China’s economic liberalization since the early-1980s has brought about a revival of its private security industry, once a despised symbol of the country’s ‘century of humiliation’. As a result of successive high-profile attacks against State-Owned Enterprises operating abroad during the 2000s, China’s Private Security Companies began to globalize and drew academic attention partly as an extension of the lively discourse surrounding the Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI approach to crisis management has been characterised predominantly by bilateral agreements with host governments. Where states have lacked either the capacity or will to protect Chinese interests however, the use of private contractors has filled the gap in local security provision and statements by Chinese officials have increasingly referenced the sector. Yet Beijing’s efforts to codify armed security provision overseas have been vague and several ministries appear to have competing claims to oversight of the sector. Signs of ideological flexibility towards the use of force to protect ‘overseas interests’, has lead to speculation that the PRC’s private contractors may yet serve as an amenable ‘grey zone’ foreign policy tool. Chinese PSCs do not typically provide services such as armed response, local force training or support to combat operations and there is a notable absence of any Chinese analogue to the more conspicuous Western and Russian Private Military Companies. The Zhongjun Junhong Group however, has attracted the attention of researchers, due to the company’s unusual local privileges in Kyrgyzstan, its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its large market penetration relative to the country’s size and population. Central Asia is an important constituency-region of the BRI’s Eurasian pillar – the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), and the two countries’ proximity, separated by a porous and historically-contested border, means that the normalization on Kyrgyzstan’s politically fragmented territory, of these former-PLA and PAP servicemen, some of whom will have served in neighbouring Xinjiang, is significant and a potentially instructive case study for China’s use of armed non-state actors in the developing world.
Philip Reid held a Visiting Research Fellowship at CCW in 2021-22. His research examines China’s use of Private Security Companies (PSCs) in Central Asia as well as the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese Foreign Policy more broadly. Philip recently served as a MOD Regional Adviser on China and Central Asia, and his sixteen-year service career saw near-continuous deployment to Afghanistan. Philip is presently based at the Kazakh National Defence University and has held fellowships with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi and the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. Philip speaks Russian and Persian and read Classical Persian Literature for his MA.
