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William Zheng

Sylvie Zhuang

In his decades toiling as a health official in a coastal Chinese province, Alan Chen has rarely had to study a subject about which he knew so little.
“Nd is Neodymium. It is needed for almost all modern EV motors. China dominates the refining of Nd oxide. Dy is Dysprosium. It is needed for magnets to operate at high temperatures and is also essential for EV motors.”
This was the kind of content Chen pored over in a training course he attended at the Central Party School, the Communist Party’s top educational institution, in Beijing.
For six months, Chen joined hundreds of middle-aged officials from across China and various disciplines for studies to prepare promising mid-level cadres to take on bigger roles in China.
In the past, much of the focus has been on political ideology, decision-making and international relations, but now the officials are being instructed on area that is more important than ever: supply chains and economic security.




The school is one of the main ways Beijing grooms talent, enabling cadres to leave their jobs and study full time for a semester.
As a sign of its importance, Chinese President Xi Jinping has attended the programme’s opening ceremonies in the past and spoken to attendees on multiple occasions.
Chen, who is a health administrator in a city with about 10 million residents, said his class at the Central Party School was briefed by top officials from major agencies such as the National Development and Reform Commission – China’s national economic planner – the Ministry of Commerce and party school professors.
The attendees learned about the external economic security challenges facing China and how the country could best respond through careful planning and preparing countermeasures.
Chen described a “steep learning curve” in the compulsory economic and supply chain security module, saying he had forgotten what he had learned in high school chemistry.
In the rare earths component, the class learned about the efforts of Chinese scientists, such as Xu Guangxian. Xu pioneered a methodology for rare earth extraction, enabling China to be the dominant producer of high-quality rare earth products used to make semiconductors, electric vehicles and advanced weapons instead of relying on foreign imports.
“It is clear that China’s strategic advantage in rare earths is not a gift from heaven,” Chen said. “We must use our hard-earned strategic leverage as a weapon to hit back at hegemonic demands from some Western countries.”
The candidates were also asked to work on group projects to identify possible supply-chain bottlenecks and suggest ways to build better resilience related to the areas they respectively cover.
Such group projects were then presented to the full class, and the teams had to defend their work, as might happen in a master of public administration course.


Beijing’s decision to weave economic security into the training of all public officials underscores a sober outlook on future trade relations, observers say. It suggests a preparation for supply-chain disruptions with a “wide-angle” defensive strategy.
According to Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Centre for China Analysis, the training’s emphasis seems to indicate that economic security has become a new key performance indicator for Chinese officials.
“Xi has elevated industrial self-reliance to a core party priority, so it is unsurprising that officials are being instructed to grasp its political significance and sharpen their focus on it in day-to-day work,” Thomas said.
“For decades, cadres understood that economic growth was their primary performance metric. The party is now signalling that economic security has become the new KPI.”
China has maintained a multilayered system of continuing education for its officials, focusing on both political indoctrination and administrative expertise. At the national level sits the Central Party School, which in 2018, absorbed the National Academy of Governance, formerly the State Council’s main training academy.
All levels of government and party cells, down to the county level, also operate their own party schools with the same purpose of training officials in part-time and full-time courses.
Meanwhile, mid-career officials are also encouraged to obtain higher degrees, usually in part-time programmes such as MBAs, at prominent public universities.
Top-tier Chinese universities, including Peking, Tsinghua, Zhejiang and Wuhan, among others, are collaborating with the party’s main talent management agency, the Central Organisation Department, to bolster cadre expertise. These programmes offer short-term training focused on navigating economic risks and fortifying supply-chain resilience.
A group of public universities specialising in defence offers similar courses in their school of continuing education, with a focus on aerospace and military-civilian integration, new materials, new energy and advanced manufacturing.
The programme Chen attended is one of the premier training courses for officials specialising in comprehensive governance. According to a 2019 People’s Daily report, these sessions last at least four months, longer than other training formats. A training seminar on a specific subject, for example, could run as little as five days.
Candidates in Chen’s programmes received systematic training in the party’s Marxist theories with a focus on Xi’s political philosophy, as well as leadership and management skills such as strategy formulation, negotiation, conflict resolution and change management.
However, a Beijing-based Chinese academic who has taught such courses said that over the past two years, many official training institutes in the country had given “overwhelming priority” to economic security and supply resilience courses.
“The top leadership believe that all the future leaders, regardless of their background and their job function, must have a good sense of China’s greatest strength and Achilles’ heels,” said the scholar, who declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.




Aside from teaching at the Central Party School, the scholar said he was frequently invited to teach at provincial party schools, instructing officials serving in various agencies about the importance of rare earths and ways to identify their regional economy’s weak areas.
“I think Beijing’s goal is to make sure all the leading cadres have a proper sense of what is critical for China, regardless of their current role,” the scholar added.
Xie Maosong, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Strategic Studies at Tsinghua University, said the inclusion of economic and technological training for mid-career officials was part of China’s effort to “build the right team” to win the geoeconomic long game.
This required cultivating a pipeline of top talent with a breadth and depth of knowledge across technology, economics and investment, Xie added.
“It is more important for cadres to promptly fill knowledge gaps in other disciplines, to make up for their shortcomings in skills and capabilities,” he said.
“They must be specialists in their own field and generalists with basic knowledge of the matters for China’s future development.
“If you are a party secretary or a top administrator of a region, you should not only have local knowledge but also proper situational awareness of the latest trends in the world, the national blueprints, and [know] the latest industrial and technological trends.”
Only then, Xie said, could an official “make better strategic decisions for the region” under their jurisdiction.
Xie pointed to the 2023–2027 National Cadre Training Plan, published in 2023, by the Central Committee, which listed global economic trends, supply-chain resilience, dual-use technology and financial risk as important training areas for officials.
Yang Dali, a political scientist with the University of Chicago, said such coordinated widening of cadre training clearly indicated “a political will from the top”.
The party is now signalling that economic security has become the new KPI
Neil Thomas, Asia Society Policy Institute’s Centre for China Analysis
Since becoming China’s president in 2013, Xi has repeatedly stressed the importance of economic security, a target that has become more urgent since Sino-American relations took a sharp turn for the worse after the US launched a trade war in 2018.
In 2014, Xi named “economic security” as a foundation of China’s overall security, launching a “holistic approach to national security” and establishing the powerful National Security Commission.
As the coronavirus pandemic laid bare vulnerabilities in the global supply chain in 2020, Xi told senior officials at a financial affairs meeting in April that year that “optimising and stabilising industrial and supply chains” was a “crucial task”.
In addition, since 2020, Washington under the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden has sought to restrict Chinese access to US technology.
In 2022, in his work report delivered at the 20th party congress, Xi warned that China still needed to address “many major issues” in industrial pipelines. He called for more efforts to “enhance the resilience and security of industrial and supply chains”.
Rare earths soon emerged as a point of contention between China and the US, as Beijing leveraged its near monopoly of the supply chain and launched several export restrictions on rare earth products and processing technologies. The moves were meant to strengthen its bargaining power against Washington and its allies, including Tokyo.
It was such expanded export controls on rare earths that caused production delays and shutdowns affecting car manufacturers in Europe and the US, with a China-generated glut of lithium stalling US plans to expand production there.
Such dependencies have unnerved Washington and its partners, which have struggled for years to implement policies to foster durable domestic mining and processing alternatives for lithium, nickel, rare earths and other critical minerals.


In his training, Chen led a team in strengthening China’s medical exports and securing global supply chains for essential medicines and advanced equipment.
Separately, an official from eastern Zhejiang province said the supply-chain resilience and economic security course he had attended gave him a “renewed sense of urgency” to find ways to protect China’s trade and investment links with other parts of the world.
The official, who declined to be named, said his class took field trips to several exporters in coastal provinces to understand efforts to internalise and secure their supply chain.
“The class argued heatedly about China’s dilemma,” the official recalled. “We can produce everything to achieve maximum economic security, but is that the best scenario for China?”
Dennis Wilder, professor of practice in Asian studies at Georgetown University, said it had become apparent since the coronavirus pandemic that supply-chain reliance was not just an economic issue but of enormous relevance to national security.
“US actions during the Trump administration have reinforced the view that supply chains are no longer just the purview of the business community but a question that national authorities must engage with,” Wilder said.
“Training party officials to understand these issues makes sense because it is an arena in which they have very little familiarity but now have a responsibility to monitor in conjunction with state officials at the national and local levels.”


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Beijing’s decision to instruct promising cadres on logistics and resources reflects a sober outlook on trade relations, observers say


Beijing’s decision to instruct promising cadres on logistics and resources reflects a sober outlook on trade relations, observers say.


Economic Security 101: why China’s officials now have to study rare earths and supply chains

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Beijing’s decision to instruct promising cadres on logistics and resources reflects a sober outlook on trade relations, observers say

Beijing’s decision to instruct promising cadres on logistics and resources reflects a sober outlook on trade relations, observers say