Integrating Stability Maintenance into Comprehensive Governance: The Burgeoning “Safe China” Behemoth

Abstract

This article examines the Xi Jinping–era stability maintenance behemoth called “Safe China.” Safe China is a regime of activities that integrates “public order” policing and surveillance with “social governance.” It is linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s “Overall National Security Outlook” and its main task is “political security.” Our analysis of Safe China recognizes integration as its main animating principle. Three elements of Safe China—its ideological rationale, its on-the-ground public order and social governance mechanisms, and the party’s absolute leadership over its operation at the grassroots—are conducive to this integration process. Ultimately, through Safe China, the party is seeking to modernize its own governance capacity and embed its leadership more fully into grassroots society, to ensure long-lasting “peace and safety,” not only for the nation but for itself.