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Established in 1982, the People’s Armed Police (PAP) is the paramilitary wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with a primary responsibility for maintaining domestic stability and a secondary role in providing rear area support for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during wartime. The PAP—with a strength of up to a million personnel—also fills a variety of other important roles and missions, such as responding to natural disasters, guarding government compounds, and participating in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations around the world. For most of its existence, the PAP was under the dual leadership of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and the State Council, with provincial and local officials granted significant latitude over PAP deployments in the event of emergencies. Some efforts to centralize authority were made during the 1990s and 2000s, but the basic character of the PAP went unchanged for three decades. Under Xi Jinping’s tenure, China has embarked on a series of major reforms to the PAP. These followed, and in some ways complemented, earlier organizational reforms to the PLA.1 Indeed, while changes to the PLA came first, the breadth of reforms to the PAP—which were unveiled toward the end of 2017 and into 2018—is no less ambitious. Key changes included: restructuring PAP headquarters placing the PAP under the sole authority of the CMC and limiting the ability of local officials to deploy PAP units during a crisis establishing new mobile contingents, which will provide national leaders with additional rapid response capabilities divesting the PAP of certain law enforcement and economic responsibilities, such as border inspections and gold mining merging the coast guard—previously under civilian authority—into the PAP, and thus into the military command structure. These changes raise a number of questions: what goals motivated Xi and other officials to develop such an expansive reform agenda? What political, operational, and bureauc