Understanding the Chinese Concept of “Holistic National Security”: A Framework of Dialectical Continuums

Since the People's Republic of China introduced the concept of “holistic national security” in 2014, it has become a cornerstone of China's strategic thinking, prompting extensive domestic and international discourses. International scholars have examined its implications for China's domestic governance and international relations. However, a persistent challenge remains: the absence of a coherent conceptual framework to explain the discursive binaries – internal and external security, people and state, tradition and modernity, and struggle and harmony, and analyse how the contested values are justified to form coherence in holistic security policy. This paper addresses the research gap by employing dialectical continuums as an analytical framework to guide textual enquiries into political discourses, thereby illuminating the rhetorical equilibrium strategies that enable holisticness to be achieved through value-integration and normative logics-informing instruments. It contributes to the pluralisation of security studies, offering new analytical lenses for cross-cultural understanding in a fragmented and conflict-ridden world.