ASPI appoints inaugural director of Washington DC office

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ASPI is delighted to announce the appointment of Mr. Mark Watson as the inaugural director of ASPI’s Washington DC office.

With more than 30 years’ experience in national security and international relations, Mark comes to ASPI with expertise in policy analysis, stakeholder mapping and engagement, strategic planning and business management, and public-private partnerships in the national security community.

Mark is a trained Chinese linguist, holding degrees in Law and History from the University of Sydney, an Honours degree in Strategic Studies from Deakin University and a Masters degree in Public Policy from the University of New England. He also completed post-graduate studies in the Economic and Civil Law of the People’s Republic of China at the University of Hong Kong, and is a graduate of the Senior Executives Leadership Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

During his time as a diplomat, Mark had postings to Port Moresby, Hong Kong, Singapore, London and, most recently, at the Australian Embassy in Washington DC. In that role, Mark was responsible for maintaining and developing partnerships with US Defence, national security and policy analysis communities, as well as with the private sector companies supporting those communities.

Most recently, Mark established Sydney Avenue Consultants; a strategic advice consultancy specialising in national security and defence community issues. He is also currently the National Security Strategic Adviser at Bondi Partners.

ASPI’s Executive Director Peter Jennings welcomes the new appointment and said Mark would reinforce ASPI’s commitment to become a more active participant in United States think tank debates about defence and national security, and to strengthen the US-Australia relationship. Mark’s knowledge of the Washington DC stakeholder environment and leadership experience will be invaluable for establishing ASPI’s presence in DC.

‘I really feel a great of sense of responsibility in opening ASPI’s first overseas office, particularly one located in a city I know well – Washington DC. It is a unique opportunity for ASPI and for me personally, and I am looking forward to getting to the US as soon as possible to get the office up and running,’ comments Mark on his appointment.

‘This move comes at a time when the US-Australia alliance has never been more integral to Australia’s strategic planning than it is following the announcement of the AUKUS agreement. As President Biden said at the launch of AUKUS: “This is about investing in our greatest source of strength — our alliances — and updating them to better meet the threats of today and tomorrow.”

‘That is a sentiment that I think applies equally well to ASPI and the reason we are opening an office in Washington at this time. To help Australia better meet the threats of today and tomorrow.’

We are excited to welcome Mark to the ASPI leadership team and look forward to working with him. Mark will join us in Canberra until January 2022, when he is anticipated to be on the ground in DC.

ASPI Climate Security Wrap

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Amidst the lead up to the COP26 Climate Summit, ASPI has published a number of updates on climate security.

Dr. Robert Glasser and Anastasia Kapetas have reflected on the recent release of US climate security intelligence estimates, and suggested that these estimates probably underestimate the risks we face.

Dr. Glasser has also placed the PM’s announcement on Net Zero within the context of worsening natural disasters and Australia’s key alliance relationships

Given the clear warnings from the IPCC about concurrent and compounding climate disasters, the Climate and Security Centre has also argued that the US and Australia must deepen cooperation in relevant areas.

ASPI to open an office in Washington DC

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Today the Minister for Defence, the Hon Peter Dutton, MP announced that the Australian Government will support the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to open an office in Washington DC.

Chair of the ASPI Council Lt Gen (Ret’d) Ken Gillespie said “The whole ASPI team is delighted at the Government’s decision to support the opening of a Washington DC Office.

We are particularly pleased that this comes at the time of the 70th Anniversary of the US-Australia alliance and also in ASPI’s 20th year of operations.

Australia has a deep interest in contributing to strategic policy thinking in Washington DC through that city’s lively think tank community.

I am grateful to Mr Dutton for his endorsement of the quality, depth and value of ASPI’s work in contributing to contestability of policy advice.”

How the United States of America engages with the Indo-Pacific region, with China, with America’s regional friends and with treaty allies matters profoundly to Australia and to global security.

ASPI will seek to further strengthen the bilateral relationship by becoming a more active participant in United States think tank debates about defence and national security. 

These think tanks are often the source of new policy ideas and are designed to be able to experiment, develop and explain innovative policy ideas.

The Executive Director of ASPI, Peter Jennings said: “ASPI’s Washington DC office will operate as a branch and be an integral part of ASPI in Canberra, as such, the business model will mirror ASPI’s which has been successfully developed over twenty years.

ASPI’s work focuses on non-partisan empirically grounded original research, a capacity for policy innovation and an ability to shape real-world policy outcomes.

We are proud of the achievements of the organisation over the past twenty years and look forward to the next twenty.

We thank the Minister for Defence for his support to ASPI as well as for the continuing support the Institute receives from Parliament, the Defence organisation and the wider public service, our sponsors and supporters.”

The 2021 ASPI Sydney Dialogue

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The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s The Sydney Dialogue is a world-first summit for emerging, critical and cyber technologies.

The inaugural dialogue will be hosted virtually from Australia and will begin on 17–19 November 2021.

The Sydney Dialogue will have an Indo-Pacific focus and will bring business, government and technology leaders together with the world’s best strategic thinkers, to debate, generate ideas and work towards common understandings of the challenges posed by new technologies.

The program will commence with an opening address from Australian Prime Minister the Hon Scott Morrison MP.

The Prime Minister of India – Narendra Modi – will also be giving a keynote address at the inaugural Sydney Dialogue.

Conversations about technology are currently taking place in silos – for example, on artificial intelligence, the use of surveillance technologies, quantum, space and biotechnology, disinformation and cyber-enabled interference, supply chain resilience and the future of cyberspace. The Sydney Dialogue provides a forum for the world to anticipate and respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by increasingly complex advances in technology.

The dialogue will span both public and private activities, including keynotes, panels, roundtables, podcasts, an annual publication and more. While the dialogue will start in November, the conversation will extend into early 2022 as we continue to launch new events.

Invitations will be issued to select delegates from around the world, with priority given to those in the Indo-Pacific region. This year, most plenary sessions will be broadcast live to the general public, others will be publicly available at a later stage and a small number will be closed-door.

Please see the Sydney Dialogue website for more information. 

US and Australia must deepen defence cooperation on climate security

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Robert Glasser and Erin Sikorsky write on recent climate-driven disasters and how Australia and the US can cooperate to tackle this crisis.

Read the full article here.

Chinese-controlled Port of Darwin ‘Australia’s most strategic northern port’ | The Australian

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Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Dr John Coyne says the Port of Darwin is Australia’s “most strategic northern port” and ownership of the Port is vitally important to Australia’s defence future. Dr Coyne, who is head of the Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre at ASPI, told Sky News that Australia hasn’t had a unified strategy around the port “since Federation”. “Everyone agrees – Northern Territory, Northern Australia is strategically important to the country,” Dr Coyne said. “We just can’t articulate that into practice.” Dr Coyne told Sky News host Peta Credlin if we left the Port of Darwin as is, “we leave investment in our northern port in the hands of a Chinese owned company”. “They will make the decisions.”

Dr Teagan Westendorf Appears on ABC radio; Mornings

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Dr Teagan Westendorf Appears on ABC radio; Mornings with Adam Steer.

The relevant segment is between 29:40 and 36:30, listen here.

Mapping China’s Technology Giants: Covid-19, supply chains and strategic competition

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Mapping China’s Technology Giants is a multi-year project by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre that maps the overseas expansion of key Chinese technology companies. The project, first published in April 2019, is now being re-launched in June 2021 with new research reports, a new website and an enormous amount of new and updated content.

This data-driven online project – and the accompanying research products – fill a research and policy gap by building understanding about the global trajectory and impact of China’s largest companies working across the Internet, telecommunications, AI, surveillance, e-commerce, finance, biotechnology, big data, cloud computing, smart city and social media sectors.

Two new research reports accompany the re-launch

Mapping China’s Technology Giants: Supply Chains and the Global Data Ecosystem Most of the 27 companies tracked by our Mapping China’s Technology Giants project are heavily involved in the collection and processing of vast quantities of personal and organisational data. Their global business operations depend on the flow of vast amounts of data, often governed by the data privacy laws of multiple jurisdictions. The Chinese party-state is ensuring that it can derive strategic value and benefit from these companies’ global operations. We assess interactions between the People’s Republic of China’s political agenda-setting, efforts to shape international technical standards, technical capabilities, and use of data as a strategic resource. We argue this ‘Data Ecosystem’ will have major implications for the effectiveness of data protection laws and notions of digital supply-chain security.

Reining in China’s Technology Giants Since the launch of ASPI ICPC’s Mapping China’s Technology Giants project in April 2019, the Chinese technology companies we canvassed have gone through a tumultuous period. While most were buoyed by the global Covid-19 pandemic, which stimulated demand for technology services around the world, many were buffeted by an unprecedented onslaught of sanctions from abroad, before being engulfed in a regulatory storm at home. This report describes the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing China–US strategic and technological competition, and a changing Chinese domestic regulatory environment on the 27 Chinese Technology Giants we cover on our map.

New content and data

  • We’ve added four new companies to the project: Ant Group, Inspur, Ping An Technology and Nuctech. The dataset now includes 27 companies.
  • Our Map includes over 1,400 new entries, totalling over 3,900 global entries. These are populated with up to 15 categories of data, totalling 38,000+ data points. Existing entries were updated to reflect new changes.
  • Our map tracks more than 130 donations, 80 of these are Covid-19 monetary and medical donations from ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba.
  • Biotechnology company BGI saw profits surge in 2020 as Covid-19 spread around the world. Our map now contains 100 datapoints of presence for BGI including commercial partnerships, Covid-19 related donations, investments, joint ventures, MoU agreements, overseas offices, research partnerships and subsidiaries.
  • We have tracked the expansion of Hikvision, Dahua and Uniview as overseas demand for their temperature screening products increased during Covid-19. The map contains 65 data points of overseas presence relating to Covid-19 for these three companies, including donations, commercial partnerships, and surveillance equipment.
  • Our ‘Company Briefs’ include new ‘Privacy Policies’ and ‘Covid-19 Impact’ sections. We’ve also updated each existing overview, and of particular note are updates to the ‘Activities in Xinjiang’ and ‘Party-state Activities’ sections.
  • We’re introducing a new product: ‘Thematic Snapshots’. These combine company overview content across the four thematic areas named above. They are designed to serve as a user-friendly guide for the journalists, researchers, and policy makers who use our website. 

A new & better website 

Visitors can now explore our data in two ways, using either the Map or Data Listing pages. These display the same results in different formats depending on a users’ preference.

Click the ‘show Our Highlights Only’ to see the map entries ASPI staff have flagged as data points of particular interest. For these entries, we have undertaken additional analysis or recommend further investigation.

For more about this multi-year project visit the About page of the China Tech Map website.

The Team

The Mapping China’s Technology Giants research project is a huge team effort, comprising;

Cyber Norms translated videos

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At the request of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, ASPI translated the graphics and videos on the UN cyber norms into three new languages. We have now added materials in French, German and Italian to our repository of downloadable materials.

Read here about Switzerland’s endeavours supporting the UN’s normative framework to promote responsible state behaviour in the digital space and promotes multilateral cooperation in this area.