Debating Human Security in China: Towards Discursive Power?

Abstract

While the concept of Human Security is sometimes dismissed in China as an irrelevant and alien "Western" concept, it has been the subject of serious academic debate -particularly in the mid-2000s, when a series of crises led to a rethinking of the nature of security in and for China. But like other theories and concepts which have been largely developed outside China, Human Security has been "Sinicised" to reflect Chinese contexts and preferences. In the process, the emphasis on the individual human being that is normally at the heart of Human Security discourses is typically replaced by a focus on the collective humankind, and Chinese analyses are often packaged together with broader understandings of non-traditional security. This results in a Chinese version of the concept where the state remains a key referent point and actor -indeed, the state is the key guarantor of Human Security, not a threat to it. And it is this Chinese definition, so the argument goes, that Chinese practices should be judged against, and not supposed universal definitions that in reality only reflect the history and values (and interests) of Western states.Key words: China, Human Security, global norms, universalism, security studies 2014 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the UNDP Human Development Report that introduced the search for "a new concept of Human Security" (UNDP 1994, 3) that turned the focus of security from states to people, and saw the solutions to insecurity in "development, not arms (UNDP 1994, 1). The basic thrust of the Human Security (HS) agenda has often been simplified to the objective of attaining individual "freedom from fear and want." Within this emphasis on freedom from fear, there are implications for the nature of domestic political governance that do not sit easily with political systems and processes in non-democratic countries. As such, we might suspect that the HS concept might not be well suited to Chinese understandings and discourses of security. And indeed, this is partly the case -it is not a term that is widely used in official policy discourses, and as we shall see, there 2 is a strand of academic thought that sees it as another way in which the West tries to promote its human rights agendas and impose its liberal preferences on places like China under the false banner of "universalism" (Hu 2011).But this rejectionist position does not tell the full story. While freedom from fear forms a core part of the HS agenda associated with Norwegian and Canadian approaches, preferences associated with Japanese conceptions stress the importance of freedom from want instead. This has provided a conceptual ambiguity that allows Chinese analysts to focus on socio-economic agendas rather than more "problematic" political-legal ones. Moreover, a series of crises since the late 1990s have resulted in a rethink of what constitutes the nature of security, and what constitute the major security challenges not just to China, but also in China. As part of this process, issues relating...

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