Washington Examiner title: Xi Jinping tightening security amid ‘paranoia’ about domestic uprisings
By: Joel Gehrke
Date: 17 December 2020
“Chinese Communist officials are preparing to tighten their foreign and domestic security apparatus, according to state media leaks that hint at “paranoia” about dissident threats.
“They’re talking about cells of the party learning how to integrate intelligence and other national security work from attacks against the party at home and abroad,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Dan Blumenthal said. “It’s paranoia about what they view as their No. 1 threat, which is foreign forces helping hostile separatist Chinese forces.”
Blumenthal offered that assessment following a report in Chinese state-run media that General Secretary Xi Jinping had convened a “study session” for the regime’s top leaders focused on U.S.-China relations. The commentary accompanying the revelation put a finer point on their interests, focusing on the party chieftains’ desire to improve intelligence-sharing between the national security and homeland security agencies.
“Now, security is no longer just the job of the party’s security organs, but all the top cadres will have a role to play,” an unnamed political science researcher at the Central Party School told the South China Morning Post. This person acknowledged that Beijing needs to “adopt the good practices” refined by the United States. “They have a longer history of operating integrated homeland security and global intelligence operations.”
Chinese Communist officials have complained publicly about what they regard as the Trump administration’s attempts “to drive a wedge” between the party apparatus and the broader Chinese population. President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 elections hasn’t allayed that fear, according to an international relations expert in Beijing who suggests that the incoming administration could continue those attacks in a “more systematic way” than President Trump’s team has.
“The rivalry between China and the U.S. is increasingly becoming an ideological struggle,” Renmin University’s Wang Yiwei said. “We might lose everything if we make careless mistakes.”
That’s an admission of vulnerability, analysts agreed, while cautioning against overstating its significance. “What we’re seeing is not a China that is worried about collapsing tomorrow and going into retrenchment; we’re seeing a China that has butted heads [with the U.S.], and what they’re trying to figure out is, ‘How can we keep doing what we’re doing?’” the Heritage Foundation’s Jim Carafano said. “We’re in for a period of Chinese improvisation and testing.”
The perceived necessity to link foreign intelligence-gathering and the monitoring of potential dissidents at home mirrors China’s reliance on foreign influence operations, according to another expert in Chinese Communist repression tactics.
“There’s a lot of projection going on,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation senior analyst Adrian Zenz said. “They’ve been very secure because they’ve been able to infiltrate a lot of places without a lot of pushback. Now, suddenly, they’ve got so much pushback all at once, and it must have been quite a shock to the system.”
Some of that “pushback” is internal, coming from the ranks of mainland Chinese intellectuals. Xi has been criticized in public by various academics. And though he led the Central Party School before making his leap to the top of the regime, a former professor at the institution recently denounced Xi’s leadership and revealed that at least some of the party’s ideological leaders regard him with contempt.
“‘He lacks basic judgment and speaks illogically,’” retired Central Party School professor Can Xia quoted one of her former colleagues as saying of Xi, in a new Foreign Affairs magazine piece.
The Chinese autocrat has maintained his control of the party through a ruthless approach to power politics involving his rivals and the development of a high-tech surveillance state to help monitor the broader population. But even the most advanced surveillance state has a difficult task in a country of China’s size.
“Officially, there’s no space for civil society, it’s crushed,” Blumenthal said. “Unofficially, it’s a cat-and-mouse game between the repressive organs of the party and members of different kinds of groups trying to stand up to the party for different reasons.”
His determination to constrain the space for such dissent may account for his decision to rescind Hong Kong’s traditional “high degree of autonomy,” some analysts suggest.
“Xi constantly has to be concerned about maintaining power,” Carafano said, adding that in arbitrary party politics, “if you’re not hitting home runs all the time, you’re vulnerable.”
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Sources:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/xi-jinping-tightening-security-paranoia-domestic-uprisings
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3113924/why-did-chinas-communist-party-elite-need-lecture-us
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-12-04/chinese-communist-party-failed
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