ABSTRACT
Introduction A simple question initially motivated the research reported here: what is China’s National Security Commission (Zhongyang guojia anquan weiyuanhui), established
in January 2014 and announced in connection with the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of November 2013? This question immediately raised at least two second-order issues: what are the organization’s missions (e.g. the balance between domestic and international security), structure, staffing, operation and activities to date? And, what are the implications of this new organization for the roles and prerogatives of preexistent players and organizations in the foreign, military and domestic security policy-making realms? Despite the progress reported here in addressing these questions, at this early date in the institution’s evolution many questions and uncertainties remain. The National Security Commission (NSC) is a work in progress. The exploration of this new institution raises two broader, more important issues
than simply how this potentially key policy institution works and what its practical consequences for China’s internal and external behavior may be. The first of these questions concerns Xi Jinping’s transition to power. When considering the transition to power of newly elected American presidents, for example, we fully expect them to put in place new advisors and key agency heads and to structure the inter-agency process in a manner suiting their own objectives, skills, political needs and comfort level. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, famously in the case of China policy, largely bypassed the Department of State and Congress in shaping the momentous shifts they were contemplating in the 1970s by utilizing an empowered National Security Council staff. Both Nixon and Carter brought in bureaucratic outsiders to help effect the changes they most sought, believing that the established institutions and personalities would obstruct their aims. Xi Jinping is doing just this, trying to construct new institutional pathways to shape policy and bring in new people not so beholden to the previous constellation of interests. He also is using the creation of the NSC to seek to consolidate his personal sway in the domestic security, foreign policy and military realms. In short, Xi is both driving to achieve better policy coordination and greater personal control in the system. Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were inheritors of broad foreign policy from Deng
Xiaoping and both placed considerable store in the professional foreign policy apparatus (the State Council, its relevant ministries and the public intellectuals associated with these structures) to advise on, define, shape and conduct policy. When Xi Jinping came to power, it appears from interviews1 that he believed that foreign (and internal security) policy needed considerable adjustment, that he wanted to be the prime mover toward a vision of a rejuvenated China more active on the
world stage, and that he is less comfortable with the professional foreign policy bureaucracy and its associated public intellectuals than were Jiang and Hu. Xi also is less at ease than his predecessor with the relatively independent internal security apparatus that Zhou Yongkang had consolidated and with the free-wheeling corruption and untethered military Hu Jintao had tolerated. A notable Global Times article of 18 December 2014 put it this way, referring to a PLA Daily article published the previous day: ‘This article is a show of the authorities’ determination to continue the corruption fight despite resistance from some interest groups, analysts said, though the fight inside the military is much harder than the fight inside the government or the Party’.2 In January 2015 Xi struck out at the Ministry of State Security and 16 generals. In short, Xi arguably is trying to adjust (or build new) institutions and put in place
new personnel to better reflect his will. One way to look at this is in organizational terms-he seeks to make the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) the key instrument in both developing (and perhaps implementing) policy, feeling that the professional, state bureaucracy is not highly reflective of his vision-the professional bureaucracy is too cautious, too co-opted by traditional arrangements and not intellectually innovative. On 23 January 2015, the Politburo convened a meeting in which it explicitly called for state institutions to tow the Party line more obediently, saying:
What all this will add up to in the end and how the Party can be an effective implementer remains to be seen. In an extensive November 2014 speech at the ‘Central Foreign Policy Work Conference’ General Secretary Xi said,
This doesn’t sound like someone fully satisfied with the foreign policy and domestic security policy-making processes that he inherited. A second big question is related to the first, but remains largely unaddressed
below-to what extent will Xi Jinping be able to restore the strong-man leadership role that he seemingly envisions for himself and that is reflected in his acquisition of all major cross-system integrator roles [chairmanships of leading groups and the Central Military Commission (CMC)] and his penchant to fashion a far more personalized leadership image? It is worth observing, for example, that less than two years into his job an anthology of his speeches was issued under the title, Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Put simply, is he trying to impose a degree of personal control over a pluralized society and ever-more complex bureaucracy that they will find difficult to accept? Is Xi defining for himself a role that is so extensive that it may exceed anyone’s span of effective control? The new society and greatly changed bureaucracy produced by three-plus decades of reform is not the same governance challenge that Deng Xiaoping faced when he returned to office in mid-1977. Nonetheless, the observer must be impressed with Xi’s advances to date. Recalcitrant and fractious society and bureaucracy aside, if one examines the
aggregate of foreign policy initiatives taken in connection with the 2014 APEC and G-20 meetings, and the 28-29 November 2014 Foreign Policy Work Conference, their dynamism and coherence are impressive: a seeming decrease in the temperature of Sino-Japanese conflict; free trade arrangements with South Korea and Australia (two US allies); climate, military and trade progress with the United States; and, forging ahead with an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, BRICS Bank and Silk Road initiatives in maritime areas and in Central Asia (e.g. Kazakhstan). What we see emerging is a simultaneous attempt to lower the temperature of abrasions on China’s periphery while enunciating a strategically ambitious long-term external policy, amidst a tightening internal political circumstance. These are some of the larger issues to which the case study below speaks. We now
turn to examining the new, evolving NSC, the systemic problems which gave rise to it, and what we know about this new organization and the challenges of building it, returning to larger implications at the conclusion of this essay.
