Sheena Chestnut Greitens

Most studies of foreign policy look outward — at armies, alliances, and the balance of power. Sheena Chestnut Greitens built her reputation by looking the other way first: at how a state polices itself. Her wager is that the two are inseparable. How a government organises its coercive machinery at home — whom it recruits, how it shares information, what it fears — shapes not only the kind of violence it inflicts on its own people but the way it behaves beyond its borders. Follow that thread far enough and you arrive at one of the most important and least understood vectors of Chinese power: the export of surveillance, policing, and internal-security governance to the rest of the world.

It is an unusual lens, and a powerful one. In an age fixated on China’s navy and its chip ambitions, Greitens insists that the country’s vast apparatus of domestic control is not a side story but a foundation — and increasingly, a product for sale.

A Scholar of Coercion¶

Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Asia Policy Program and edits the Texas National Security Review. She took her doctorate at Harvard, a master’s at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and her undergraduate degree at Stanford, and she holds affiliations with the Carnegie Endowment and the US Army War College. She testifies regularly before Congress and the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, and publishes across the divide between scholarly journals and policy outlets — a reach that reflects the dual nature of her subject, which is at once a question of comparative politics and a live problem of national security.

Dictators and Their Secret Police¶

Her first book, Dictators and Their Secret Police (2016), made her name with a deceptively simple argument. Authoritarian rulers, she showed, face a “coercive dilemma.” They can build internal-security forces designed to manage mass popular unrest, or forces designed to guard against a coup from within the regime itself — but the institutional design that protects against one threat tends to expose the ruler to the other. And the choice has consequences written in blood: the way a regime organises its coercive apparatus shapes the kind of violence it produces.

A fragmented apparatus, staffed from a narrow loyal in-group and built mainly to coup-proof, lacks good intelligence and tends to over-react — producing indiscriminate, high-intensity violence against the population. A unified, socially inclusive apparatus with deep reach into society generates better intelligence and more targeted, lower-visibility repression, but concentrates power in ways that leave the ruler more exposed to a coup. Drawing on archival work across Cold War Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea, Greitens turned mass state violence from an expression of a dictator’s character into a predictable byproduct of how he tried to survive. The book won the American Political Science Association’s prize for the best book on comparative democratization.

Securing the Home, Acting Abroad¶

It is the China work that has made Greitens essential reading for strategists. Her unifying claim is that China’s “comprehensive national security” concept is, at bottom, a regime-security concept elevated to the level of grand strategy — and that to understand Beijing’s behaviour abroad, you have to start with what keeps its leaders awake at night about home.

The scale of the domestic effort is the first surprise. Under the banner of “stability maintenance,” Chinese spending on internal security has at times run ahead of the official military budget — a startling fact, even allowing for the definitional caveats that come with aggregating provincial accounts. Greitens uses the comparison to make a conceptual point rather than to fetishise a number: Beijing has long treated internal threats as at least as grave as external ones, and has built a surveillance state to match. Her most-cited recent scholarship, on Xinjiang, traces the 2017 escalation to mass detention and “re-education” to a shift she calls “preventive repression” — the conviction that an entire population had to be pre-emptively inoculated against a threat perceived to be rising, driven less by any specific attack than by a heightened sense of domestic vulnerability.

The payoff comes when that machinery goes abroad. Greitens has documented how China exports its surveillance and public-security platforms — “safe city” systems and the like — to scores of countries, and, crucially, what predicts who buys: not regime type alone, but the depth of a country’s strategic partnership with Beijing. The technology travels with training, consulting, and visits from China’s Ministry of Public Security, so that what is exported is not just cameras but a model of governing. Her recent work reframes China’s Global Security Initiative as substantially non-military, with police diplomacy conducted on a scale comparable to the People’s Liberation Army’s military diplomacy — “policing as foreign policy.” It is the internal-security dimension of the Belt and Road, and it connects directly to the contest over digital sovereignty and the global spread of surveillance-based governance.

One of her sharpest observations captures the strategic stakes in a sentence: many states now buy their external security from Washington and their internal security from Beijing — a quiet division of labour that scrambles the tidy “choose a side” framing of US–China competition.

Beyond “China Spreads Autocracy”¶

Greitens’s account of surveillance export is valuable precisely because it resists the slogan. The easy version of the digital-authoritarianism story holds that China is on a mission to spread its model — exporting repression the way the Soviet Union exported revolution. Greitens’s evidence points somewhere more disciplined and more disturbing. The strongest predictor of who buys Chinese surveillance, she finds, is not whether a government is authoritarian but how deep its strategic partnership with Beijing runs — which means the technology spreads through the ordinary channels of commerce and diplomacy, pulled by demand as much as pushed by ideology. Governments of every stripe want tools to watch their populations; China is simply the most willing and capable supplier.

That reframing changes the policy problem. If the issue were Chinese evangelism, the answer would be to counter Chinese influence. If the issue is global demand for instruments of control — met by a supplier that bundles cameras with training, data practices, and a model of “public security” — then the challenge is structural, and it implicates the buyers as much as the seller. The civil-liberties stakes are correspondingly broad: what travels is not just hardware but a template for how a state relates to its citizens, and the norms of cyber sovereignty and pervasive monitoring that come with it.

It is a characteristically Greitens move: take a subject saturated with alarmist rhetoric, and replace the slogan with a mechanism — who buys, why, and with what consequences. The result is more useful to policymakers than the moral panic it displaced, and harder to wish away.

Influence¶

Greitens’s contribution is to have fused two fields that are usually studied apart — the comparative politics of authoritarian repression and the international relations of foreign policy — into a single analytic frame in which the organisation of internal security is a foundational variable. She pushed the debate over “digital authoritarianism” beyond the slogan that “China spreads autocracy” toward a more disciplined, demand-side account of why Chinese policing and surveillance models spread, to whom, and with what consequences for civil liberties and governance. Through congressional testimony, the Texas National Security Review, and her think-tank work, that framing has become a reference point for how Western policymakers think about the security dimension of Chinese influence.

The Critics¶

The scholarly pushback, mostly directed at Dictators and Their Secret Police, is the productive kind. Reviewers ask whether her coup-proofing-versus-unrest tradeoff holds for revolutionary regimes like China and North Korea, which seem able to coup-proof without the predicted fragmentation; whether the model explains episodic mass violence such as the Cultural Revolution as well as it explains everyday repression; and whether coercive institutions might themselves shape the threats a regime faces, raising questions of reverse causation. Others note the model under-weights regime legitimacy, fiscal limits, and the influence of foreign patrons. On the China work, the perennial difficulty is evidentiary — inferring the threat perceptions of an opaque leadership from limited and often official sources — a caution Greitens shares rather than dismisses.

Why She Matters¶

Greitens reminds the realist tradition of something it sometimes forgets: that the state’s first and oldest security concern is not the enemy abroad but the threat at home, and that the two are joined at the root. By tracing the line from the secret-police file to the exported surveillance platform, she has illuminated a form of Chinese power that fixation on hardware misses entirely — the quiet sale of tools and techniques for governing populations. As the contest with Beijing increasingly turns on models of order rather than just military balance, hers is the indispensable account of how authoritarian security travels.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• “Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence” (Cambridge University Press, 2016) — the prize-winning study of how coercive design shapes state violence.

• “Counterterrorism and Preventive Repression: China’s Changing Strategy in Xinjiang,” International Security (2019/20) — her most-cited article on the logic behind the Xinjiang escalation.

• “Dealing with Demand for China’s Global Surveillance Exports,” Brookings (2020) — on who buys Chinese surveillance technology, and why.

• “A New World Cop on the Beat? China’s Internal Security Outreach Under the Global Security Initiative,” Carnegie Endowment (2025) — on policing as Chinese foreign policy.

• “Playing Both Sides,” Foreign Affairs (2024) — on states that buy external security from Washington and internal security from Beijing.