Colonel Kyle Marcrum and Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, visiting faculty at the China Landpower Studies Center at the US Army War College and an associate professor at the University of Texas—Austin, joins the CLSC Dialogues to discuss the People’s Republic of China’s four Global Initiatives and her recent publication on China’s mobilizational initiatives.
Keywords: China, Global Initiatives, Community of Common Destiny
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COL Kyle Marcrum
Welcome to the
CLSC Dialogues, a production of the China Landpower Studies Center at the US Army War College. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or the Department of War. I’m Colonel Kyle Marcrum, the Director of Global Research here at the US Army War College, and your host for today’s conversation. Today I’m joined virtually by Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, visiting faculty at the China Landpower Studies Center at the US Army War College. She is concurrently an associate professor at the University of Texas—Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program and serves as editor in chief of the Texas National Security Review. Dr. Chestnut Greitens research focuses on China’s internal security and foreign policy. She is the author of two books and is currently writing a book on how the prioritization of regime security shapes China’s grand strategy.
Sheena, thank you for joining us today.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Marcrum
So, you write a lot about China’s global initiatives, and I was wondering if you could describe these global initiatives for us and what China’s goals are for these initiatives.
Chestnut Greitens
Yeah. So, these global initiatives are something that Xi Jinping started announcing in the first half of the 2020s. And he has four major initiatives. That’s how Chinese scholars and Chinese state media refer to them. The first one he announced was the Global Development Initiative. That was followed by the Global Security Initiative, which is the one that I’ve focused most on a little over a year later. That was followed by a Global Civilizational Initiative, and then finally the Global Governance Initiative, which was announced last fall during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in China itself. And these four initiatives form part of what Xi Jinping has talked about for several years as a phrase that’s translated as “community of common destiny” or “community of a shared future for mankind”. There are a couple different ways of translating the Chinese phrase, but this is really, I think the best way to describe it is Xi Jinping’s vision for global order. The initiatives have been described as strategic, the strategic guidance for implementing that vision and turning it into a reality. So, it’s really about the wiring of the international system, about global governance, but just about how global politics is organized and to make it compatible with China’s vision and China’s priorities.
So, in the case of the Global Security Initiative—maybe it’s helpful to give an example for one of these for your listeners—The Global Security Initiative is both the security pillar of the Community of Common Destiny, and Chinese scholars tell us it’s also the external projection of Xi Jinping’s comprehensive national security concept, which is this thing he announced in 2014. It’s his concept of how to make the Communist Party secure and safe in power at the top of China’s socialist system. So, it is a regime security concept, and the Global Security Initiative is the external projection of that. And Chinese scholars, sources, white papers are really clear that that’s what the Global Security Initiative is and what it’s doing for China’s national security strategy.
Marcrum
Maybe we can zoom out a little bit here and kind of start with the basics on it. You mentioned the Community of Common Destiny, and as the editor in chief of the Texas National Security Review, the Texas National Security Review paper by Liza Tobin is still kind of the standard about the Community of Common Destiny. Can you talk about briefly what is the Community of Common Destiny? What does Xi Jinping mean when he says that? And what are they trying to accomplish?
Chestnut Greitens
The Community of Common Destiny is really Xi Jinping’s vision for transforming global governance, right? And so, it’s got a kind of a funny English translation that sounds grandiose but, frankly, these concepts are pretty vague, especially when they first get announced in Chinese as well as in English. And so, I think, you know, for me, watching how we talk about the Community of Common Destiny and the Global Security Initiative, there’s been a little bit too much of a tendency to dismiss them as empty rhetoric, because this is how China makes policy, right? And maybe we’ll get into this later, but they start with slogans, and then the implementation often takes several years to fill in. That’s very unlike a policy rollout in the US context or, or European context. And so, when you hear a phrase like that and it seems important, but it’s fuzzy, it’s worth sort of saying, okay, what’s the principle or the vision? Because that’s what the Community of Common Destiny has been. It’s Xi Jinping’s vision for transforming the international environment to make it compatible with and friendly to China’s domestic governance model and China’s emergence as a global leader. And so, it’s a really central concept, and has been since the late 2010s, for China’s foreign policy framework and its overall national security strategy. It’s a way of building the new type of major power relations or new type of international relations that will facilitate China’s rejuvenation by 2049. And so, Xi Jinping, this is something Xi Jinping has been talking about as the guiding vision for China’s foreign policy for years now.
Just to be clear, right, when you talk about the phrase community of common destiny, as with a lot of things in Chinese political discourse and political talk, Xi Jinping didn’t come up with the term. I think Hu Jintao has been using it since 2007, 2008. But Xi Jinping was the one in a speech in Moscow in, I think 2013, I’d have to check, to really bring it back and make it this central organizing principle of China’s foreign policy and China’s vision for how the world should run. And that vision is about making the world compatible with China’s approach to security for the party in power. And so, it’s really a way of articulating a vision of world order that makes the world safe and friendly to the Communist Party. Does that answer your question?
Marcrum
No, that absolutely does. You know, that’s really interesting—
Chestnut Greitens
And I will say, I think the Liza Tobin piece, I was not involved in in that particular TNSR piece. That was before my time. But I do think it’s a great read and would encourage everybody to go look it up at TNSR.org.
Marcrum
Yeah, it’s fantastic piece and I still it’s still required reading here at the Army War College when we talk about, you know, community of shared—or the shared future for mankind, shared community of common destiny, however, we want to translate this phrase, it’s still the standard for it. But I think it’s an interesting point that you raise. And this is the, you know, one of the reasons I asked that question is a lot of times we hear from people that China is not really looking to change the world order. But then we have things like the Community of Common Destiny and these other things that in your paper you describe them as “mobilizational initiatives”. And you briefly talked about how they create this slogan, and then everything falls out below it. Can you talk a little bit more about that with the Global Security Initiative? And how is China implementing using the Global Security Initiative? How are they doing that to accomplish this new global world order?
Chestnut Greitens
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think this is a key point that’s led to some real misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the Global Security Initiative, because what, the way that the Global Security Initiative works, I think, is—and we have a paper coming out with two great colleagues, Isaac Kardon and Cameron Waltz, in China Quarterly that’s going to make this argument later this year—but the piece, in that piece we argue and, I think, show that China is a Leninist party state. And in the Leninist party state, you use mobilizational campaigns to pursue change. That’s actually there’s a long history of experts on China and on Leninist party, Communist party systems, looking at how you get policy change done in a system that’s run by a Communist party or a single party Leninist system. And these mobilizational campaigns, we call this campaign style governance. So, there’s a big slogan. The party sort of mobilizes everybody toward that goal. And mobilization governance has a couple of features. It is a strategy for change, right? So, first of all, that’s really clear from the process alone.
And China, I will say, I don’t think there’s any debate that China wants to change global governance. When you read what they say about the four major initiatives, that’s very clear. One of them is a global governance initiative that talks about how global security governance has many inadequacies and must be reformed. Right? This is a case where I don’t think I think we can just take them at their word. They’re saying it and they’re doing it, and the rhetoric and the activities line up. And I think we need to be careful about what kind of change they mean and not mirror image and assume that they’re going to do it the same way we’re going to do it. But first of all, you know, a mobilization approach to global governance uses kind of slogans and mobilizing the Chinese party state to go talk to other countries and try to get them to sign on to the slogan and the vision. And then you fill in the details based on what you can get done later. So, mobilizational governance is always, almost always, in a domestic Chinese context really flexible because you got to give sort of this really big, complex Chinese political system latitude to figure out the best way to achieve the vision in the slogan. And then once you figure out what works, you kind of scale that more systematically across the system.
But, you know, this is part of why I think we’ve seen China go out and recruit a bunch of countries to say nice things about the global security initiative, using the phrase “support” in Chinese when they can. But if they can get “welcome” or “greatly appreciate”, then that’s fine too. And so, there’s this—Chinese is a very formulaic language, especially in formal state rhetoric. But the language about how countries, you know, when they say nice things about GSI is actually highly nonstandard, which is part of that flexibility. What that does is portray like a rhetorical consensus in the international system around China’s vision without actually having worked out any of the details yet. And that gives the system time to build consensus and to, you know, try to sort of like push forward the actual lines of effort. But it means they don’t, they’re not bound to any specific deliverables in a sort of set time frame. So, you can’t, it also makes it harder to declare the initiative of failure because there’s no metric from the beginning. That’s the way that mobilization kind of functions. But I think the important things for readers to know is like, this is taking a Chinese domestic policy process that is a way that the system tries to change policy and change the functioning of the system and exporting that to the international system. And so, first, it’s aimed at change. It’s going to be big slogans, “big phrase” in Chinese is literally “big propaganda”, followed by “big implementation”. But that might be a couple of years, right? And it’s always going to be highly improvisational and flexible implementation in the initial rollout period.
And so, I think for us who, if we’re used to a Western model of policymaking with plans and lines of effort and deliverables and timetables, this doesn’t fit our image of a policy plan. And so, there can be a tendency to say, well, it’s not real. It
is real. It’s a Chinese way of doing policy change. And we need to, you know, not dismiss it just because it doesn’t look like ours. So, that’s what I mean by mobilization.
And then on the Global Security Initiative, I think this has taken two forms. One, we’ve been in this phase where a lot of the mobilization has been directed at just going out and getting other countries to say nice things, to show up at certain forums, to portray that everybody is on board with this. And then we’ve seen China kind of flexibly trying to see where it can get some quick wins in the implementation. And I will put those in two baskets. One is trying to reform global security, governance and regional security governance in ways that really reduce the centrality of or kind of work around, bypass, the US alliance and partnership system. China has been very clear that it views the US Alliance and Partnership Network as not contributing to the kind of global security that China cares about. And the argument that it makes in places like the global South is that US ally and partner relationships are zero-sum. They create security for the set of US network of US allies and partners at the expense of everybody else in the world. And we can talk about whether that’s a fair argument. I don’t think it is. That’s the persuasive case that China is trying to make to shift, you know, regional security arrangements and governance in ways that reduce the role of the United States and make it less important in global security.
The other part is creating a whole set of global security architecture around China’s vision and security, which, again, is really about security for the people in power and the right to stay there. And so, for China, that means police using police. It means using surveillance technology. It means using state security and political police forces and tools. And China is building an entire sort of global security architecture based on police and internal security cooperation. And, you know, we can talk about why that gets some traction in certain parts of the world if that’s of interest, because I do think it really matters for what we do about it. But they’re basically selling a vision that says, hey, you know, countries in the world, lots of you have security problems that aren’t solved by this sort of unmatched high end conventional military power of the United States. You know, you really have more of a public safety security problem. The US can’t help you with that. We can help you. Here’s the example China’s developed. We’re one of the safest countries in the world, crime-wise. So, we got you covered. The US doesn’t have your back. Get on board with this architecture and this vision that we’re building. And in the process, that’s building a whole new China-centric global security architecture that the US is really marginalized from. And it’s pretty clearly authoritarian-compatible. And so, I think this is something we should be pretty concerned about for a whole slew of different reasons.
Marcrum
The idea of changing their perspective on security that really comes through in the Shanghai Cooperative Organization as well, because they have this idea that through the SCO, this redefinition of terrorism, where it includes political dissidents and separatists and things like that. And so, you have this kind of authoritarian suppression on people kind of vibe, even through what has loosely been termed kind of a NATO-like alliance organization, although that’s a very unfair comparison, very much devaluing NATO by saying that. But it’s kind of how they’re doing that. Are you seeing that same kind of definition through the Global Security Initiative and some of the more policing cooperations that you’re seeing?
Chestnut Greitens
Yeah. So, this is what’s fascinating is the Global Security Initiative has kind of incorporated some previous Chinese security platforms and efforts into its vision. This is something Xi Jinping has done with domestic security as well, right? He’s taken old ideas, old efforts, but he’s really transformed them into a much more systematic, comprehensive program and system. And the Global Security Initiative appears to be doing the same thing on China’s global security efforts.
So, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as you mentioned, has been engaged in this effort for two plus decades now to rewrite how countries in Central Asia, in particular, talk about terrorism in a way that includes and criminalizes political dissent, as you mentioned. And the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is described as one of the places where the Global Security Initiative is already best institutionalized, right? And so, the SCO and Central Asia as a region are sort of a key area of focus for the Global Security Initiative. But so is, for example, mainland Southeast Asia, where China has really built up a forum, I think in some ways, trying to catch it up to the SEO called the Lancang-Mekong Integrated Law Enforcement and Security Cooperation Center, LMLECC is the abbreviation we use for the translation from Chinese. It’s a long title. But this group has now has a center in Kunming and has really expanded a lot of its, you know, security cooperation in Southeast Asia. Some of that is, you know, combating scam centers and cross-border smuggling and doing joint patrols on the river. But also some of it is about social stability and supporting the regimes in that part of the world, that not all of which are democratic, in maintaining domestic, you know, law and order and social control. And so, it’s a mix of dealing with nontraditional security issues that countries and probably citizens in the region really care about. And some of those are legitimate security problems that need to be addressed. But it gets melded and blended with this highly authoritarian model of state and regime control. And so, the problem is in these cooperation mechanisms, you kind of can’t have one without the other.
The other area, I think, that China has really put some effort into trying to building, build this security outreach that’s centered on China’s approach and China’s vision is in the Pacific Islands, where, you know, you literally have Chinese police officers trying to go through the Solomons and teach, you know, the Fengqiao model, which is not just about police training. It’s a whole model of governance that is deeply rooted in Maoist party history, and not even to contemporary Chinese experience, but like the peak Maoist, you know, Communist Party tools of social control. And there’s a great article recently in The New York Times about the local pushback and local contestation as people actually figured out what that model involved. And one of the things we’re seeing is that as people get more familiar with what China is offering or promoting, not everybody sure they like it, but that process is pretty early.
So again, I think China has most concentrated its efforts on its regional periphery, right, the SCO countries, mainland Southeast Asia, Pacific islands. But there’s also a global element of this. And so, the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, which is hosted by China’s Ministry of Public Security, the main national police and internal security agency in the PRC. That forum that they host every year in Lianyungang, is actually China’s largest global security convening. It’s bigger than the Xiangshan Forum hosted by the Ministry of Defense. And I think we need to take that seriously, right? Because that’s a huge part of how China is trying to build partnerships and coalitions around global security. But they’re using a set of tools that we’re not used to tracking. And so, in some ways this is really flown, I think way, way too much under the radar because institutionally, it’s not something the US is well designed to observe and measure, let alone even sort of postured to do something about or counter.
Marcrum
Well, that’s really interesting because you talk about how institutionally we’re just not there. You know, I attended the Xiangshan Forum multiple times, and, you know, it’s things like the Russian defense minister and the Chinese minister of national defense are the guest speakers, and it’s thousands of people. And you’re saying that this is bigger, and this is, you know, and we’re completely caught off guard. But part of it is, I will say, is how we’re designed institutionally. The United States has a security cooperation program that is focused on the military, and we have certain rules about working with police forces and things like that. So, you end up with the US military helping foreign militaries and trying to spread our ways that way. But then we have this gap where we do have legal attaches, the LEGATs, in our embassies, and we do have some, but it’s so much smaller. And if we’re going to compete with China, that’s where we really have a big gap there. You mentioned the focus being kind of in this, kind of China’s periphery—Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands—and that’s another place where we have a complete gap, particularly the Pacific Islands, where, you know, we have I think we’re up to three embassies in the Pacific islands, but two of them are one individual each, and one has to, we have one security cooperation office there that has to cover all these islands, and most of the time just spent flying around. So, we really have a big gap there. That’s really interesting.
Can I ask, as we’re coming close on our time here, can you talk to me about why this is important for army leaders to understand?
Chestnut Greitens
I think the Pacific Islands is actually a great example, because some of the countries in the Pacific Islands don’t even have militaries for us to work with, right? And so, again, that creates a little bit of a gap. And the US interagency, as you mentioned, is just poorly postured to compete in an asymmetric, largely nonmilitary domain of security cooperation and security competition. And so, more concretely, why I think this is of concern to the Army and really to the US government more broadly, is that this is a way that China is building a global security presence that doesn’t get as much attention as the PLA, and therefore sometimes doesn’t get the same pushback when and where it’s appropriate. And so, it allows China to build a security presence, to build partnerships in, with a foreign partner, with some of the key actors. There are weakly-institutionalized countries around the world where the security ministries are the power players. And if that’s who China’s building relationships with, I think we should be aware of that. It’s a way of building influence that advances China’s broader strategic objectives in a number of other ways: national rejuvenation, reducing international space for Taiwan, you name it, right? It allows China new pathway of influence beyond the economic gravity that the size of the Chinese economy gives Beijing.
And then, you know, the other reason is that this can really affect the operating environment for US allied and partnered forces. This is peacetime shaping. And if, you know, China is training foreign police forces, exporting police equipment, especially exporting surveillance technology, where some of that data may be getting back to Beijing, and they’re doing it in a place because it’s not nonmilitary, where, you know, the US also has forces or allies and partners have forces, that’s a part of the operational environment that I think that we really need to be aware of if we’re sending people out there. I think about it, frankly, as somebody who’s an academic in a civilian capacity, who’s students go not just to China, right? But now we have to think about our Chinese surveillance platforms being used in hundred other countries around the world. And what effect does that have on the operating, global operating environment or the local operating environment for the US military and our allies and partners?
I do think there are models that we could augment that would allow us to compete more effectively. So, I was just in Italy visiting a Carabinieri global training center that the US has supported. I actually think this is a great model under the current National Defense Strategy, because it is providing capacity to local police forces in places where China might otherwise be stepping in and doing things that that are concerning, both from a human rights perspective and from this strategic influence operating environment standpoint. And it’s partner led, right? This is a really good burden sharing model, because this is something our partners and allies are better at doing and willing to do. And I think we ought to sort of think about burden sharing models that allow Australia, Japan, Italy to take the lead on some of these things. And that seems fully compatible with the current strategy to me. So, I actually think there’s some interesting room to explore, some new models that would enable us to be better positioned in this asymmetric security competition. My concern is just that we haven’t actually defined the problem well enough to figure out how to use a fragmented interagency to engage productively. I think the answers were there. I just, I think we’ve been a little behind the curve.
Marcrum
That’s fantastic. I really appreciate your time. We can go, easily go another 30 minutes with this. But for our listeners, where can they go to get more information about the GSI and the other initiatives?
Chestnut Greitens
I have a piece in
Parameters. If people want to look at that, that talks about China’s use of the police and internal security apparatus really is a form of strategic land power to get these strategic effects so that that’s one place. The other place is there are two reports now, three actually from the Carnegie Endowment that I’ve worked on, where we’ve built data sets because nobody had actual data on where China was doing some of these activities. So, we looked at where China has police security cooperation agreements, police training, and then we have one that’s about really about the Global Security Initiative and how China is pushing diplomatically its vision of this concept of regime security and trying to build global security architecture and governance that’s compatible with China’s vision of regime security and, quote unquote, “national security”.
And so, any of those reports, they’re long, because we want to put all the detail for somebody who cares about a specific country to look up what’s going on in their country, if they’re in a SCO shop somewhere or something, you know. People can also always email me for specific follow-up questions. It’s been great to be affiliated with the Army War College. And I’m, it’s been a privilege to be a resource for anybody who has questions about any of this. And so, people can also feel free to contact me if there’s something I can do to help.
Marcrum
Well, awesome. Thank you so much for joining us, Sheena. It’s great to see you again, and I appreciate you coming on the show and we’ll hopefully have you again on soon.
Chestnut Greitens
Sounds great. Thanks for having me.
Marcrum
All right. Thank you so much.