中文
By Bradley Blankenship
Lead: China is expanding intelligence and law enforcement cooperation with other nations as transnational threats increasingly outpace the capacity of any single nation to respond alone.
Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy is an affirmation of the postwar international order. Chinese officials routinely invoke the United Nations, sovereignty, non-interference, multilateralism, and international law as organizing principles for global affairs. In contrast to the ideological universalism and military interventionism that defined much of the post-Cold War moment, Beijing presents itself as a stabilizing actor: cautious, procedural, and development-oriented.
This posture has appeal. After decades of wars in the Middle East, economic fragmentation, and growing distrust of Western institutions, many states are receptive to a framework that promises predictability over ideological crusading. Yet there is a contradiction emerging beneath the rhetoric. The international system today is entering a genuine security dilemma, one that increasingly resembles the unstable strategic environment surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Many post-Cold War Western strategic assessments described the late Soviet period as one marked by institutional exhaustion, weakening ideological legitimacy, regional instability, and uncertainty regarding the future security architecture. In the years surrounding the Soviet collapse, U.S. strategic literature increasingly emphasized the reactive posture of states and intelligence services operating amid rapidly deteriorating institutional confidence.
Today, the world faces a comparable atmosphere of systemic distrust. In particular, while the United States remains militarily dominant, it is internally polarized and strategically inconsistent. Europe is divided between economic dependency and strategic anxiety. Regional conflicts—from Ukraine to the Middle East—are increasingly interconnected. Non-state actors, cybercrime syndicates, fentanyl trafficking networks, and decentralized extremist movements exploit gaps between jurisdictions faster than traditional state institutions can adapt.
Under these conditions, diplomatic signaling alone is insufficient, as stability is maintained through functioning security coordination and credible institutional behavior.
This is where China’s evolving security cooperation becomes significant, in line with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “actual outcomes” focus on diplomacy and the Global Security Initiative (GSI).
As early as April 2022, Xi Jinping proposed the GSI, calling on countries to adapt to the profoundly changing international landscape in the spirit of solidarity, and address the complex and intertwined security challenges with a win-win mindset. As an essential part of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy, the GSI aims to eliminate the root causes of international conflicts, improve global security governance, encourage joint international efforts to bring more stability and certainty to a volatile and changing era, and promote durable peace and development in the world. Over the past few years, significant progress has been made in the efforts to advance the GSI, notably in China's diplomatic mediation in the Middle East and elsewhere.
One of the more underappreciated recent developments has been the gradual expansion of Chinese intelligence and law-enforcement cooperation with neighboring states (Cambodia, Vietnam, for example) and even with “geopolitical competitors,” including the United States. This trend does not fit neatly into the prevailing narratives of inevitable confrontation. Instead, it suggests that both Washington and Beijing increasingly recognize the danger posed by unmanaged transnational threats.
A striking example occurred in Cincinnati, Ohio—my city of birth—where cooperation between the FBI and China’s Ministry of Public Security contributed to operations targeting fentanyl trafficking networks. Despite broader tensions between the two powers, the reality is that fentanyl precursor flows, money laundering systems, darknet logistics, and transnational criminal syndicates cannot be effectively managed through unilateral action alone. These networks exploit jurisdictional fragmentation. Intelligence sharing becomes less a matter of goodwill than of necessity.
This matters because it demonstrates a crucial point: practical security cooperation is still possible.
A similar logic can be observed regionally through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The SCO has increasingly emphasized counterterrorism coordination, intelligence exchange, and regional stabilization mechanisms. Its recently announced counterterror center reflects a broader recognition among Eurasian states that security threats are becoming diffuse, technologically adaptive, and transnational. Militancy, separatism, cyber operations, narcotics trafficking, and organized criminal activity increasingly overlap into hybrid threats that no single state can independently contain.
Western analysts often dismiss these developments merely as instruments of Chinese influence. But this critique can become too reductive because security institutions arise along with genuine threats. The question is whether the institutions themselves contribute to greater predictability and coordination.
In this context, China’s expanding international security engagement presents both significant opportunities and important responsibilities. As Beijing continues advancing initiatives associated with the GSI and multipolar cooperation, the importance of institutional coordination, procedural consistency, and professional security cooperation will likely continue growing. In an increasingly fragmented international environment, long-term security credibility depends not only on economic capacity and diplomatic engagement but also on the ability of institutions to operate predictably, lawfully, and effectively under pressure.
As China continues advancing the development of what it describes as a "socialist rule of law system," questions surrounding procedural consistency, regulatory predictability, and professional standards in cross-border cooperation will likely remain important areas of international discussion. Different countries maintain distinct legal traditions and political systems, but effective international coordination increasingly depends on stable institutional frameworks and mutual confidence between participating states.
Security cooperation in areas such as counterterrorism, anti-narcotics operations, anti-money laundering frameworks, and intelligence coordination requires consistent communication, professional conduct, and reliable legal procedures among all parties involved. As transnational threats become more technologically adaptive and globally interconnected, the importance of institutional trust and operational predictability will likely continue growing.
For this reason, China's continued emphasis on institutional development, professional governance capacity, and international coordination mechanisms may play an increasingly important role in shaping perceptions of its long-term contribution to global stability. History repeatedly demonstrates that a durable international order is strengthened when states are able to combine effective governance, economic development, and trusted institutional frameworks capable of managing complex security challenges in a predictable and coordinated manner.
There is an instructive anecdote here from the closing months of the Second World War. In February 1945, Dr. Carl Jung wrote a memorandum intended for Allen Dulles—later director of the CIA—and ultimately for General Dwight Eisenhower. Jung warned that Germany was approaching total psychological collapse. The Nazi system, having exhausted itself morally and spiritually, had left the German people facing what Jung described as a kind of void: a condition in which an entire society, stripped of meaning and legitimacy, risked descending into despair, fragmentation, and nihilism. Yet Jung also observed something significant in Eisenhower’s conduct. Rather than treating Germany as a permanently damned civilization, Eisenhower appealed to common values. This approach, combined with reconstruction and institutional rebuilding, ultimately helped stabilize not merely Germany, but Europe itself. The lesson was strategic: societies emerge from catastrophe through legitimacy, law, and disciplined reconstruction.
One finds a similar insight much earlier in the Western tradition itself. Aeschylus’ Oresteia, one of the foundational texts of European political consciousness, culminates in the replacement of blood-feud with law. The Furies are integrated into a higher civic order through the establishment of the Athenian court. Out of this symbolic transition from revenge to legal order emerged, historically and mythologically alike, the foundations of the Athenian Golden Age. Civilization advanced because conflict became mediated through institutions regarded as legitimate.
The emerging international environment in our present time demands states capable of disciplined institutional conduct. The development of socialist rule of law may prove just as important as military strength or economic scale. In the future, Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy will be given special credit for China’s role in helping construct practical systems capable of preserving the rule of law. In this respect, I believe Beijing’s continued expansion of intelligence coordination, counterterror cooperation, anti-narcotics partnerships, and institutional legal development will gradually build genuine international security credibility as a stabilizing force within a dangerously unstable century.
With the world drifting deeper into suspicion, fragmentation, and reactive securitization—a world increasingly reminiscent of the uncertainties that have long accompanied other transitional moments in history— the task is to build stable security, intelligence, and legal systems across borders to maintain the current level of social complexity. The security challenges are vast: groups are now armed with artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare capabilities, and globally networked criminal economies. That is a far more dangerous prospect than many policymakers presently admit. But it must be addressed responsibly. That is why China is advocating the GSI as well as the concept of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, ready to work with all other countries to address global security challenges.
Bradley Blankenship is an investigative journalist, columnist, author, political analyst and the founding chairman of the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project, a local U.S. anti-corruption network and civic oversight body.
