IMPROVING CHINA’S NUCLEAR SECURITY

China’s approach to strengthening the security of its nuclear weapons, materials, and facilities is important in facilitating strong global action on nuclear security. At the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, Chinese President Xi Jinping made commitments to strengthening nuclear security. This paper will describe the status of China’s nuclear security practices. In particular, it will assess improvements China made over the last two years. Finally, this paper will recommends steps to further improve China’s nuclear security. Since the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), Chinese leaders have paid increasing attention to the challenge of preventing nuclear and radiological terrorism. Chinese president Xi Jinping and his predecessor Hu Jintao actively participated in the last four summits and pledged at the summits to strengthen nuclear security. In recent years, China has made important progress on nuclear security,1 but there is still substantial room for improvement. Major factors that motivated China’s efforts to further improve its nuclear security system include Chinese leaders’ increased attention on the topic due to the summit process, the rapid growth in nuclear power, increasing domestic terrorist activities, cooperation with the United States, concern with China’s global image as a rising power, commitments to undertake new international legal obligations, and recommendations from the IAEA. This paper focuses on China’s’ major progress made over last two years in improving nuclear security, highlights the key challenges China is facing, and recommends a number of next steps.