The Rise of the Chinese Security State

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the Chinese domestic security apparatus has expanded dramatically. “Stability maintenance” operations have become a top priority for local Chinese authorities. We argue that this trend goes back to the early 1990s, when central Party authorities adopted new governance models that differed dramatically from those of the 1980s. They increased the bureaucratic rank of public security chiefs within the Party apparatus, expanded the reach of the Party political-legal apparatus into a broader range of governance issues, and altered cadre evaluation standards to increase the sensitivity of local authorities to social unrest. We show that the origin of these changes lies in a policy response to the developments of 1989–1991, namely the Tiananmen democracy movement and the collapse of communist political systems in Eastern Europe. Over the past twenty years, these practices have developed into an extensive stability maintenance apparatus, whereby local governance is increasingly oriented around the need to respond to social unrest, whether through concession or repression. Chinese authorities now appear to be rethinking these developments, but the direction of reform remains unclear.

Fragmented control: Governing contentious labor organizations in China

“…11–12). The expansion of the state security apparatus entailed both pluralization and localization of stability maintenance, as the range of local state actors involved grew to include bureaucratic actors (Wang & Minzner, , pp. 356–357).…”

Ethnic minority empowerment and marginalization: Yi labour migrants outside China’s Autonomous Regions

“…Ever since the Tiananmen Square student movement in 1989, the Chinese government has invested considerable resources in attempts to dissipate, accommodate, or crush the collective actions of workers. 6 Since the Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, the primary tool for coping with labour disputes across China has been a set of policies designed to maintain social stability. 7 These policies, which act as formulas to control workers and quell labour activism through coercion and violence, fit into broader strategies of maintaining social stability.…”

Securitizing Culture in Post-Deng China: An Evolving National Strategic Paradigm, 1994–2014

“…Under Xi Jinping the securitization of socialist culture and cultural development has intensified, with elite speeches, CCP documents, and the state press repeatedly calling for greater -cybersovereignty‖-echoing calls for cultural sovereignty nearly a decade earlier-and the development of technological systems capable of resisting foreign interference (-foreign hostile forces,‖ waiguo didui shili) in China's internal affairs through ideological infiltration (Hu, 2011;Creemers, 2015a). More recently, scholars of the PRC political system have begun to acknowledge the -pluralization‖ of security to include a wider range of policy areas, including addressing of citizen grievances, ideology, and the media (Wang and Minzner, 2015;Ohlberg, 2016).…”