Preventive criminal law has demonstrated a level of effectiveness in enhancing the earlywarning capacity of national security systems and disrupting the financial and personnel networks of terrorism that traditional criminal law has struggled to achieve. However, its expanding scope has simultaneously exerted sustained and profound pressure on the foundational principles of criminal law, including restraint, legal certainty, the principle of culpability, and proportionality. More critically, when criminal law becomes deeply embedded in a national security logic characterized by “states of exception” and “urgent threats”, it risks undergoing a fundamental transformation. Instead of functioning as a normative system designed to constrain power, it may evolve into a flexible instrument for policy implementation and social risk management. Such a transformation ultimately leads to a systemic erosion of the rule of law.

Drawing on risk society theory and securitization theory as analytical frameworks, this article systematically elucidates the internal drivers and institutional logic underlying the preventive expansion of counter-terrorism criminal law. The fundamental problem of preventive counter-terrorism criminal law does not lie in its preventive purpose itself. Rather, it stems from the absence of effective counterbalancing and boundarysetting mechanisms embedded within institutional design. Against this backdrop, the central challenge of modern counter-terrorism criminal law lies in constructing a form of “resilient equilibrium”: one that is capable of accommodating the practical demands of risk governance while, through refined institutional arrangements, confining security-oriented logic within the trajectory of the rule of law and preventing irreversible erosion of the core principles of criminal law.

Situated within China’s counter-terrorism legal practice under the guidance of China’s officially articulated “Holistic National Security” concept and in light of the strategic objective of advancing the modernization of the national security governance system and governance capacity during the Fifteenth Five-Year Plan period, this article argues that the future development of China’s counter-terrorism criminal law should transcend the simplistic dichotomy between “severity” and “leniency” and instead focus on preventing structural institutional risks. Specifically, it advocates a series of institutional self-corrective mechanisms, including tightening offense elements centered on “concrete dangerousness” and “explicit terrorist intent”, improving substantive judicial review standards for abstract endangerment offenses, and establishing internal filtering procedures at the investigation and prosecution stages. Through these measures, the article seeks to construct a model of counter-terrorism criminal law risk governance that combines security effectiveness with rule-of-law robustness, thereby achieving a dialectical integration of security and freedom at a higher institutional level.