New Books In National Security

Alessandro Arduino and Xue Gong’s Securing the Belt and Road, Risk Assessment, Private Security and Special Insurances Along the New Wave of Chinese Outbound Investments (Red Globe Press, 2018) significantly contributes to an understanding not only of China’s ambitious infrastructure and energy driven Belt and Road Initiative, but also the increasing challenges it poses for China itself.  The multiple security issues the initiative poses, including political instability, religious and ethnic tensions, fragile legal environments, criminality, environmental degradation and social strains, has sparked the rise of a Chinese private security industry with what the authors call Chinese characteristics. Populated primarily by former People’s Liberation Army and police officers, the industry is on a steep learning curve that makes it dependent on Western and Russian expertise. It also has to come to grips with the fact that China’s mushrooming overseas investment threatens to drag the People’s Republic into