North Korea: Part II—Why I Might Start Worrying About North Korea

The technical aspects of a fully-functioning nuclear weapons program are daunting. A warhead is useless unless it can reach your target. Intercontinental ballistic missiles must be accurate, durable enough to withstand the considerable pressures of the launch, transit (including a sub-orbital spaceflight), and re-entry. Since the distance between North Korea and its primary targets in the US are so considerable, fueling is key (solid fuels are trickier but offer more distance for a smaller volume), and you need a warhead that is small enough to fit at the tip of an ICBM without weighing it down too much but also powerful enough to pack a wallop (the so-called miniaturization stage, perhaps the trickiest of the lot).

It took the Soviet Union and United States the better part of two decades to master the complex process of physics, chemistry, metallurgy and engineering to construct reliable, intercontinental nuclear weapons arsenal. To think that North Korea can do the same with less than one percent the resources in a shorter timeframe is, to put it bluntly, paranoia. And even that assumes that the politics of North Korea are pushing the country in the direction of a hot war with the United States. In Part I of this series, I laid out just how unlikely that all is and why I’m not all that concerned about North Korea.

But things may be changing.

Recent changes to such outside assessments are why I’ve broken with my normal policy of ignoring North Korea to give my view on where North Korea is today, and what could well be about to happen.

Throughout August there have been rafts of leaks out of U.S. intelligence institutions and a great deal of propaganda out of North Korea on the status of the North Korean nuclear and missile programs. All point to a sharp increase in the speed of technical achievement of said programs: longer range missiles, different materials that enable for stable missile reentry, progress in miniaturizing nuclear devices to make them missile-mountable, indications of changes to the device geometry that would increase both yield and stability, and so on.

Seoul, South Korea

On September 3, North Korea tested what Pyongyang claims to have been a “thermonuclear” device rather than simply a mere “nuclear” device, which serves as a case in point. A run-of-the-mill nuclear device uses conventional explosives to split unstable uranium atoms in a process called fission: as the atoms split they unleash additional energy, magnifying the destructive potential of the initial blast. A more advanced thermonuclear device instead uses a smaller atomic device to combine light elements (typically hydrogen) to make heavier elements in a process called fusion: hydrogen atoms are smooshed together (scientific term), knocking off protons and again unleashing a devastating amount of energy. Both generate a massive amount of energy and will generally ruin your day even if you are blissfully ignorant to the difference between the two, but a fusion device requires less fuel and a smaller assembly and so is easier to mount on a missile making it the more problematic weapons system from the American point of view.

Considering how tightly-closed the North Korean system is – particularly when it comes to weapon specs – I find the near-simultaneous release of all this information a bit… convenient. On the American side, leaks about advances in miniaturization have the feel of a bureau’s carefully-crafted effort to attain more funding. On the NorK side of things, some of the propaganda is just stupid – for example the claim that Pyongyang’s new device is yield-adjustable (that it can be preprogrammed to detonate at variable explosive power levels). Such a technological advance would make North Korean nuke tech equal to current Russian and American nuke tech.

Yet too much has changed too fast for me to simply dismiss the lot. If several of the items leaked and proclaimed the past five weeks are true, then the entire balance of the region and American policy towards it change dramatically. It is one thing to toy around with nukes in your basement, quite another to mount them onto missiles, put them on your lawn and point them at people.

A meaningful, deployed North Korean nuclear weapon would leave the Americans with only two options.

Option one would be a pre-emptive strike – and not the sort of pinpoint conventional strike that gets bandied about on Fox and CNN. Since anyone who can build one nuclear weapon can build more than one, all a conventional strike would do is piss Pyongyang off and force them into a use-it-or-lose-it position. No, any preemptive strike designed to eliminate the North Korea nuclear program would need to be nuclear itself, and would need to hit at least a dozen different targets.

Option two is containment. The Americans would make sure that no weapon launched from North Korea could ever hit any American landmass. That means radically expanded missile-interception assets, on land, in the air and on the water. Putting American hardware at multiple points on every flight path for any conceivable delivery system to any possible American landmass. And backing those assets up with strike capability so that any North Korean asset even tangentially related to any missile launch facility could be eliminated within an hour of any North Korean launch.

The big loser from either option (aside from North Korea) is China. It’s hard to imagine anything that would focus minds in Beijing more on whatever Washington wants to talk about than the American carpet-nuking of China’s only real ally.

Yet if anything, containment is worse for Beijing than even North Korea’s vaporization. Any American missile defense system that can intercept missiles from North Korea to the United States could also intercept missiles from China to the United States. One way or another, North Korea’s recent evolutions make China look weak and hugely shrink China’s strategic room to maneuver.

This all, of course, assumes the Americans continue with their weird obsession with North Korea. The real hilarity of all this is that North Korea is a strategic relic of a time three decades in the past. A much more relevant discussion is about what’s about to happen in South Korea and beyond.

In the immediate aftermath of North Korea’s Sept 1 (thermo)nuclear test, U.S. President Donald Trump reserved his harshest criticism not for Pyongyang or Beijing, but instead Seoul.

From a traditional national security point of view such vitriol seems…unwise. North Korea is a foe. South Korea is an ally. Lambasting an ally you would need to combat a foe is idiotic. Right?

Well, the problem here isn’t with the Trump White House, the Kim family, or either of the Koreas – but instead with the word “traditional”…

Continued in Part III

North Korea: Part I—Why I Don’t Worry About North Korea

I’ve been in the foreign affairs, intelligence, analysis and context business for two decades now, and there are few things that annoy me more than North Korea.

It is a small, perennially poor, backwards and deliberately dysfunctional regime. Its economic heft is below negligible. It could not sustain a hot war for more than a few days as its entire population has lived on insufficient rations for years, its military equipment was antiquated thirty years ago, and all its fuels are imported so its military has little staying power. It couldn’t win a military conflict with any of its neighbors. It is so politically isolated that it simply cannot shape anything in any sphere beyond its immediate region.

North Korea is in such a sad state that its strategic policy has no real tools other than bluff and propaganda, and I don’t have a lot of respect for blowhards – particularly when they never back up their words with action – and North Korea is perhaps the most blowhardy country in the history of language. To give you an idea of just how strongly I feel about North Korea’s lack of strength, my brother is of South Korean descent and I don’t believe he has been in one whit of danger in all these past four years he’s been living in South Korea.

And then there’s the strategic angle. During the Cold War the Americans committed themselves to protecting the territories and economies of all the allies – of which South Korea was one – in order to form a cordon sanitaire around the Soviets. A large military presence in South Korea was part of that process. But the Cold War is long over, the Americans are getting out of the global management business, and the ongoing American military footprint in South Korea is the very definition of policy inertia. The inter-Korean border may still be a flashpoint, but it is no longer a flashpoint that serves any broader strategic purpose for the United States. For the Americans it is exposure and risk without any conceivable benefit, and it is high time for the American military position in the region to shift – and shift sharply.

Seoul, South Korea

And that despite all the nuclear bric-a-brac. Yes, the nuclear question for North Korea is a big one, and honestly it is the only reason that Washington should care about the country at all. But even here, I’m not impressed. My lack of concern falls into two general categories.

First, the technicalities of a nuclear program.

A nuclear weapons program isn’t easy, but the easiest part is building the explosive device itself. Obtaining the uranium, turning it into weapons grade uranium or plutonium, building an implosion device to trigger a runaway atomic explosion – this was all first done in the 1940s and to think a people as inventive as the Koreans (North and South) couldn’t achieve nuclear fission is simply silly. The NorKs did so back in the 1990s and there is no recapturing that genie.

But that’s only the first step. Now you need to deliver it. Back in World War II the Americans delivered the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes by high-altitude bomber – something that was possible because of the lack of surface-to-air missile defenses and absolute American mastery of islands near Japan. That option is firmly off the table for the NorKs as the United States is far too distant and far too militarily advanced for a large, slow moving aircraft to penetrate its defenses.

That leaves missiles. The obvious obstacle is range. The NorKs can currently claim accurately to be able to strike in the vicinity of Hawaii and ongoing experiments with missiles are clearly aiming for the American mainland. That is likely some time off still, but in years – not decades. It may (literally) be rocket science – and remain one of the most technically challenging military fields – but the NorKs have been working on this very hard for a very long time.

Yet even a sufficiently-ranged and designed missile isn’t enough, because a missile cannot carry a big, bulky, delicate device. Primitive nuclear devices weigh tons, and rockets can only carry hundreds of pounds. There’s also the massive issue of reentry. Falling from orbit makes everything more than a bit shaky, which is more than enough to break into irrelevance a newbie nuke.

And of course, it would be nice to actually hit your target. Early ballistic missiles were notoriously inaccurate. There’s a reason NASA – not only the world’s best rocket nerds as well as the nerds with the greatest interest in accuracy – aims for the Pacific Ocean when its rockets need to make splashdown. It is sorta hard to miss the world’s biggest body of water. North Korea’s missiles probably can only be relied upon to strike within 15 miles of their targets. As of September 2 high-end estimates for a North Korean nuclear device (not deliverable weapon, device) were “only” 30 kilotons. That’s “only” enough to generate a thermal pulse 3 miles across. For comparison, in the early 1980s American ICBMs had an accuracy of +/- of 2 miles which was a big reason they opted for the big booms provided by the MX program. (If you enjoy day-dreaming of nuclear Armageddon I’m pleased to point you to the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Nukemap where you can dial up and down the kilotons and see the effects on the city of your choice.)

Bottom line: Just as the technologies required to make a missile capable of descending through the atmosphere without shaking itself or its cargo apart are more difficult than getting the missile to its destination, the technologies required to ruggedize and miniaturize a nuke so that it can fit on a missile are more difficult than “simply” making a nuclear device in the first place.

Put it together and, while the NorKs clearly are making progress, I don’t believe they are all that close to having a deliverable weapon, much less a broader deterrent. And even that assumes that the NorKs’ nuclear program is about the United States – something I’m not convinced on. This brings us to the second why-North-Korea-doesn’t-worry-me category: internal North Korean politics.

Kim Jong Un via the Korean Central News Agency

Let’s start with the obvious:

Anyone who claims they have a good picture of what is going on in North Korea is lying to you. The isolationist country has a wickedly effective internal security system and pretty much everyone’s spies are rooted out on a regular basis. Operational intelligence, particularly within the political-military space that is so crucial to informing American decisionmakers, is simply not possible with North Korea. The only thing an intelligence professional can do in such circumstances is infer and induce, something that pretty much all of us hate doing because there is no way to prove any particular theory correct or incorrect. What I’m about to share is little more than a guess, but it is an educated guess guided by some of the smartest thinkers I know.

North Korea’s bombast is not about the United States. It is about a family dinner table squabble.

Kim Il Sung is the guy who founded the modern North Korean state after World War II. He built his legitimacy fighting the Japanese during their generation-long occupation of the peninsula. He created the paranoid, ultra-poor, Stalinist backwater we know as North Korea and ruled it through the end of the Cold War. However, come 1993 the Soviet Union had disintegrated, the Chinese had agreed to join the capitalist world, and North Korea found itself utterly alone. Kim Il Sung was far from inane; he realized that his country in its current form was unsustainable, and the talk of the time was how to open negotiations with South Korea on unification.

And then, unexpectedly, he died. (Insert your favorite conspiracy here.)

The remaining ruling elites of Kim Il Sung’s First generation did the only thing they could. They helped pass the torch to the Second generation, led by Kim Il Sung’s son, Kim Jong Il. But whereas Kim Il Sung was a competent autocrat, a savvy negotiator and had the gravitas that comes from decades of rulership, Kim Jong Il was an arrogant, inept, unfeeling prick shaped by an environment of isolation and paranoia.

Unlike their co-ethnics in South Korea, the North Korean educational system is seeped less in engineering than in ideology – and not even a globally interesting ideology, but instead a homegrown one that preached that a country with no resources or friends or trade or money was somehow magically a world power. Kim Il Jong and his entire generation were raised wholly within North Korea, and they all grew up drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid. Upon becoming the Dear Leader, Kim Il Jong launched a series of economic “reforms” that inadvertently gutted the country’s agricultural capacity, causing a famine that killed between one million and three million people out of a population of roughly 20 million.

The First generation was horrified, and soon took steps to limit the damage. Ditching Kim Il Sung and the Second generation wasn’t perceived as an option, so instead the First generation sent the Third generation abroad so that they could learn how the world really worked. The goal was to, in time, bring the Thirds back to relaunch the country into the modern world. Kim Jong Un, the future North Korean leader, attended studies in Switzerland, far from the less-than-worthless educational system back in North Korea.  (I have it on good authority from the guy who sat next to Kim in class that while the younger Kim certainly has impulse control issues, “insane” is not an accurate descriptor.)

There was a problem with the Firsts’ new plan: Kim Jong Il died before the Thirds’ studies were complete. But rather than risk an unstable transition period in which no one was in control, the Firsts thought it best to recall Kim Jong Un, put him in charge at the tender age of 27, and shove the entire ruling Second generation to the side for being wastes of skin.

Now, put yourself in Kim Jung Un’s shoes.

Your grandfather’s generation – the Firsts – are now in their nineties and are dying out in dribs and drabs. But these are the guys that fought Imperial Japan and resisted the Soviets, Chinese and Americans. They are no slouches. They want you to overhaul the country, but not until they are gone – and they still control much of the sharp end of state power. Your father’s generation – the Seconds – is bat-shit crazy, and the First generation just shunted them from power, prestige and privilege in favor of… you. The Seconds are angry, bitter and want back what was taken from them.

You are trapped between a group that wants you to move, but not too quickly, and one that simply wants you dead. So what do you do? You appear erratic. Unpredictable. You launch the odd missile. Test the odd nuke. Shell the odd South Korean city. You make the Firsts think you are strong but respectful of their position, and the Seconds think you are crazier than you are. And whenever the opportunity presents itself, you purge a few Seconds. Including your relations.

Especially your relations. This is, after all, a dynastic system.

If this is true, then North Korea is a Twitter account in a teapot. All the smoke and sound is simply what domestic politics looks like, and there isn’t much to be concerned about. The biggest argument that this is true is the simple fact that the NorKs haven’t done much of strategic significance since the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953. Six decades is a looooong time to do absolutely nothing if you really are a country full of nuclear-armed madmen. If this is true, then the Trump administration can totally lean on Pyongyang without risk of a military conflict because at the end of the day the drama is for internal consumption – it is not about the United States. If anything, Trump matching North Korea’s propaganda invective tweet for tweet is actually an effective strategy because it makes it clear that Pyongyang is firmly on the American radar and the North Korea domestic management strategy could have consequences. (Trump’s tweeting has certainly had an impact on Venezuela, but that’s a topic for another day.)

So between technical questions and political insecurity, instability and bombast, I don’t worry all that much.

Or at least I haven’t. That may now be changing.

(to be continued in Part II)

The Absent Superpower

It’s finally arrived!

I’m happy to announce that The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America is finally in print and in stock. Here is a link to the purchase page on Zeihan.com. We will have a digital version ready by February 1st. Additionally, book format issues limit me in terms of graphics capacity to only black & white images but many of the topics I write about are in screaming color, so here is the map room for The Absent Superpower.

Which brings me to my next announcement: the Zeihan on Geopolitics website has had a face lift for the New Year. We’ll be populating it with more material during the next few weeks, particularly as the Know Your World section expands. Feel free to explore.

And if all that wasn’t tease enough, in lieu of a New Year’s newsletter, we’ve instead opted to share the introduction for The Absent Superpower…

Absent-Super-Power-book

INTRODUCTION


The Journey to The Absent Superpower

EVERYTHING IS CHAOS!

At least, that’s what it seems like every time you turn on your TV, radio, computer, or smart phone.

The European Union is falling apart, Syria is in meltdown, cybercrime is an hourly occurrence, the Chinese economy is gyrating wildly, Russia is on the march, the election of Donald Trump has Americans of all political stripes wondering what comes next, and the Kardashians get more press time than Congress. It’s enough to give anyone a panic attack.

Well, not quite anyone. Unlike the average person, all this craziness puts me in my happy place. Where most see the world turning itself upside down and inside out, I see a long-overdue shift in the global order. New trends emerging. New possibilities unfolding. For me, change is good for business.

That’s because my job is a bit…different than the standard. You see, I’m a geopolitical strategist. That’s a fancy way of saying I help organizations understand what challenges and opportunities they will be grappling with across the world in the years to come. As such I’m sort of a professional apprentice, rarely a master of any particular craft but needing to be able to hold my own in conversations about manufacturing and transport and health care and finance and agriculture and metals and electricity and education and defense and such. Preferably without pissing off anyone whose living is based off of manufacturing or transport or health care or finance or agriculture or metals or electricity or education or defense.

In many ways those conversations make me who I am. From the Air Force to the Pickle Packers, every interaction gives me a good hard view of the world, yet each of these interactions originates from a radically different perspective. Combine all those angles and interactions and perspectives and the unique information that comes from them with my private intelligence experience, and I’m granted the privilege of seeing something approximating the full picture — how the world’s myriad pieces interlock — and catch some telling future glimpses to boot. More than anything else, what I sell is context.

That picture and those glimpses and that context formed the bones of my first book, The Accidental Superpower, which was published in November 2014. In Accidental I made the case that the world we knew was at a moment of change: The Americans who had created, nurtured, enabled, maintained and protected the post-WWII global order were losing interest. As they stepped back the world we know was about to fall to pieces.

At any time in history such a shift would have had monumental consequences, but the American retrenchment is but one of three massive shifts in the global the order. The second is the rapid greying of the entire global population. Fewer people of working age translates directly into anemic, decaying economies — enervating global trade just as the Americans stop guaranteeing it. Third and finally, the American shale revolution has changed the mechanics — if not yet the mood — of how the Americans interact with the energy sector. Surging petroleum output within the Lower 48 is pushing North America toward outright oil independence; in the past decade the total continental shortfall has narrowed from roughly 10 million barrels of oil per day (mbpd) to about 2mbpd.

In the two years since Accidental published, I’ve had ample opportunity to re-examine every aspect of my work — some of my critics have been (over) eager to assist in such endeavors — and I fear that I may have been off the mark on a couple of points.

First, the American shale sector has matured far faster and more holistically than I could have ever expected.

Despite a price crash in oil markets, despite ongoing opposition to shale among a far from insignificant portion of the population, despite broad scale ignorance about what shale is and what shale is not, shale has already overhauled American energy.

In 2006 total American oil production had dropped to 8.3mbpd while demand was touching 20.7mpbd, forcing the United States to import 12.4mpbd, more than Japan and China and Germany combined. By 2016 U.S. oil output had breached 15mbpd. Factor in the Canadians and Mexicans, and total American imports of non-North American oil had plunged to about 2mbpd — and that in the teeth of an oil price war. And that’s just oil specifically. Take a more comprehensive view and include everything from bunker fuel to propane, and the continent is less than 0.8mbpd from being a net energy exporter.

The end of American dependence upon extra-continental energy sources does more than sever the largest of the remaining ties that bind America’s fate to the wider world, it sets into motion a veritable cavalcade of trends: the re-industrialization of the United States, the accelerated breakdown of the global order, and a series of wide-ranging military conflicts that will shape the next two decades.

This book’s opening section contains the long and the short of this Shale New World, the greatest evolution of the American industrial space since at least 1970. For the financiers and accountants and policy wonks out there, this was written with your geeky brains specifically in mind.

Second, the isolationist trickle I detected in American politics has deepened and expanded into a raging river. Of the two dozen men and women who entered the 2016 presidential race, only one — Ohio Governor John Kasich — advocated for a continuation of America’s role in maintaining the global security and trade order that the Americans installed and have maintained since 1945. The most anti-trade candidate on the right won his party’s nomination, while the most anti-trade candidate on the left finished a close second in the Democratic primaries to the Clinton political machine. Last night (now President) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton met in New York to debate economic policy. What struck me as self-gratifying and horrifying in equal measure was that their core disagreement on trade issues wasn’t whether trade was good or bad for the United States, but how much to pare it back and which reasons for paring cut it the most with the electorate. (The pair of them obviously disagreed — colorfully, vehemently and often — on other issues.)

The world has had seven decades to become inured to a world in which the Americans do the heavy lifting to maintain a system that economically benefits all. The world has had three decades to become inured to a world in which the Americans do not expect anything of substance in return. As the Americans back away, very few players have any inkling of how to operate in a world where markets are not open, transport is not safe, and energy cannot be secured easily.

The stage is set for a global tailspin of epic proportions. Just as the global economy tips into deflation, just as global energy is becoming dangerous, just as global demographics catastrophically reduce global consumption, just as the world really needs the Americans to be engaged, the United States will be…absent. We stand on the very edge of the Disorder.

The Disorder’s defining characteristic is, well, its lack of order. Remove the comfortable, smothering American presence in the world and the rest of humanity has to look out for its own interests. As many of those interests clash, expect devolutions that are deeply-felt and disastrous in equal measure. Part II breaks down the breakdown. I’m equally proud and terrified to report that some of the darker shades in Accidental are happening sooner rather than later. For generals — armchair or otherwise — who prefer jumping directly into the fight, Part II is what you’re after.

In the final section we will circle back at take a good hard look at the United States. Energy independent, economically robust, physically secure, and — above all — strategically unfettered, the United States will be taking a break from the world writ large for the most part.

Yet “for the most part” is a far cry from a full divorce from all things international. The Yanks will still find bits of the world worth their time, effort, money and ammunition. Section III explores the American Play: where the Americans will still be found, why they will be there, how they’ll act, and what they’ll be up to.

It may be small comfort, but the acceleration of the shale revolution as well as the American political shift towards populism has illuminated a great deal, sharpening my view of the future. The various glimpses that made up Accidental have somewhat merged, lingering to the point that they now constitute a bit of a roadmap.

That roadmap is the core of this book.

Peter Zeihan
September 27, 2016
Somewhere over Kentucky

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America and Vietnam Set Sights on China

President Obama kicked off a trip to Asia with a visit to Vietnam, where he announced that the United States is fully lifting the arms embargo on Hanoi. In a joint press conference with Vietnamese president Tran Dai Quang, President Obama finished a process that has been proceeding incrementally throughout much of his term in office, namely slowly rolling back the vestiges of the United States’ bitter two-decade war against Vietnamese communists. Sentiments among many American Baby Boomers regarding Washington’s slow-but-steady outreach to Hanoi are mixed, but President Obama’s visit and decision to end the arms embargo reflect the United States’ determination to restructure Cold War alliances in a nod to today’s shifting global environment.

Countries like Vietnam are emblematic of the future of American alliance structures.

  • Hanoi is an inveterate land power—having proven itself sufficiently scrappy to resist centuries of Chinese encroachment and both French and US military might.
  • Lifting the arms embargo is unlikely to cause serious heartburn down the line for other friendly US states in Southeast Asia — namely Thailand and Singapore — because Southeast Asian geography is sufficiently rugged that Vietnam does not pose a threat to these states.

  • It helps strengthen pro-US sentiments among Vietnam’s vehemently anti-Chinese military leadership, a vital bulwark against Beijing’s regional interests for both Washington and Hanoi’s fellow ASEAN member-states.
  • Vietnam’s long eastern coastline is home to Cam Ranh Bay, the finest natural deep water harbor in South East Asia. Cam Ranh has hosted French, American and Soviet fleets in the past century.
  • Vietnam lies along the South China Sea and claims the Paracel and the Spratly Islands, rocky outposts that have become flashpoints in the powder keg of the South China Sea. Vietnam’s views on China and the South China Sea mean that its geographic and strategic positions are now in-line with American interests, rather than threatening them. Vietnam’s geographic position is now more strategic than ever, and its stance on China has opened the door for American influence.

  • Washington’s outreach to Vietnam cannot be defined purely through military or anti-Chinese positions. Vietnam’s large and youthful population represents a strong future growth market, and getting in on the ground floor of Vietnam’s push toward industrialization will be a boon to American manufacturers looking for both cheap skilled labor and a market for higher-end, US made goods. Vietnamese power and transport infrastructure is in desperate need of foreign technology and investment, and the country’s offshore energy assets represent several opportunities for US supermajors experienced in deep-water energy production.

The United States and Vietnam are burying the hatchet. Hanoi still has work to do on its end—economic and political reforms and the kinds of asides about human rights concerns US leaders habitually mumble about in front of journalists—but Washington is committed to working with the Vietnamese leadership to see that this process is carried out in-line with American regional interests. The process will have hiccups and headaches along the way, but the United States is committed to moving forward in what will be the bedrock of expanded US-ASEAN cooperation.

Making the Next Mao

Chinese President Xi Jinping is already poised to be the most powerful man in Chinese history after Mao Zedong, and proposed reforms to the country’s paramilitary police force would all but guarantee that position if they are passed. The People’s Armed Police Internal Guard Corps is a 600,000 strong paramilitary police force with military-grade weapons and specialized training in counter-terrorism and anti-riot policing. Right now, the Corps answers to China’s civilian leadership as well as the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. Proposed reforms would place the paramilitary force under the control of the Chinese president, relocating a key structure in containing social unrest and domestic security from a fractured control system scattered throughout the Chinese system to the direct control of Xi Jinping.

As Beijing and the Communist Party ready themselves for the 19th Party Congress in 2017, President Xi has been in the midst of a frequently mentioned but often misunderstood factional reshuffling. President Xi is consolidating authority and attempting to control the evolution of China’s political and social reforms in the face of an unavoidable slowing of the economy. If the proposed reforms to the leadership of the People’s Armed Police go through, expect Xi to follow through with reforms targeting the most ossified and entrenched (read: corrupt and powerful) factions of the Party, with the full force of 600,000 paramilitary forces poised to reign in any threats of resistance or unrest.