobilize them by providing social welfare assistance. Or is this somebody who's the nature of their petitioning behavior and their grievances and their role in the community suggests that you can't do that but they really only get active at a couple of times a year. So as long as you make sure they stay home for a week around this sensitive anniversary, you're fine. That's I think the type of social management that we see some of these information platforms including but not limited to social credit heading towards. Now I wanna be clear that, you know that my point about information islands earlier was intended to signal that some of our coverage of things like social credit or Chinese surveillance focus more on the aspirations and don't tend to clearly distinguish between aspirations and marketing of these technologies that's being done by companies that wanna sell their products. So they kind of overstate the omniscience and the omnipotence of these tools because they have every incentive to do that. Whereas sometimes what we see on the back end is that the use of these tools is much messier. They don't always work as promised. And so I see social credit as pretty fritting pretty squarely in that overall characterization. It's pretty fragmented but it is increasingly trending toward integration and application to social governance and doing so very quickly. The party states moved very, very quickly to try to solve these integration problems, fix some of these patchworks and create a cohesive central system where before we had a bunch of local systems that didn't talk to each other. I think you could describe some of what's happening in the social credit space in a very similar way but I do think it's part of the overall toolkit. You've got about four minutes left. I think there's at least one last question. And this come from Pyke Lee. How likely does nationalism plays a role in maintaining China's internal security? I think the second part of the question is probably much more than we will think. When internal security and external threat are mixed such as in the scenario of Hong Kong, do you think China is likely to use external threat to divert tension from internal insecurity? Short answer again is yes but I actually think it's a bit more complicated than that because I think the same is actually true of internal insecurity and the threat of terrorist violence on Xinjiang. The party state tends to release information a little bit later after an incident has occurred. It tends to, there's a really good piece coming out soon about the timing of state media coverage of terrorist violence in the British Journal of Political Science that suggests that this is sort of strategically timed and the argument that they make which I think is convincing is that this reminds people in China that there is a potential threat, that the CCP or the party state is defending them from that threat but doesn't make people insecure or lose confidence in the CCP's leadership. So it's trying to strike a balance between the idea that if you tell people there's a threat they'll want you to do something about it as the government but you also want to signal strength and the ability to deal with that threat. And so we know from some of the other work on repression that it actually plays a signaling role to regime supporters. There's been some interesting work done on this in the Latin American context. And so I think we probably want to look at how the CCP frames and communicates threats internally through the same light. It is partly about convincing people that there's a need for the CCP to take these actions but not go so far in portraying the threat that it makes the CCP look weak or incompetent in its response. Okay, well, thank you very much, Shina. I think you have been extremely generous in sharing your very insightful thoughts with us. I'm sure that many will find what you have said very provocative and in a very positive way. I'm afraid that our time is up so I have to draw this to a closed with apologies to people who have raised very, very good questions indeed that I am not able to fit in purely because of incompetence on my part in sharing and moderating. But thank you once again, Shina, for this fantastic webinar. I hope to see some of you in the audience next week. Thank you very much for having me and for a really excellent thought-provoking set of questions. Great pleasure to have you. Goodbye.