Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also directs the Asia Policy Program. Her research focuses on national security, East Asia, and authoritarian politics. She is the author of Dictators & Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions & State Violence (2016) and Politics of the North Korean Diaspora. She is currently working on a book entitled, Preventive Repression: Internal Security and Chinese Grand Strategy under Xi Jinping. Sheena Chestnut Greitens.lllustration by Kate Copeland Q: How does China view national security? A: There's no question that national security has been a defining feature of Xi Jinping’s leadership and of the way that he has governed China. But what's interesting about the use of this term “national security” — which you can also fairly translate as “state security” — is that when Xi has applied that concept, he means some