China, Regime Security, and Authoritarian Collaboration

Testimony before the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission Hearing on “An Axis of Autocracy? China’s Relations with Russia, Iran, & North Korea”Panel on “Military & Security Cooperation”

Thank you to the Commission for inviting me to testify today.  I will focus my remarks on how the pursuit of regime security shapes security cooperation in Chinese foreign policy, with particular attention to China’s non-military security cooperation with other authoritarian regimes.¹  

The testimony below emphasizes several points. China’s growing security relationships with Russia, Iran, and North Korea take place in a broader context: China’s emergence as a global security provider, one that has a different emphasis than the United States and therefore employs a different set of tools for providing security assistance. These tools reflect China’s emphasis on regime security and internal stability and control, and are especially – but not only – appealing to authoritarian partners; Beijing provides security assistance to a range of countries where such assistance serves and advances China’s conception of its regime security interests. One key driver of security cooperation between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, however, appears to be a shared perception not only of the United States as an external military threat, but a threat to the political security of the authoritarian regimes that govern each of these countries.

The PRC’s security cooperation efforts consist of diplomatic initiatives and high-level summits (both bilateral and multilateral) that promote and seek to institutionalize China’s internally-focused, regime-oriented approach to security in global politics, as well as concrete provision of tools that are useful for those purposes, such as surveillance technology and police training. Given the conceptual framework and underlying drivers of China’s expanding global security provision, Beijing is, in future, unlikely to impose a single model of authoritarianism on others when doing so is unnecessary or counterproductive for Beijing’s objectives – but it will continue to use security cooperation and to export the tools of authoritarianism where such activities provide the party-state with a comparative strategic advantage that enhances the security of the Chinese Communist Party. 

China’s Emergence as a Global Security Provider

In the past several years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged as a global security provider. We often speak, especially in the Indo-Pacific, of countries looking to the United States for security and China for economic prosperity, but that conventional wisdom has been overtaken by events.  Today, China is an increasingly active security provider, especially on its geographic periphery: in Central Asia, in Southeast Asia, and in the Pacific Islands.  Some of this activity takes place under the auspices of the Xi’s Global Security Initiative, announced in 2022, but other parts of this activity occur in a bilateral or a regional context.²  Thus, while today’s hearing focuses on China’s security cooperation with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, it is important to place developments in Beijing’s relationships with these specific countries in the context of the broader trend that is reshaping the contours of global security.

The security cooperation offered by the PRC does not mirror the type of security force assistance or defense cooperation provided by the United States. Instead, the PRC’s security offerings reflect its own understanding of security, encapsulated by Xi Jinping’s “comprehensive national security concept.”³ This conception of “national” security is regime-centered: it focuses on preserving China’s socialist system, the authority of the Chinese Communist Party leadership, and Xi Jinping as the core of that leadership.  Under this conceptual framework, internal security is paramount, and international or foreign policy tools play a supporting role in the pursuit of regime security. Chen Xiangyang, the head of the China Institutes for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR, affiliated with the Ministry of State Security), refers to external elements as “auxiliary” to the internal work around which China’s approach to national/state security is centered.⁴  Correspondingly, China’s security assistance is relatively more likely to be aimed at augmenting the capacity of recipients/partners to govern their territory and people, including capabilities that seek to prevent and control internal threats to a specific regime’s hold on power.⁵

In establishing security relationships that prioritize stability and control in internal affairs, China pursues a number of strategic aims – again, centered on supporting Xi Jinping’s vision of regime-centered “national security.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Edward Goldring and I find in a working paper that the strongest predictor of which countries have received Chinese surveillance technology is the presence and level of that country’s strategic partnership with China.⁶

By developing police-focused security partnerships with other countries, the PRC improves its ability to protect China’s overseas interests, whether Chinese businesses or overseas Chinese citizens.⁷ Such capacities can, in turn, be used to monitor members of the Chinese diaspora or engage in transnational repression. Security partnerships also provide Chinese officials with information and intelligence benefits similar to those conferred by China’s military diplomacy,⁸ helping them understand the overall security environment inside a given country and the threat perceptions of that country’s leaders. Finally, providing security assistance offers China a way to build presence, partnerships, and ultimately influence inside the governments of recipient countries, while also potentially opening up new avenues of coercion for political purposes, similar to China’s past usage of its economic gravity.⁹

Instead of being led by the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese military, this security cooperation often involves elements of the Chinese internal security apparatus acting as foreign policy actors. The most active of these is the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), led by Minister Wang Xiaohong, but other actors engaged in this kind of security cooperation include the People’s Armed Police (PAP), the Ministry of State Security (MSS, led by Minister Chen Yixin), and the Central-Political Legal Commission (CPLC, led by Chen Wenqing).

Authoritarian countries are one of two types of countries likely to find Chinese security assistance appealing. Non-democratic countries are attracted to China’s assistance because their leaders share a similar underlying aim: keep hold of power through the development and use of an effective coercive apparatus. Xi’s December 2023 state visit to Vietnam, for example, produced explicit agreement to strengthen security and intelligence cooperation to protect regime security (维护政权安全).¹⁰ It specifically referred to the need to prevent peaceful evolution, color revolutions, and separatism, all perceived vectors for corrosive foreign influence, often (though not always or solely) from the United States.

Similarly, China’s geopolitical alignment with countries such as Russia appears to have strengthened because both Beijing and Moscow view the United States not only as an external military threat, but as a threat to regime security. The February 2022 Russia-China Joint Statement referred to standing against “attempts by external forces to undermine the security and stability in their common adjacent regions” and asserted that Russia and China would “increase cooperation” to “counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext” and “oppose colour revolutions.”¹¹ In June 2022, Xi reportedly affirmed the legitimacy of Russian actions to protect its interests against “challenges to its security created by external forces.”¹² Indeed, despite having distinctive national interests in other ways, the leaders of the countries focused on in today’s hearing share a fundamental underlying threat perception: they view the United States not only as a threat in terms of external defense, but as a threat to the security of their hold on power internally.

A second set of countries, however, may be attracted to Chinese security assistance for different reasons: out of genuine and legitimate desire to reduce violent crime and improve citizen safety. For these countries, China is, too often, the partner whose assistance is available, quick, cost-effective, and relevant, as compared to the possible offerings of the U.S. and its allies and partners.¹³ As a result, today, countries are not simply reluctant to choose between prosperity from China and security from the United States, but – in many cases – unwilling to choose between the kind of security assistance offered by U.S. defense cooperation and the internally-focused security cooperation offered by the PRC. To craft effective solutions to this problem, the United States will need to understand the motivations of partner/recipient countries, and develop tailored solutions that address the underlying drivers in each instance. 

The U.S. and China offer different kinds of security benefits to partners, aligned with their respective conceptions of “security,” and – in notable contrast to the Cold War – Beijing and Washington are both weak at providing the kind of security assistance at which the other excels. Globally, China’s emergence as a security partner of choice – one focused on internal, nontraditional, and regime security – has generated what Isaac Kardon and I term “security hybridization” in the contemporary international environment: a growing number of countries, from Hungary to Vietnam to the United Arab Emirates, who receive simultaneous security assistance from both the United States and China.¹⁴ (Former CIA Director William Burns referred to these as “non-monogamous” security relationships.¹⁵)

The United States sometimes assesses China’s global security presence solely in terms of the PLA’s overseas military footprint, but if domestic and internal security activities are omitted from these assessments, Washington could seriously miscalculate its leverage in key strategic relationships, such as Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates.¹⁶ Failure to understand the set of countries in which China and the United States are each funding different parts of the military-security apparatus, leading to a potential buildup of counterbalancing security forces, could overlook risks of internal destabilization in countries the United States considers strategically important. Assessments of the PRC’s global security footprint, therefore, must be revised to incorporate China’s use of the internal security apparatus in foreign policy, so that the United States and its allies and partners can better understand changing risks to political instability in countries around the world, and more effectively engage in today’s emerging and asymmetric global security competition.¹⁷

Authoritarian Collaboration

These global patterns appear in China’s security cooperation with Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other non-democratic regimes around the world.  Iran and Russia show more visible signs of high-level cooperation on internal and regime security, across a number of dimensions, than North Korea, but all three countries have engaged in internal security cooperation with China in a number of areas, including security diplomacy (both bilateral and multilateral), provision of surveillance technology, and police training. There may also be forms of cooperation occurring – such as intelligence cooperation, for example – that we are unable to observe from publicly available sources.

Diplomatically, all three countries have expressed support for Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative (GSI).  Pyongyang expressed support for GSI in an article in May 2022 by North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Park Myung-ho.¹⁸ Iran expressed support in February 2023,¹⁹ as did Russia in March 2023.²⁰  China and North Korea have a treaty alliance – an unusually formal security partnership by PRC/CCP standards – while Tehran has had a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Beijing since 2016, and Moscow’s goes back even further, culminating in the famous “no-limits” partnership language used at the Putin-Xi meeting in February 2022, shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  

In 2022, 2023, and 2024, Russia also participated in China’s Global Public Security Cooperation Forum (GPSCF). GPSCF, formerly known as the Lianyungang Forum, is an annual MPS-hosted policing and law enforcement summit that is the internal security counterpart to the Xiangshan Forum hosted by the PRC Defense Ministry. Last year, MPS officials claimed that personnel from over 120 countries, regions, and organizations attended the GPSCF; at this event, Minister Wang announced that China would provide training to 3,000 foreign police officers in the coming year and proposed a number of other measures to strengthen global public security, policing, and law enforcement cooperation.²¹ (There is no public evidence of participation in the GPSCF by Iran or North Korea during this period, but the Ministry of Public Security does not release a full list of participants.)

In addition, security officials in both Russia and Iran engage in regular, high-level law enforcement and domestic security meetings with their counterparts in China. (There is almost no data on interactions between senior internal security officials in China and their counterparts in North Korea, as is typical of the opacity of the opacity with which the broader PRC-DPRK relationship is conducted.)  Organizationally, the lead actors in these interactions on the Chinese side are the party’s Central Political-Legal Commission (CPLC), which oversees China’s internal security and law enforcement apparatus (the political-legal xitong), and the PRC Ministry of Public Security (MPS). These meetings are most frequent and regular with Russian counterparts, but there are several publicly recorded meetings with Iranian officials in either a bilateral or multilateral context during this period. Table 1, below, shows the publicly-documented meetings held by MPS Minister Wang Xiaohong and CPLC head Chen Wenqing with Russian and Iranian counterparts since they assumed their current roles in 2022. ²²

Surveillance technology is another area of cooperation: North Korea, Iran, and Russia were among the earliest adopters of Chinese surveillance technology exports, and their use of Chinese digital surveillance tools has contributed to stronger authoritarian political control. North Korea was among the first countries reported to have received Chinese surveillance technology in 2008, when Huawei helped build and maintain a commercial wireless network (Koryolink) capable of monitoring “just about everything a North Korean might be doing” on the network.²³ Because cell phones play a key role in facilitating market activity inside North Korea, incorporating digital surveillance into telecommunications infrastructure from the start has allowed the Kim regime to pursue development of “market Leninism” or “party-state capitalism”– a model that, similar to China and Vietnam, blends regulated market economic practices with Leninist-style political control.²⁴  

Iran was also an early adopter of Chinese surveillance technology. A 2020 federal indictment alleged, for example, that Huawei “installed surveillance equipment in Iran that was used to monitor, identify, and detain protestors during the 2009 anti-government demonstrations.”²⁵ Both ZTE and CETC have also reportedly provided sophisticated surveillance and “smart city” capabilities to Iran. ²⁶

Russia, too, appeared on Huawei promotional materials in 2013-14 that showed the location of its “Safe City” surveillance platforms around the world, but much of that information has since been removed and little specific information is available in the public domain. It is worth noting that, like China, Russia has its own ecosystem of surveillance technology firms that provide digital surveillance capabilities both domestically and internationally, including to some places that have also received surveillance technology from Chinese companies.²⁷ Systematic comparison of the two countries’ surveillance exports is a gap in our understanding of this phenomenon and would benefit from further research, data collection, and analysis.

Iranian, Russian, and North Korean officials have also participated in Chinese police training activities. In 2017, the People’s Public Security University of China (中国人民公安大学) hosted 19 Iranian police officials for a training course.²⁸ In 2018, 14 emergency management officials from Iran’s Ministry of the Interior participated in a two-week “emergency response training course” at Henan Police College (河南警察学院), hosted by the Ministry of Public Security and co-organized by the Henan provincial public security department, aimed at “sharing China’s experience in disaster prevention, disaster relief, and emergency management… [and improving] the ability to deal with non-traditional security threats.²⁹ In December 2019, the Railway Police College at Zhengzhou Police University (铁道警察学院 , 郑州警察学院) provided a two-week “Railway Transport Safety Training course” to approximately 10 Russian police colleagues.³⁰ Sometime between 2016 and 2018, Chinese tech company Meiya Pico also reportedly facilitated digital forensics training that the company’s materials describe as “instructed by the Ministry of Public Security.”³¹ The DailyNK, an online news source that employs a network of informants inside the DPRK, reported in 2021 that North Korea’s Ministry of Social Security had received police training from the Chinese MPS, focused on both disaster response and social control; the training reportedly took place virtually given the outbreak of COVID-19 at the time.³²

Conclusion

China’s authoritarian collaboration with Russia, Iran, and North Korea contains lines of activity intended to enhance regime security for each of the rulers involved.  This activity takes place in the context of China’s growing emergence as a global security provider, with an emphasis on internal stability, non-traditional security threats, and – in many cases – enhancement of authoritarian political control.  Xi Jinping and the CCP see this role as advancing their own, current vision of “national security,” which is about selectively revising both China’s domestic politics and the global environment to facilitate the survival and power of the Chinese Communist Party.  It is the “global vision” for national security that Xi has demanded from his internal security apparatus since 2017.

This means that Beijing is likely to continue to pursue alignment and cooperation with countries such as Russia, North Korea, and Iran – and others – to the extent that it perceives those activities as benefitting the political and regime security of the CCP and China’s socialist system.  China’s security cooperation activities will be shaped, scoped, and limited by those interests as well. China is exporting the tools of authoritarianism where doing so provides comparative or strategic advantage, but will not impose a single “model” on others where doing so is unnecessary or counterproductive for regime security. If the United States and its allies and partners do not understand this grammar and logic of the CCP’s strategy, we will overlook or misperceive the drivers and future direction of its global efforts.  The United States must also fundamentally reconsider how the interagency organizes, targets, and resources security force assistance programs worldwide to account for China’s emergence as a global security provider – one with a very different vision for what security means and how it is accomplished.