Beijing announced eight countermeasures in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.

All of them affect contacts with Washington.

At the same time, however, the nuts and bolts are being tightened in the fight against all those dissatisfied with the government inside the country.

The powers of the security authorities are being expanded.

Pelosi's visit convinced President Xi Jinping of the People's Republic of China that America and its allies would use the economic and social problems and difficulties in inter-ethnic relations facing the Asian country to weaken him.

A new cadre textbook says that if national security is not guaranteed, the state will collapse like a sandbag.

This campaign also involved students being asked to report suspicious items by phone.

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According to Daniel Russell, a former high-ranking American diplomat who accompanied Joe Biden - then US Vice President - on a trip to China in 2011, back then Xi Jinping (pictured) repeatedly said that the country's unity was threatened by color revolutions similar to erupted in the Middle East.

And he brought up the topic more than once.

This anxiety has largely determined Beijing's domestic policy.

Over the past 10 years, China's leader has broadened the meaning of national security by tightening the Communist Party's control wherever an adversary could do damage.

Pelosi's visit further reinforced his belief that vigilance must be increased in the face of such machinations.

Here is the practical result.

In a Beijing school, as reported by the New York Times, children drew pictures showing vigilante citizens beating a masked villain.

And in another school - in Northwest China, the teachers ordered the students: if you see something suspicious, call the Ministry of State Security at 12339.

The newspaper also writes that Beijing has borrowed the very term "color revolutions" from ideologues in Moscow.

But he has gone even further.

Vigilance can turn into paranoia.

This is evident, for example, from the spring events in Shanghai.

Due to COVID-19, the residents of the city were subjected to several weeks of lockdown.

And they expressed their indignation by banging pots and pans on the windowsills.

And the authorities, standing in front of microphones, warned the disaffected that the protests were being fanned by shadowy "foreign forces".

A year after coming to power, Xi Jinping announced that a National Security Commission would be established within the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

Some American experts thought that this commission would become an analogue of the US National Security Council and deal with foreign policy.

But the president explained that a comprehensive approach to the problem is needed.

In effect, this means that external and internal threats are viewed through the lens of ideological rivalry with the West.

Beijing's firmness in assessing the state of national security was experienced firsthand by Li Min-chi, who posed as an employee at a community college in Taiwan.

For many years, he maintained contacts with human rights activists in China, assisted the families of those arrested.

In 2017, Li Mingchu arrived in China.

As soon as he crossed the border, he was detained and accused of planning to start a color revolution.

The sentence was five years in prison.

This year he was released and Li returned to the island.

America's pundits know little about the National Security Commission.

The number of its employees remains unknown.

The chairman is Xi Jinping himself.

His deputy is State Security Minister Chen Wenqing.

Vasiliy Kashin, a senior researcher at the Higher School of Economics, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta: "The Chinese analogue of the National Security Councils in other countries was created in 2013. It is a very closed body, in which not only functionaries from the power bloc, but also from the ideological and from the economic. It is supposed to collect all the information about the threats of an external and internal nature. It probably also has its own analytical centers.

Since Pelosi's visit, Chinese security agencies have cracked down on Taiwan independence sympathizers.

And there are those mainly among the Taiwanese diaspora, numbering hundreds of thousands of people on the continent, who live there almost permanently.

If we also add those arriving for a few months a year, we are talking about nearly two million people.

Maybe they are already being purged.

Earlier, it was always their turn, but now the authorities have cracked down on people who made reckless statements on social networks.

As usual, when there is tension, the counterintelligence regime tightens."

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As for the thesis of color revolutions, the Chinese did not borrow it from Russia at all, the expert believes.

From the very beginning of these revolutions in the Arab world, China has taken a clear negative position towards them.

It even removed from the Internet messages about uprisings in Arab countries.

"They are probably also tracking some materials collected in Russia. Cooperation between Chinese and Russian law enforcement agencies is developing, of course. But Russia, of course, has not yet reached such a level of power control over society as China," Kashin added, BTA reported.