Structural Multipolarity and China's "National Security in the New Era"

This week, China’s State Council released a new white paper - National Security in the New Era - which provides Beijing’s comprehensive national security vision for China and the global community. A central feature of the narrative upon my first couple of times reading it was the thread of multipolarity as the structural environment which enables Beijing’s rise and pursuit of strategic interests in the international community. I dig into this a bit deeper in this analysis.

In China’s 2025 white paper National Security in the New Era, multipolarity is framed as a precondition for peace, stability, and equitable development. The document places multipolarity at the center of China's evolving approach to national security, development, and global governance. It portrays the world at a “historical crossroads,” beset by geopolitical conflict, systemic crises, and what it calls the “four deficits” of peace, development, security, and governance. Yet amidst this turbulence, China portrays multipolarity as both a stabilizing corrective to unipolar dominance and a strategic opening for states seeking greater autonomy in an increasingly contested global order.

China’s Overall National Security Concept (ONSC), introduced by Xi Jinping in 2014 and elaborated at length in the white paper, sets the ideological and structural framework for understanding how multipolarity fits within the country’s grand strategy. The ONSC defines national security both in the traditional territorial and military terms, but also a broad, systemic enterprise that encompasses economic resilience, technological sovereignty, ideological control, and global influence. In this framework, multipolarity provides the strategic space for China to protect and advance its own development model, while simultaneously pushing back against what it describes as “hegemonism, power politics, and Cold War mentality.”

“China has always stood on the right side of history and on the side of human progress, and has stabilized an uncertain world with China’s certainty.”

In Beijing’s view, multipolarity, then, is both a shield and a scaffold. It shields China from systemic pressures—such as sanctions, supply chain disruptions, and ideological subversion—while creating new scaffolding for a global order based on sovereignty, regime security, and economic interdependence. The white paper outlines this vision through the Global Security Initiative (GSI), which it calls “the ‘security chapter’ of the community with a shared future for mankind.” Framed as an answer to “outdated logic” like alliance blocs and zero-sum rivalry, the GSI emphasizes “common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security.” These principles are not merely rhetoric—they mirror Beijing’s strategic goals: secure development corridors (BRI), pluralistic digital and AI governance, and constraints on foreign interference.

“The Global Security Initiative is... not only China’s answer to global security governance, but also a dialectical understanding of its own security and international common security.”

That line is telling. Common security, in China’s view, is not a global public good independent of national interest—it’s a mechanism to reinforce national security from the outside in. As the paper puts it, the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” depends not just on domestic control but on a favorable international environment. Multipolarity and common security are deeply intertwined—and Beijing sees both as structural requirements for sustaining political legitimacy and economic stability at home.

Multipolarity also plays an important developmental role within the security framework. China is blunt: “Lack of development is the greatest insecurity.” Development is described not only as a domestic imperative but as a stabilizing force that underwrites regime durability and public trust. In the white paper’s formulation, security and development are two sides of the same coin. Multipolarity offers Beijing a way to access new markets, hedge against decoupling, and engage in parallel rulemaking beyond U.S.-led institutions. It allows China to preserve what the document calls “a benign interaction between high-quality development and high-level security.”

“Development and security are the two wings of one body and the two wheels of one drive.”

This logic is also reflected in China’s expanding legal and institutional toolkit. The white paper underscores a suite of national security laws—the Data Security Law, Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, Export Control Law, among others—designed to counter external economic coercion and secure China’s “right to open development.” Multipolarity creates the normative and political cover for China to build parallel regulatory systems—especially in coordination with Global South partners seeking to escape the reach of Western legal and financial mechanisms. It’s an effort to rewrite international norms from the standpoint of sovereignty, non-intervention, and development rights.

That same impulse is evident in China’s efforts to lead within the Global South. The paper repeatedly calls the Global South “the backbone of stability, goodness and progress,” and portrays China not as a disrupter of Western order but as the architect of a more balanced global system. The GSI, BRI, and BRICS expansion are all framed as vehicles for redistributing power and mitigating the development and security deficits that many emerging states face. China explicitly rejects what it describes as the “pan-securitization” of trade, tech, and finance, offering instead what it calls “inclusive globalization.” The message is simple: no country, China included, should be forced to choose between growth and sovereignty.

“All countries have boarded a ship with a shared destiny. No country can retreat to a self-enclosed island.”

This framing serves a dual purpose. It positions China as a stabilizer in global security governance while legitimizing its domestic model of Party-led modernization. China’s claim to international leadership is reinforced by its growing footprint in emerging technology domains—AI, biotechnology, data governance, and outer space—where it increasingly seeks to act as a rule-maker rather than a rule-taker. The white paper highlights Beijing’s efforts to promote frameworks like the Global AI Governance Initiative and Global Data Security Initiative, which are grounded in principles of “people-oriented, inclusive, and non-discriminatory” development. These initiatives serve both as soft-power instruments and as extensions of the national security apparatus, designed to secure technological autonomy and shape global standards in ways that reflect Chinese interests.

Critically, these domains have evolved from innovation priorities to national security imperatives. The white paper calls for “forward-looking prevention and restraint guidance” and “rapid and effective response” to emerging technological risks. Multipolarity enables China to set the pace of global norm formation in these fields—reducing vulnerability to external regulatory regimes while expanding its influence as a norm entrepreneur across digital and frontier technologies.

The military dimension is less prominent in this year’s document than in past ones, but it remains core. The white paper reiterates China’s goal of building “a strong military defense barrier” and modernizing its integrated national security architecture. Civil-military fusion, joint operations capabilities, and industrial readiness are all part of the long-term effort to safeguard “core interests,” including Taiwan and contested maritime zones. Importantly, multipolarity helps manage escalation risk. In a conflict scenario—say, over Taiwan—a more multipolar world gives Beijing leverage to prevent or dilute unified responses. As the paper states, China “will never allow any person, any organization, any political party, at any time, in any form, to separate any piece of Chinese territory.” Multipolarity offers both the geopolitical cover and the diplomatic fragmentation to make that threat more credible.

In sum, multipolarity now functions as a structural pillar of China’s national security architecture, no longer just aspirational rhetoric. Its integration into the Overall National Security Concept (ONSC) reveals how Beijing links global power diffusion to the viability of its political system and developmental model. From first look, China’s embrace of multipolarity seems less about achieving balance among major powers and more targeted to reconfiguring the normative and institutional foundations of international order. In other words, the goal is to reshape the operating environment so that China’s system is no longer the exception to liberal norms, but a template with growing legitimacy.

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