Abstract：National security environment is a very complex system in which the structures and functions of national security exist. A main purpose of this paper is to seek an analysis method of structure for understanding China's national security environment. China has broad national interests involving military security, political security, economic security, cultural security. National security interests for any state always exist in a particular space, so national security interests have a spatial form. An analysis of the spatial form of national security interests is a basic requirement for recognizing the environment of national security. In the level dimension of spatial form, the distribution of China's national security interests gathers in the surrounding areas with a core of China's territory. Meanwhile, China's national security interests extend outside the territory degressively with distance. Then it has characteristics of the structure ‘concentric circles’ including core area, surrounding area and peripheral area. The Core Area indicates the domain that China's authority covers cohere China's critical interests lie in. The Surrounding Areas are composed of neighbouring and near neighbouring countries of China including Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, North Asia, Centric Asia and South Asia. They could be divided into two major strategic aspects of maritime and land according to geographic relationship with China. The Surrounding Areas are the key areas in China's national security environment. The Peripheral Areas distribute in North America, South Pacific, Middle East, Europe, Africa, Latin America. In these areas, China's national security interests are very imbalanced. With a tridimensional vision of spatial form, this paper indicates that China's national security environment has a pyramidal structure. China's security environment has been synthesized a structure of pyramid in shape by the USA, Russia, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, the Korean Peninsular, Central Asia, and others. These states or regions are arranged along the following hierarchically ordered spatial levels: The top level is the USA, its strategies to China determine the basic situation of China's security environment for the most part. Russia, Japan and India lay on the second level, they locally determine the part of China's security environment in different directions. On the third level there are the geopolitical regions of Southeast, the Korean Peninsular and Central Asia. The fourth level includes other neighbor states like Mongolia and the countries in South Asia. The bottom level is incompact spatially, including Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, America.
陆俊元. 中国安全环境结构:一个地缘政治分析框架[J]. 人文地理, 2010, 25(2): 140-143.
LU Jun-yuan. ANALYSIS OF THE STRUCTURES OF CHINA'S NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT: A GEOPOLITICAL FRAMEWORK. HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2010, 25(2): 140-143.
