Publication: China Brief Volume: 24 Issue: 15, The Jamestown Foundation: Global Research & Analysis
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) engages in extensive security cooperation with other single-party socialist states. This includes deploying the People’s Armed Police (PAP) to train paramilitary and police forces in these countries, offering cybersecurity support, and assisting with online information control.
Policymakers and academics in the PRC see their country as the leading single-party socialist state to its junior partners—Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, and North Korea—in a “Community of Common Destiny for Socialist Countries,” helping sustain these states’ regimes and thereby buttressing its own claims to legitimacy.
The PRC promotes the concept of the Community internally, but exercises caution by rarely mentioning it in its general external discourse to avoid international reputational costs. This is in contrast to other multilateral groupings that the PRC spearheads, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS.
Background photo of Dancers celebrate DPRK–China friendship at the Arirang Mass Games by Roman Harak, from Wikimedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:North_Korea_-_China_friendship_(5578914865).jpg)