Irregular Warfare Podcast - Paramilitaries Abroad: China’s Use of Nontraditional Security Forces

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Episode 107 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast examines how China uses its paramilitary and internal security forces to project power abroad and build global influence.   Our guests begin by dissecting the Chinese security apparatus: contrasting the People’s Liberation Army with the CCP’s internal police forces and paramilitaries. They then explore how China uses these nontraditional security forces—which often aid foreign governments in maintaining regime stability—as an alternative to U.S. security assistance packages. Finally, our guests conclude by examining how the U.S. and its allies can compete with China more effectively in the realm of security cooperation.

As China has become more of a non-traditional security provider, countries aren't necessarily dropping the United States. It's not that it's an alternative and you have to pick either or. They're actually saying, well, I want the benefits of both types of security assistance because the United States specializes in external defense. It's really good at extended deterrence and high-end conventional capabilities. But on the non-traditional side, China tends to focus its offerings on the thing it has

a comparative advantage in, which is domestic and internal security. And I'd say this with some regret. The Chinese security forces, for example, the Ministry of Public Security or the People's Armed Police, are far more appropriate partners for many of our allies and partners than the Department of Defense in the United States military. And when you add to that the fact that we have very strict laws that prevent the Department of Defense from training or assisting most paramilitary or internal security forces, that complicates things. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

I'm your host Ben Jebb and my co-host today is Katherine Michelson. In today's episode, we examine how China uses its paramilitary and internal security forces to project power abroad. Our guests begin by dissecting the Chinese security apparatus, contrasting the People's Liberation Army with the CCP's internal police forces and paramilitaries. They then explore how China uses these non-traditional security forces, which often aid foreign governments in maintaining regime stability, as an alternative to U.S. security assistance packages. Finally, our guests conclude by examining how the US and its allies can compete with

China more effectively in the realm of security cooperation. Professor Sheena Chesnok-Greytenz is currently a visiting associate professor at the Army War College. She is also an associate professor and director of the Asia Policy Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Earlier this year, Professor Greitens published an article entitled, China's Use of Non-Traditional Strategic Land Power in Asia, which serves as the anchor for today's episode.

Lieutenant General Charles W. Hooper served in the U.S. Army for over four decades. Throughout much of his career, Lieutenant General Hooper focused on U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific, where he completed two attache assignments in Beijing. Lieutenant General Hooper is a graduate of West Point and holds advanced degrees from Harvard University and the UK Ministry of Defense Chinese Language School in Hong Kong. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

Here's our conversation with Lieutenant General Charles Hooper and Professor Sheena Chestnut Greitens. All right, General Hooper, Professor Greitens, thanks for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. It's great to have you today. Great to be with you. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much. Sheena, we identified your newly published article entitled, China's Use of Non-traditional Strategic Land Power in Asia to be a Particular Interest for our show and our wider audience.

When most people think of the PRC's hard power, they envision the People's Liberation Army, not police forces or paramilitary forces. So to start, could you explain what motivated you to publish this piece? Sure. It's a great question. I'm currently working on a book project that looks at Xi Jinping's concept of security and the way that he's really overhauled a lot of China's party state and the security sector since he came into

power to implement his vision of comprehensive national security. But as I was doing a lot of the research for that, which is mostly about how this works inside China, I saw more and more references to what the People's Armed Police, the Ministry of Public Security, the Central Political Legal Commission were doing overseas. And it seemed like that activity was really increasing and that Xi Jinping was encouraging that activity to increase. And so when we think about China's foreign security policy, if we only look at the PLA,

we're really missing a huge part of the way that China is interacting as a global security actor, trying to reshape the global security architecture, and really shaping the regional environment in which the US-China strategic and security competition is playing out. And so I ended up trying to write down what I saw happening, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, and why I thought that really mattered for the US military and for the broader community of people interested in national security and the US-China competition.

Before we dig into the specifics of Sheena's article, I'd like to first just define terms and understand the task organization of Beijing's non-traditional land forces. Hoop, could you explain to our audience what the Ministry of Public Security and the People's Armed Police are? Where do they fit in within the wider Chinese security apparatus? Yeah, I'm happy to do it. And it's a great question. And it's a tough question because this structure is so different than our own that sometimes we have a hard time getting our minds around it. And I have to start in order to properly place the Ministry of Public Security and the People's Armed Police in context, I have to start with what we do know, which is the People's Liberation

Army. And the first thing to remember about the People's Liberation Army, and you'll see this trend in all three, is that the People's Liberation Army is the arm wing of the Chinese Communist Party. It is a political organ. It is not a national organ. And in fact, its first mission, its primary mission is the protection and the sustainment of the Chinese Communist Party's leadership in the country. Only its second mission is preserving and defending national sovereignty

and national territory. And so that's very different than our own. The PLA also consists of four services, a ground force, a People's Liberation Army Navy, a People's Liberation Army Air Force, and a People's Liberation Army Rocket Force, or Strategic Rocket Force, and then four arms, aerospace, cyberspace, information support, and joint logistics. The PLA is led by the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, a political organ of which Xi Jinping is the chairman and commander in chief. The minister of defense in China is merely a diplomatic figurehead. So that gives us a baseline because that's what we understand.

Let's move on to the Ministry of Public Security or the Gong Anbu. The Ministry of Public Security is responsible for the day-to-day public and political security in the country. It oversees the National Police Force, the Renmin Wujing, the People's Police. But the Ministry of Public Security also has responsibility for food safety, forestry safety.

They are the forest rangers in China. VIP security, when VIPs come from overseas or the Chinese Communist Party VIPs, the Ministry of Public Security is responsible for their security. They're responsible for security of railways. So when you ride a train in China, those police that you see on the train are security personnel also belong to the Ministry of Public Security. They're responsible for customs at the airport and the traffic police that we may see in pictures or in films. The MPS has a nationwide police force. It also has responsibilities for counterintelligence, both in China, but

also overseas as well. And we can talk about that later and maintaining the political security of the Chinese Communist Party. Unlike the People's Liberation Army, which at least in theory has no law enforcement authority, the Ministry of Public Security is the law enforcement authority in China. And then let's move on to the People's Armed Police Force. And this is something very, very different than we have, although some countries do have it.

The People's Armed Police Force is what they call a paramilitary organization. It has responsibility for internal security. China is a very large and diverse country. And the People's Armed Police have responsibility for internal security, riot control, counterterrorism, disaster response, law enforcement, and maritime rights protection, as well as providing support to the People's Liberation Army during wartime. Their principal mission is to enforce and restore internal security and internal order if that internal order

is threatened. And they've often been referred to in Western terms as a gendarmerie and a paramilitary force. The terms as a gendarmerie and a paramilitary force. The difference between a gendarmerie and a military is a gendarmerie, for example, like the Carboniari in Italy, have law enforcement authority. They can arrest people and they can put people in jail. Their uniforms are slightly different than the PLA. And they are often confused as being PLA or Chinese military when they are in fact people's armed police. So the differences between the three is at least ostensibly the PLA has no law enforcement authority, that is the Chinese military, but the Public Security Bureau and the armed police

force do have that law enforcement authority. But at the end of the day, all three are dedicated to protecting and defending the Communist Party of China and its leadership. So given that very succinct summary, let's actually dig into the article here. Sheena, you start off by giving us a unique definition for China's use of internal security forces abroad, which you define as non-traditional land power. Could you explain what you mean by that? The reason that the piece in Parameters talks about these activities by China's domestic

and internal security forces as strategic land power is that they are using ground forces, which is, as who points out, don't have a great analog or corollary in the US system, to achieve strategic ends set out by the Chinese Party states. So they in many ways fit our definition of strategic land power. I called them non-traditional for two main reasons. First is that these are non-traditional forces. They're not army forces. They're not PLA army forces operating abroad.

The PLA does do international military diplomacy through the Office of International Military Cooperation, but that's not what this piece focuses on. It focuses on the use of a different set of security agencies and security actors, the Ministry of Public Security being the most prominent of these, and the People's Armed Police to engage in security diplomacy and international security cooperation. But the other reason why I refer to them as non-traditional is that in many cases, the types of security threats that they partner or assist foreign forces in addressing are also non-traditional security threats.

And this gets back to the vision of security that Xi Jinping has, that he lays out in his comprehensive national security concept, which sees external and internal security as very closely linked, but also includes explicitly a much bigger focus on non-traditional security challenges than some of China's previous security concepts and security frameworks. So I called them non-traditional land power because they are engaged in non-traditional missions and to address non-traditional security threats, but also because these are not the actors that we typically think of as exercising

land power abroad. But nonetheless, if you look at the concept, that very much seems to be what the Chinese Party state is using them to do. So you go on to say that China's internal security forces provide concrete security benefits, right? Enhancing the CCP's partnerships and capable of shaping the information domain in ways that are favorable to the CCP's interests, which is very different from largely Western or the US model, right?

So how exactly do Chinese internal security forces do this? So they do this in a couple of different ways. First, one of the things is that using your internal security forces, your public security apparatus to engage with foreign counterparts, gives Chinese security officials another way of learning about the interests and concerns, security concerns of foreign governments. So if you take the example of Papua New Guinea, where both the United States and Australia have defense or security cooperation pacts, last fall, Beijing also approached Papua New Guinea and offered some security assistance, particularly around riot control, policing,

law enforcement, domestic security topics. Even preliminary discussions about whether or not an assistance package or cooperation agreement is going to go forward gives China an advantage in understanding the security environment and the way that leaders in a third country think about the security challenges they face. And so that can create some informational advantages and enhanced informational understanding of the regional security environment, again, through this non-military channel of engagement that China has. But the other thing is that there are times where Chinese assistance provides concrete

security assistance or benefits to regional countries that is outside the scope of what the DOD traditionally provides. And so that can make China a viable, even attractive security partner if a country is facing a domestic or an internal security challenge that US assistance is not well placed to address or that the US is not interested in providing. And so China's role as a security provider can fill gaps that are going unaddressed, making China an attractive partner to those countries, but it can also provide an avenue for political influence and potentially for coercion or leverage if China one day decided

to withdraw assistance that a third country has come to depend on. So there's this sort of tricky cost-benefit calculation for third countries, I think, in whether or not they want to accept this assistance. But even having this diplomatic outreach and these conversations about whether China's assistance makes sense for a country provides them some intelligence, informational advantages, and understanding the way that other countries in the region think about the regional security environment and their own domestic security environment. And that's very helpful, especially for China's protection of overseas interests, as well

as for broader PRC diplomacy. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about what Sheena just pointed out and get to that point that she made about the usefulness and the utility of China having these forces for overseas engagements. But first, I want to talk a little bit about this whole concept of China's national security concept and how it differs from ours. When it comes to the application of violence to achieve political ends, and that means the people in the government with guns, for want of a more elegant phrase, right? Whether it's the People's Armed Police, the Ministry of Public Security, or the Chinese

People's Liberation Army confronting external threats, the Chinese Communist Party prioritizes political security, in this case, the security and survival of the Communist Party over all missions. And each of those forces I mentioned is directly controlled by a national level organ, either the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party or the Ministry of Public Security. So the controlling principle here is centralized partisan political control of the state instruments of violence. Let's contrast that with the United States, where by both tradition and law, the Department of Defense is

bound to remain strictly nonpartisan, apart and aloof from political parties and with limited exceptions, has no law enforcement authority. In fact, we have a Posse Comitatus Act and we have a number of very complicated steps that need to be taken in our government, both at the state level and the national level, before the military can have any law enforcement authority. The departments of justice, treasury, homeland security, each have their own armed security and law enforcement forces in our system. And in the day to day, each state, district and territory of the United States, about

56 of them, we have 50 states, but we have the District of Columbia, we have Guam, we have the Virgin Islands, we have the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Each of those entities has a paramilitary force called the National Guard, right? Subordinate to the governor of that state and not a political party or central government organ. And beneath that, each political subdivision each state each county each municipality no matter how large and small has an armed uniform civilian police force enforcing the laws of that specific

political subdivision. So our United States approach to this has always been with the exception of DOD historically and legally decentralized and emphasized the nominally apolitical control of the state instruments of violence, right? Because our own approach is so culturally and historically different from China's, we have a hard time getting our minds around this. And to Sheena's point, we have simply no comparable institutions to the armed police and the Ministry of Public Security.

The challenge here is far more countries in the world have adopted China's approach to internal and external security than the United States approach. Okay? And that's what makes the People's Armed Police and the Ministry of Public Security such effective tools for overseas engagements and building relationships with overseas countries because far more countries in the world use their militaries and police forces and they're organized along China's lines

than the lines of the United States. Let me just add one thing to that that I think is really, really important to wrap our heads around. And that is that Chinese sources, when they're translating Xi Jinping's comprehensive national security concept into English, use the phrase national security, which when we hear that in our English speaking brains, we tend to think that that mirrors our concept of national security.

But if you look at the way that the CCP defines national security, and an equally good translation would be state security. It's the same phrase that appears in the Ministry of State Security, which does political policing and counterintelligence work for the PRC. If you look at the way that the CCP unpacked that concept, the foundation or the heart of it is political security, which the CCP then very explicitly defines as the security of China's socialist system, the authority of the CCP central committee, with Xi Jinping as the core of that leadership. So it is explicitly a regime security concept. And while you see China's domestic security actors engaged in practical, more tactical or training exercises that do provide these concrete security benefits abroad. There are

also cases where you very explicitly see references to cooperation that is built on this concept of political security and regime security. Not in every case. It depends on the recipient or the partner country. But China's Ministry of Public Security and the security apparatus more broadly uphold an idea of national security where political security and ordinary criminal, law enforcement and policing functions are really inextricably tied up in the way that policing is organized and executed. And so that has implications

because when you take that approach abroad, those things aren't neatly separable for the Ministry of Public Security or for other actors that go out and do this type of security engagement. So we've talked about how China sees national security which emphasizes ideas like central political security and protecting regime rule but how does China actually employ its internal security forces abroad? Sheena, could you detail some of the operations

that the CCP's non-traditional units conduct? Yes. The interesting thing about that is that the activity that China's internal security actors conduct abroad has changed and is changing. So in 2017, Xi Jinping gave a speech to the internal security apparatus where he encouraged them to adopt a more global vision in national or state security work. And since that time, what we've seen is a pretty consistent increase in the activity of these domestic security actors to shape the global security environment in ways that are favorable for China's national or political security and the CCP's political security at home.

So the interesting thing about answering this question is that it is a moving target and whatever answer I give you today may be very different in it a year or two as this activity evolves. But I would group the activity into a couple of different buckets. First is police or law enforcement diplomacy. And that's probably been the biggest and most visible increase in China's security diplomacy and security cooperation abroad, which is the Minister of Public Security, the head of the Central Political Legal Commission, going

out and having a bilateral meeting in a country. Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong just visited the UAE to start a strategic police dialogue there. The head of the Central Political Legal Commission, Chen Wenqing, is going to Russia later this year to prepare for a head of state visit. So these kinds of diplomatic engagement, China's also really focused on building multilateral diplomacy, whether that's partnerships with Interpol, training UN peacekeeping police at a college run by the Ministry of Public Security, or hosting what China calls now the

Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, which is an annual conference designed to build new security cooperation and security architecture around law enforcement, not traditional military security cooperation. And so the diplomatic outreach is bilateral and multilateral in nature. It uses existing institutions and it tries to build new security architecture that the PRC designs and then shares with the world. Two of the other categories in which we see these security forces conducting some of their international outreach and activity are training.

China has made a number of offers under the Global Security Initiative and before that to train security personnel, police, peacekeeping police, paramilitary forces, whether that's at its own police colleges or in visits abroad. And so training is another important part of the activity of these domestic security forces when they engage internationally. And then the third one is assistance with equipment. And that could take the form of actual police equipment that is transferred to a country like the Solomon Islands.

Or it could be an actor like Huawei that provides a safe city platform that it sells to a third country's law enforcement agency. And that might be at the national level, right? It might be the Ministry of the Interior, or it might be a local sub-national official who is concerned with establishing order and getting a better handle on surveillance and public safety in a particular city. So we see China's engagement at both the national and the sub-national level when it comes to provision of equipment and technology as well. Those are the three big categories, police and law enforcement diplomacy, training and provision of equipment

and particularly surveillance technology. Those are probably the three biggest areas in which we see activity by China's security sector abroad. Sheena makes a great point and I'd like to kind of reinforce something that she said and this is about this interpretation and concept of national security.

The United States concept of national security tends to reflect our own experiences and our own geostrategic position. We tend to talk about protection, projecting power, defending sovereignty of national territory, but in other countries, state security and political security is synonymous with national security. Let me give you an example. So, I was a deputy J5 in Indo-Pacific Command, deputy director of strategy, plans, and policies. In the Solomon Islands, and Sheena talked about this, in the Solomon Islands, national

security is protecting the fisheries, protecting their territorial waters from poaching from countries with industrial fishing fleets. The United States has nothing in its arsenal that can assist the Solomon Islands with this. It's not as if we're gonna assign a destroyer to assist them in doing that. The Coast Guard District could possibly help them with that, but the United States Coast Guard,

which is in Homeland Security, and in theory could engage with them, is not equipped to do that. Similarly, many countries, many smaller countries, and many countries around the world, have national police forces and national paramilitary forces. But we have no national paramilitary force. And in some instances, we are severely,

we being the Department of Defense, is severely restricted from engaging with these forces. So we have no comparable tools similar to the armed police or the Ministry of Public Security to engage with them. And I gotta tell you, both as a deputy director of strategy in the Pacific and the director of strategy in Africa, I used to pull my hair out because the Chinese could do things

simply that we could not do. Because there are far more countries in the world that share China's vision of national security than that interpretation of national and state security, than share the United States interpretation of that phrase. And China is spot on. Hoop, so it sounds like China employs non-traditional land power as a bridge to working with partners who might not need to partner with the US Navy.

I mean, the example Yi just used, right? Regime stability or coastal fishing rights might be more important to, you know, X country than, you know, our conception of national security. So is it fair to say that China's internal security forces then act as an alternative to US or Australian or Japanese security force assistance? They absolutely do, because in many instances, and I say this with some regret, the Chinese security forces, for example, the Ministry of Public Security or the People's Armed Police, are far more appropriate partner for many of our allies and partners than the Department of Defense and the United States military.

And when you add to that the fact that we have very strict laws that prevent the Department of Defense, including the National Guard, from training or assisting most paramilitary or internal security forces that complicates things. So let me give you an example. When I was in AFRICOM, we were working very closely with the country of Liberia. Liberia has both a national police force and an army. But when you look at some of the challenges that Liberia faces, their National Police Force and the training and improvement of their National Police Force probably is on

par, if not more important, than the improvement of their military, which faces external threats. But as a J5 and the Africa Command, the laws prevented me from engaging with the National Police Force. And furthermore, for example, in Liberia's case, Michigan is their National Guard state partner. And of course, they were Michigan, they were Detroit police and police officers that served in the National Guard. Even those police officers are forbidden from training with the Liberian National Police. So we simply don't have the tools to compete in a lot of instances

with the Chinese. I would also add to that, that we have laws that very strictly govern our ability to engage with organizations that are suspected of human rights violation. And in many cases, many internal security forces or paramilitary forces, there are allegations because of the nature of their engagement with their own internal populations that they have engaged in extra-legal or human rights violations. And so that's another restriction that prevents the Department of Defense and even in some cases the Department of Justice, which does engage in a very limited fashion from engaging with these forces. So this kind of illustrates the handicap that we are working under sometimes. The Chinese don't have Leahy vetting, and they have a force that is an exact counterpart

in many instances to the forces in all of these countries. So this is some of the frustration that we have and some of the restrictions that we have that the Chinese organs don't have, which is why they've been able to engage so effectively. I think that raises a really important and great point that I wanted to draw out a little bit. I think we have to be careful when we talk about China's internal security forces as being an alternative to US Australian Japanese security force assistance, because the reality is, and this is a really interesting, puzzling, fascinating feature of the global security environment right now, there are lots of countries that are currently pursuing security cooperation

with both the United States and China. And that is fundamentally a different ballgame than what we saw in the Cold War, where the United States and the Soviet Union had their blocs and they tended to provide both internal and external security assistance to allies and partners on their side of the Cold War divide. And Isaac Cardin and I have a piece in Foreign Affairs that tried to lay out what we saw as this emerging dynamic, where as China has become more of a non-traditional security provider, countries aren't necessarily dropping the United States. It's not that it's an alternative and you have to pick either or.

They're actually saying, well, I want the benefits of both types of security assistance because the United States specializes in external defense. It's really good at extended deterrence and high-end conventional capabilities. The United States really doesn't have a peer for a lot of those capabilities that it offers to allies and partners. But on the non-traditional side, and for countries that have problems with public order, with riot control, that want to build surveillance that's not so friendly to civil liberties, to human rights and democracy, China offers tools that the United States can't, and in

my view, probably in many cases shouldn't, provide. But the result is that you get this growing overlap in security assistance. And that's a really distinctive feature of US-China competition. As a policy matter, I think it's really important to realize that there are sort of two groups that might be seeking out security assistance from China. And these groups might coexist even in the same country. And this is where the policy challenge that Hoop identified gets just really tricky for American policymakers, because you might have people who are motivated to seek Chinese assistance because they have a real violent crime problem in a city. So when I looked at China's export of surveillance

technology, some of the appeal in Latin America, is that it was being presented as a solution to violent crime and drug trafficking challenges. And that's really appealing if you're a mayor or a provincial governor or a national leader who recognizes that one of the jobs of a legitimate government is to provide some semblance of public safety and order for your citizens, right? That is a legitimate function of government. Now the additional obligation of a democracy is that those forces are held in check and overseen by rule of law and democratic checks and balances so that they don't abuse the rights of citizens. But you have these two groups that, I think, that seek out Chinese assistance, one that may genuinely be interested in improving

public safety in a country, which is a legitimate goal, I think, for an official to have. And then others who clearly want to use the tools that the CCP can provide to enhance the security of a particular leader who is not democratically elected or wants to stay past their democratically elected term, or who might want to use those tools to repress political opposition and pull a country into democratic backsliding. Sheena, your point is very well taken, and it's a paradox because I can't tell you how many countries I've been in where there's US-trained military, Chinese-trained internal security forces, both coming from radically opposite polar philosophical approaches, right?

Our approach values-based, grounded in legality, the Chinese approach perhaps a bit different than that. And it can be inevitable that the two philosophical approaches are going to clash, or the internal security forces and the guidelines that they've been trained on will run afoul of our values-based approach perhaps in our Leahy vetting. But I've also had foreign military leaders look at me and go to your point who have drug problems or have crime problems.

And I had them look at me and go, what do you want us to do? What do you want us to do? And it's tough to sit there as the principal officer responsible for engagement and sometimes to answer that question. Because from their perception, looking at the world through their eyes or looking at the challenges through their eyes,

they would appreciate perhaps the approach that the Chinese take in training, for example, internal security forces, and we don't have the means or the ability to do so. So it's a tough dilemma. Okay. So this is a really intellectually stimulating topic because we spend a lot of time talking about security force assistance on this show. So just to summarize and make sure

I understand everything here. Do China and the US each offer different security force assistance packages then with the US kind of offering support for external threats and the CCP focusing on internal security? And if so, does that mean we've got a supply side problem here where third party countries are able to blend SFA packages and or just play one great power off of another?

And I'll direct that to Sheena first. The short answer to your question, I think, is yes. The United States does tend to focus its defense cooperation, its security cooperation on external or regional security. And China tends to focus its offerings on the thing it has a comparative advantage in, which is domestic and internal security, including, but not limited to, keeping a particular political regime in power. And the best example I can think of right now is if you look at what happened over the course of just the fall in Vietnam. President Biden went to Vietnam, upgraded the comprehensive strategic partnership, and

there's been a lot of work to build out defense cooperation with Vietnam aimed at regional security, particularly in the South China Sea. At the same time, prior to Xi Jinping's visit in December, you saw a robust ministerial level pattern of engagement with the Minister of Public Security, the head of the Central Political Legal Commission, the Minister of State Security, and more than one senior official in the People's Armed Police going to Vietnam, hosting their Vietnamese counterparts, particularly the prime minister who rose to his position through the internal security sector in Vietnam, hosting their Vietnamese counterparts, particularly the prime minister who rose to his position through the internal security sector in Vietnam,

and lots of conversation, including in the readout of Xi Jinping's visit, that talked about cooperation on political and regime security to, quote unquote, keep the red flag of socialism flying in both countries. I mean, it was very, very explicitly a political regime security type of cooperation that's implemented and led by the domestic security agencies and

that coexists right alongside defense cooperation with the United States that interestingly is actually aimed largely at countering Chinese activity in the South China Sea. So sometimes you even see that each country is putting in security assistance to counter threats that are being sort of amplified or caused or motivated by the other great power. And this is a really fascinating dynamic. Because we didn't have a lot of cases of security overlap during the Cold War, we actually don't know a ton about what the effects on regime stability are going to be. But typically when you have competing security forces, the military versus the internal security apparatus or multiple

security agencies, that each have sort of independent authority and engage in competition, that can actually be destabilizing from an autocracy. So it's not clear to me how this is going to play out because we really are in, I think, uncharted waters for a lot of these countries. But the sort of potential for irregular and different forms of security competition on the ground in these third countries, I think it is pretty high. And the potential risk of conflict and miscalculation is something we should all be paying attention to, particularly for those of us who are interested in this non-traditional security and irregular warfare space. I couldn't agree more, Sheena.

We tend to forget on a human level and on a practical level, these organizations, particularly security organizations, develop power centers of their own. And in some cases, for example, in a given country, if you have a Chinese-trained internal security force and a U.S.-trained military, you're essentially creating two separate entities with two separate philosophical approaches to the application of violence. That could, it doesn't necessarily have to, but to Sheena's point, it could contribute to instability in that country. I haven't been anywhere, and that includes as being in Addis A three times, being at

J5 and the Deputy J5 and the director of DSCA. I haven't been in any country where they wouldn't rather do business with the United States and have good relations with the United States as opposed to other countries or other entities, even China. Having said that, in most countries in the world, regime stability and survivability is the primary directive. And that is not something with which the United

States security apparatus has a lot of experience with. How does this all fit within China's wider peacekeeping efforts, which as the article points out is a fairly robust program? So China has emerged as a major player in the global peacekeeping regime. It's a major contributor of troops to UN peacekeeping forces and, after the United States, a major funder of UN peacekeeping operations. But where the internal security forces come in is that China has also become a fairly prominent or significant trainer of UN peacekeeping police, which are separate from the peacekeepers themselves. And there's a police college that is run by the Ministry

of Public Security that does a lot of the Ministry of Public Security's foreign police training and international police outreach that is where the UN peacekeeping police training occurs. And that has had visits from the UN Secretary General, it hosts international conferences, and so if you think about this way of engaging, there's this multilateral dimension where China is providing, again, a public security good via the United Nations that is needed and in demand by many third countries, including the places that the UN has authorized peacekeeping missions. And so I think this is, again, an important facet to realize many countries would look

at that as a legitimate employment and a security benefit that China is providing to areas of the world that are conflict-torn, that have high human needs for human security, and China is supporting the UN architecture, or seen as supporting the UN architecture, and providing a global public security good. And so I think the United States and its allies and partners, when they think about messaging around the Ministry of Public Security's role, need to realize that there are real places in which

this assistance is wanted and needed, even if it comes with these downsides that countries may or may not realize they're going to incur by having China provide security force assistance or peacekeeping police assistance. And that I think should really affect how the United States talks to and engages with partners around these questions. Because to Hoop's earlier example, if the United States goes around and says, China's terrible, don't do this, and the response is, well, what do you want me to do to solve my security problem? And the United States doesn't have a compelling alternative, then that's not very satisfying and indeed would probably be deeply frustrating for a lot of these countries that the United States is trying to engage with.

That's not to say that the concerns about China's security force assistance aren't legitimate. They come potentially with some real downsides. But unless there's a credible alternative that is compatible with the rule of law, that's compatible with oversight and protection of civil liberties and human rights, and that is effective for the purposes of public order and public safety, then third countries are going to go to China as a provider because there isn't a credible alternative. Look, China wants to establish itself as a strategic competitor and a player on the world

stage. To Shina's point, of course, they're going to use their resources to contribute to peacekeeping, to raise their global profile in a benign and proactive and positive way. I do have to say that like most sovereign nations, China's looking at influence building as they continue to contribute around the world to peacekeeping, but that doesn't belay the fact that they have. But you know, Sheena, it reminds me of the old joke you talk about countries turning to China. You know, there's the old joke of small country in the developing world, and the US diplomat goes in and asks the official in that country, well, why do you work with the Chinese? And he says, well, when the Chinese come, they bring a training center. When you come, you bring a lecture.

And then the U.S. diplomat goes, well, you know the Chinese, and the local diplomat goes, well, here comes the lecture. And so, yes, the Chinese bring very practical, very useful capabilities to these countries, ostensibly agenda-free without some of the conditions that the United States places on some of the aid that we provide the countries and they do it under the umbrella of peacekeeping and under the umbrella of the United Nations. And it's practical and it's tangible and the countries can see the results. To your point, you know, like you, I don't think we should just sit around admiring the problem. We need to come up with credible alternatives to this that might require some changes in our legal structure. It might require us to think very carefully about ways that we can work with these countries

and still maintain the primacy of our emphasis on human rights and some other things. We have to come up with credible alternatives. Just lecturing countries on not doing business with China is simply insufficient. Hoop, you're never short on thought-provoking yet humorous anecdotes, which is why we love bringing you on here. But before wrapping up, I think just a general question I thought about while reading your article, Sheena. Why would the US and its allies care about how China employs its non-traditional internal

security forces? In other words, what risks does the MPS and the PAP pose to the interests of the US and its allies? Great question. I would list, again, three probably major categories. First, if you perceive the level of democracy and human rights protection around the world as an American interest, then China's police training and security force assistance programs have the potential to enhance the coercive capacity and repressive capacity of a lot of non-democratic

actors. So that's one of the reasons why a good number of people in the United States, I think, do care about what we're seeing with China becoming a more active global security provider, particularly on internal security and repressive capacity. Second is that even if you bracket those issues, this really does provide a pathway for China to increase its presence, partnerships, and influence abroad, which is the phrase that I use in the parameters piece. So China has a more active presence in places that it might not otherwise be operating. It provides security benefits and thereby can build influence in third countries. And that influence can potentially turn into leverage if China is later willing to condition

that assistance and that cooperation on other political stances by the recipient country. So it opens the avenue for potential future coercion. So whether or not the United States is a security partner of choice really does have this effect of shaping the peacetime regional security environment and then potentially a future conflict environment if it comes to that. We all hope that deterrence is successful and that there's not a conflict between the United States and China, but these are efforts that will have an effect on the regional security

environment in peacetime and also could be important in the event of a potential future conflict. So those are a couple of the reasons why I think the United States should be paying attention to this. Third is that I was really motivated in writing this to try to inform U.S. policymakers in a given country. And that again, if they're only looking at the PLA and the pattern of activity and engagement by the PLA, they might be missing a big part of China's security presence and influence in that country. And therefore, we might be prone to overestimating the strength of a relationship with a partner

or potentially US influence in a country overall. And so from a very sort of just practical standpoint of do we know where we stand in the regional security environment and in specific bilateral relationships, I think our China policy will always be better if it is better informed and we have a full picture of what China is doing and what activities it's engaged in and why they're appealing or not to third countries. So Hup, Sheena, based on today's conversation and aside from what you just said, what are the major considerations for policymakers, academics, and practitioners who are interested in China's non-traditional use of land power?

I'll start off, and I got four quick points to make to give Sheena the last word. The first one is, to her point, we need to add to our current curriculums, particularly in our professional military professional development and our military education system Analysis of the functions both internally and externally of the Ministry of Public Security and the People's Armed Police To our study of China's military and security forces That's number one and we need to add that because it is again so different than our own model number two We need to understand that the concept of national security, to Sheena's point, in many countries, particularly in the developing world, is radically different

than our own. National security and political security are synonymous in many countries, and we need to understand that. We need to understand why that is the case. Number three, we need to create tools and a legal structure that allows our cabinet departments, Department of Defense, but also others, to engage effectively with internal security forces and police forces, and we need to fund it. That's the other important point. We need to provide funding for it. And the last thing I'll say is, and I know this as someone who spent the majority

of his military career engaging with our allies and partners and foreign nations around the world. You have to demonstrate to countries the value proposition of good governance along the lines of the United States approach to law enforcement and security through person to person-person engagement with them. You cannot lecture them into doing it. You have to demonstrate the value proposition because nation security forces will adopt

practices that they feel are valuable for them. And that's the best way to do it. And the most effective way to do that, to engender respect for human rights, engender respect for the rule of law and civilian control of security forces as opposed to political control, is through direct engagement with United States entities. So we have to create a structure that allows us to do it, and then we need to do it on a continuous basis. State partnership can help in that and others, but that's what we need to do, and I'll stop

there. I would give three or four part response to that question. First is that I think that we do need to incorporate these domestic security actors into our overall assessments of the PRC's security activity and engagement abroad. We've been pretty focused on the PLA with good reason, and a lot has changed with respect to the PLA. So even keeping track of the evolution and growth of the PLA and its activities has been a major task. But based on what we've seen in the rapid increase in foreign engagement by these internal security actors, we need to treat them as serious foreign policy and security players

when we do our assessments of China's security presence, partnerships, and activities abroad. That's point one. Point two is that I do think in the article talks a little bit more about this, that the United States needs to go back over its current security force assistance programs in light of this updated information about where the PRC is operating and how it's engaging in this non-traditional security cooperation and see whether there are holes or gaps in security force assistance that where the PRC is operating and how it's engaging in this non-traditional security cooperation, and see whether there are holes or gaps in security force assistance that the United States needs to try to fill. The United States has a range of tools and interagency actors that it

could probably bring to bear on the problem, but until we do that assessment of where the gaps or needs are, it's going to be difficult to tell you exactly what that update or redesign might look like. And then third, I think there is this question that gets at the interagency piece of this, because Beijing may offer forms of security assistance that the United States decides it either cannot or should not try to compete directly with. I would recommend against the United States, for example, providing direct assistance that strengthens the capacity of particular forces to go out and knock heads and repress their citizens. The United States did some of that during the Cold War, decided

the backlash wasn't worth what they were getting out of it. There's actually a fascinating book by Adam Casey that goes through and, in my view, persuasively makes the case that the United States wasn't actually very good at that anyway. United States assistance tended to not create stability, whereas, ironically, Soviet assistance tended to prolong and stabilize authoritarian rule on the communist side of the Cold War divide. So Beijing may offer forms of security assistance that the United States cannot or should not try to match, but in other cases, the United States might be able to create an interagency package that

addresses legitimate security challenges. And it might, if it can do that, be a more appealing security partner than Beijing. But we won't know, the United States won't know unless it actually goes to the effort of putting that package together. Now, that raises the final question, which is that I would like to see a fairly high-level, probably NSC-level discussion of what the United States strategy is, because this is fundamentally an interagency challenge. As Hoot mentioned, it's not just DOD that does, and the Security Force Assistance Brigades that do this work. There's also these rule-of-law

partnership programs through USAID, the do this work. There's also these rule of law partnership programs through USAID, the Department of Justice. State Department does these international law enforcement academies. The National Guard does its state partnership program. The FBI and Department of Justice are involved in these programs. And so if what we're trying to do

is figure out what the right toolkit is for this problem, I don't see a way to resolve this that doesn't end up at the interagency NSC level and some strategic decisions about where and how the United States should compete and where it, for normative or strategic reasons, doesn't need to. Again, I can't give you a sort of like broad cookie cutter

answer that applies to all of the countries, but there's some, I think, institutional rethinking of how the United States can and should tackle this challenge with allies and partners that hasn't happened yet and that I would like to see happen sometime soon. Well, Hoop, given your first prescription about enhancing the understanding of the PRC's external and internal security mechanisms. Hopefully this podcast can be a good jumping off point for practitioners and policymakers. However, we're out of time right now and I wanted to thank you both for joining us on today's episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure to be on with you. Hey, it was a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much.

Hey, it was a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much. Thanks again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn.

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Thanks again, and we'll see you next time. So So I'm going to be back. you