The Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee that concluded on Tuesday, decided to set up a State Security Committee, making this one of the session's top highlights. Maintaining national security is a key task for China in the 21st Century.

As China becomes more powerful and the country's security situation becomes more complex, the establishment of a national security committee comes at the right time.

The national security committee will reinforce the concept of security in the entire country and it will enhance people's understanding of the changing connotation of national security.

The reality shows that national security in this century goes beyond traditional areas, such as building the nation's defense system and territorial security. The significance of economic security has been stressed more than ever now.

In the age of the Internet, information security has also assumed a special meaning. The boundaries of security in many other fields are today entangled.

Globalization has brought about some invisible "national boundaries" and all such concepts challenge our past understanding of national sovereignty.

Social transition has triggered many conflicts within China. As China opens up to the world, competition among world powers has intensified. Foreign forces have shown a growing interest in competing with us by making use of China's internal problems. On this front, they appear to have more leverage than we do.

The importance and urgency of maintaining national security is of genuine interest to China as a rising power. Protecting national security is a core task for the whole of Chinese society and it is the platform from which reform and development will flow.

Both the US and Russia have established their own national security committees. China is not as powerful as the US yet but China's long-term and current tasks are enormous, which also shows that China is facing a more challenging security situation than the US.

There has never been a slogan in Chinese society which calls for people to contribute to maintaining national security but maybe we should promote such a call because the public's understanding of national security needs to be both solid and deep.

Although requiring ordinary people to always act in the best national interest might be a bit far-fetched, but people must be conscious that they should not do things that hurt national security.

Problems such as territorial frictions, terrorist attacks and strikes on our financial stability will bother our society and may arise from time to time in our attempts to better secure ourselves. But China has to promote high quality national security because that's the demand of our times.