Cultural Security in the People’s Republic of China: Between Party-State Invocation and Academic Theorization

This chapter traces the embrace of cultural security—expressed in terms of discursive invocations and formalizations—by the party-state, a process that began with the Jiang administration in the late 1990s and remains ongoing under the current Xi administration. The chapter provides an in-depth overview of how the concept was theorized by party-state elites, drawing heavily from a representative sample of works associated with a cultural security literature published in the PRC in the period 1999–2018. In the absence of an officially endorsed party-state def inition of cultural security, these sources, produced by academics embedded within or in close proximity to party-state institutions and largely conditioned by the CCP’s domination over knowledge-production processes, offer approximating insights into how the concept is understood and operationalized by party-state elites.