China security chief in the ascendant

China plans balance the modernisation of its armed forces against the need to keep military spending in line with economic development.

Hours before the first planned protest in Beijing in support of a “Jasmine Revolution”, Zhou Yongkang, China’s security boss, gave instructions to his colleagues. “Strive to defuse conflicts and disputes while they are embryonic,” he said in a speech.

In the end the protest movement amounted to little, but that has not stopped Mr Zhou from putting in place a sweeping crackdown of “embryonic” dissent. Dozens of activists and lawyers have been detained or put under police supervision, while internet censorship has been tightened.

The police have started to put heavy pressure on foreign journalists in Beijing and Shanghai. Although most received only mild warnings, at least one reporter was pushed to sign a document promising not to write any more stories about the “Jasmine Revolution”.

While the most visible politicians in China are premier Wen Jiabao and Bo Xilai, the party boss in the centre-west city of Chongqing with a knack for attracting headlines, the man who has seen his influence rise the most over the past three years is Mr Zhou. He occupies the ninth and last position on the politburo standing committee, the Communist party’s top body.

Mr Zhou spent 30 years as an official in the oil industry, running China National Petroleum Corporation in the mid-1990s, before becoming the Communist party boss in Sichuan province in 1999. The close ally of former president Jiang Zemin became minister for public security in 2002 before taking over the security portfolio on the committee in 2007.

The recent anonymous online calls for protests have provided the latest in a series of opportunities for Mr Zhou’s rapidly expanding security apparatus to demonstrate its increased powers and techniques.

“What we see is a government in deep fear of being challenged for power and a security apparatus highly confident of its powers and capabilities,” said Wang Songlian, senior researcher at China Human Rights Defenders, a rights group.

“Ever since the Tibet uprisings in early 2008, we have been moving from one ‘sensitive time’ to the next. The security forces have kept the country almost in a constant state of alert.”

A report by Tsinghua University last year, showed the official budget for internal security was Rmb514bn ($78bn), not far short of the headline figure for military spending. Chinese media have reported that Yunnan province in the south-west doubled security spending last year, while Liaoning in the north-east spent 15 per cent of its budget on security.

The Beijing municipal government announced plans this week to roll out a global positioning system for all mobile phones. Although the authorities say it is for smart traffic management, the platform is expected to help security forces close gaps in their surveillance of people considered a risk.

A network expert at a state-backed telecom research institution said the planned system would also help police predict “hot spots”. “Once it works properly, it can create alerts about an imminent concentration of people in certain areas,” said the researcher, who asked not to be named.

The authorities have also sought a similar advantage in new media. Over the past two years, police and other departments have invested heavily in data mining tools, which promise to predict trends in public opinion and warn of potential protests.

This week Sina, the online portal, said it was seeing rapid growth in government accounts for its microblogs, services that resemble Twitter. “We have more than 1,000 accounts set up by police stations alone,” said Charles Chao, chief executive. In order to monitor these online postings, people have to sign up for the microblog themselves.

Mr Zhou’s growing influence has been apparent in other areas, such as foreign policy, where analysts say he has helped to push a more conservative line. While Mr Wen made a number of speeches in the summer and autumn that appeared to push the case for political reform in China, Mr Zhou wrote an article criticising “erroneous western political and legal ideas”.