China's National Security Strategy: Continuance and Change in Securitizing and De-securitizing

The issue of transformation in China's national security strategy has fueled many debates among policymakers and research communities in the past decades. Additionally, the fact that China's growth is now considered a security threat to the Country's security procedures is also the source of many debates. The main objective of this article is to evaluate changes in China's national security strategy considering the Country's four generations of rulers, in the framework of China's security traditions and “comprehensive security. The main question posed in this article considers the ways in which China's national security Strategy has been defined and/or re-defined under the four generations of China's rulers.The answer to this question is sought in an explanatory-analytical method, with due consideration of the “comprehensive security” theoretical framework of Barry Buzan and Ole Weaver of the Copenhagen School of thought (COPRI). This is done to evaluate the power of the principles of the Copenhagen School of thought to explain and predict the changes taken place in China's national security strategy. The main hypothesis studied here is that securitizing and de-securitizing from Weaver's viewpoint and the constituents of comprehensive security are not, in most cases, able to evaluate China's security transformations.