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In a bid to help Pacific island states become more resilient to cyber attacks such as the one Vanuatu suffered in 2022, Australia outlined a vision to become the partner of choice for cyber security in the region in the Australian Cyber Security Strategy released last November, as part of a renewed focus on enhancing cybersecurity cooperation and capacity-building.

This marks a notable step forward in Australia’s relationship with its neighbours, but it lacks a focus on local investment, which the region wants most.

The crippling ransomware attack on the Vanuatu government’s Broadband Network underscored small island nations’ vulnerability to cyber threats and highlighted the urgent need to improve cybersecurity regionally. The impact of the attack was devastating, with ministries and administrative functions paralysed. Hospitals turned to pen and paper to register patients, the prime minister’s office resorted to typewriters, and essential services, including schools and police, halted.  

The island states need to upgrade their systems to shield themselves from attacks such as these, but it’s a tricky task.

At the inaugural Pacific Cyber Capacity Building and Coordination Conference in 2023, Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna said that while the digital revolution offered many opportunities, island states face challenges requiring a specialised approach. Limited budgets, legacy technology and societal vulnerabilities including prevalent online disinformation, make digital transitions complex.

With China pursuing deals in the Pacific, Australia has responded by announcing a suite of aid and defence packages to become the partner of choice and increase its influence. The step-up in cyber support, articulated in the sixth shield of the Australian Cyber Security Strategy, includes Cyber RAPID teams, technical vulnerability reviews, end-of-life hardware assessments and hardened digital standards and trade rules. The government has committed $26.2 million towards Cyber RAPID teams along with $16.7 million for hardware modernisation and ‘secure-by-design’ development.

But being partner of choice requires not only alignment with shared goals and values, but also a willingness to listen, understand and address unique needs and challenges over the long-term. Shield Six does not adequately cover this, lacking a focus on true local investment that Pacific countries have consistently said they want most.  

First, Australia should help the region build sustainable resilience and capacity. The World Economic Forum’s latest global cybersecurity report identifies affordability as a critical determinant of cyber-resilience, but in the Pacific, small budgets and limited technical capacity leave many nations ill-equipped to defend themselves against cyberattacks. 

Take Fiji. Its legacy Chinese-made technology and lack of cyber hygiene made it vulnerable to a surge in Chinese state-sponsored cyberattacks following rapid political changes in 2022.

Now the Fijian government wants more local skills to build cyber resilience, knowing this would also contribute to economic growth. Australia has been addressing its own cyber security skills gap in recent years, recognising the importance of a thriving cyber workforce to national prosperity. Australia can adapt this experience to support Pacific states through targeted training programs, scholarships, secondments and internships. 

In doing this however, Australia must help ensure that the expanded pool of cybersecurity professionals remain in their own countries to safeguard local communities, and not perpetuate the existing gap in regional defences. There is a common gripe that local professionals are lured away by opportunities abroad and not incentivised to stay. Australia can help prevent brain drain by supporting the creation of robust local cyber communities and jobs that offer meaningful work and competitive salaries. 

We know this can be done. In 2013, not a single South Pacific nation had its own computer emergency response team. Today, Vanuatu has a skilled and committed CERT: half-a-dozen cyber warriors who have stayed in Vanuatu to alert the government to threats, respond to incidents and educate the community on cyber security. Australia could help expand Pacific-grown teams like the Vanuatu CERT through increased funding, technical assistance and knowledge-sharing initiatives. 

Specifically, a cyber-skills version of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme would allow Pacific-islanders to work in Australia and eventually transfer knowledge back to their home country. There is potential in the region: the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector in Fiji is set to become a $300 million industry employing more than 5000 people by 2025.

Australia can also help the region bridge the gap between awareness and action. There is a shortage of sensors and experts monitoring the cyber threat landscape because few companies are willing to invest in cyber threat intelligence in the South Pacific and governments are unable to afford the latest services. For example, cybercrime increased during the pandemic as more Pacific Islanders ventured online, but we don’t know by how much. The entire region needs to be uplifted to meet the latest security standards and have access to OSINT monitoring of social media, online forums and dark web marketplaces in order to understand who is behind the attacks.  

The Australian government should help negotiate with trusted cybersecurity technology companies that can provide endpoint security, threat intelligence and cyberattack training to stop breaches before they happen. Under this model, everybody wins: Australia gets enhanced regional security, influence and a more effective use of aid dollars; cyber companies gain access to a fertile source of intelligence, corporate good-will and potential long-term partnerships; and Pacific countries receive the persistent cybersecurity infrastructure and expertise they need to pre-emptively safeguard their digital environments. 

Finally, Australia should continue to help local communities in the region understand cyber threats, building on its PaCSON and Cyber Safety Pacifika initiatives that promote online security attuned to cultural norms through hyper-local education programs.

The key to Pacific resilience lies in investing in local capacity, fostering collaboration and promoting home-grown education initiatives tailored to the Pacific way of life. By making these investments, Australia can help empower its neighbours, prepare them for the next crisis and show that it is truly the partner of choice.

Although 2024 is being heralded as a banner year for elections, with dozens of countries, representing more than half the global population, holding polls, for some it marks the nadir of democracy. Cambodia is one such case.  

Last July, after nearly 40 years in power, then-Prime Minister Hun Sen said he would transfer power to his eldest son, Hun Manet. The hereditary succession was preceded by national elections that Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) claimed to have won by a landslide. The United States said the vote was ‘neither free nor fair’, while European Union officials said it was ‘conducted in a restricted political and civic space.’ Since then, however, the international community has more or less accepted Cambodia’s dynastic autocracy.  

Like his father before him, Hun Manet has sought to assert control over Cambodians by interfering in their daily lives. In March, for example, the new prime minister banned musical vehicle horns, which, as videos on social media have shown, encourage people to dance on the streets. Authorities fear that such public displays of joy could cause civil unrest.  

Cambodians have suffered under iron-fisted rule for decades, a trajectory that began with Hun Sen’s ascent to power in 1985. After serving as a middle-ranking officer in the Khmer Rouge, he defected to Vietnam, which installed a new government after invading Cambodia in 1979. First as foreign minister and then as prime minister, Hun Sen worked to strengthen his grip on a country exhausted by war and decimated by the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal rule, which murdered up to two million people (including my parents).  

When the first democratic elections were held in May 1993, under the watch of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, Hun Sen refused to cede power, even though the CPP finished second, and he became one of two prime ministers under a power-sharing agreement. In a violent coup in 1997, Hun Sen deposed his co-prime minister and eliminated others who posed a threat to his rule. He went on to reintegrate hundreds of Khmer Rouge soldiers into Cambodian society, with many swapping their guerrilla garb for military uniforms as part of what he called a win-win strategy. 

Under the pretext of maintaining stability, Hun Sen’s government jailed and killed opposition activists, journalists, and trade unionists while aligning with China to extend its hold on power. Last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping personally congratulated Hun Sen on ‘winning’ the rigged elections. Moreover, Cambodia’s constitutional monarch, Norodom Sihamoni, refused to defy Hun Sen. The king often strategically absents himself from the country to avoid signing controversial legislation, allowing the president of the Senate to sign on his behalf.  

The family dynasty and its supporters left nothing to chance ahead of Hun Manet’s accession in August 2023. In addition to selecting Hun family loyalists as parliamentary candidates, the regime barred the opposition Candlelight Party from contesting last year’s elections and viciously attacked its members. The government thus continued its systematic repression of the political opposition: those who stay in the country are routinely jailed, often on trumped-up technicalities and accusations of fraud, while those living abroad have been sentenced in absentia to decades of imprisonment.  

Since taking office, Hun Manet has strengthened the stranglehold on independent media that his father initiated by surveilling journalists and threatening to close outlets that criticize the regime. Most worryingly, he has continued to court China, meeting with Xi in September. This suggests that his government, with the support of a powerful ally, will clamp down harder on democratic rights. The deployment of mass surveillance in major cities, including Phnom Penh, and internet shutdowns further underscore Hun Manet’s determination to maintain control.  

The large influx of Chinese money and manpower into Cambodia also threatens to stoke tensions with Vietnam. Hun Manet’s government dances to all tunes. He congratulated Putin on his ‘landslide’ re-election, and he has finalized plans for the controversial, China-financed Funan Techo canal, which would allow Cambodia to bypass Vietnam for its international trade and thus reduce its reliance on its neighbor. The project, together with the recent Chinese-funded upgrade of Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, highlights China’s growing military and economic influence.  

Meanwhile, Hun Manet has attempted to curry favor with the international community. In a speech at the most recent UN General Assembly, he claimed that Cambodia’s ‘democratic building process has steadily advanced.’ So far, the West has given Hun Manet the benefit of the doubt. But US and European policymakers must wake up. For all their talk of countering a rising China, their passive acceptance of the Cambodian prime minister has given his government carte blanche to bulldoze what remains of the country’s fledgling democracy while allowing China to expand its reach in Southeast Asia. 

The US government, in particular, has numerous tools—including the Cambodia Democracy Act, the Global Magnitsky Act, and, if it passes, the proposed Transnational Repression Policy Act—that it could use to apply pressure on Hun Manet’s regime and hold it accountable for its abuses. These targeted sanctions should be coordinated with countries with similar legislation. American officials can and should bring the Hun family dynasty to heel by imposing sanctions on those who are undermining democracy and engaging in corruption. Stability in the region depends on it. 

In July 2019, world-renowned biological researchers Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng were quietly walked out of the Canadian government’s National Microbiology Lab (NML). The original allegation against them was that Qiu had authorised a shipment to China of some of the deadliest viruses on the planet, including Ebola and Nipah.

Qiu and Cheng, a married couple, subsequently lost their security clearances and were then fired by the NML in January 2021. At the time, both were subject to investigations by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The NML said both had lost their positions for ‘breaches of policy’; it did not say what those breaches or policies had been.

Then the story seemed to go away—until now.

On 28 February 2024, after a legal battle in which the attorney-general of Canada took the speaker of the country’s House of Commons to court, the government finally released a trove of heavily redacted documents.

One document makes for stark reading. In a report dated 30 June 2020, the CSIS recommended that Qiu and Cheng lose their security clearances because of Qiu’s ‘… close and clandestine relationships with a variety of entities of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which is a known security threat to Canada; … complete lack of candour regarding her relationship with those institutions; and her reckless judgement regarding decisions that could have impacted public safety and the interests of Canada’.

The CSIS found that Qiu, whilst employed by the Canadian government, had:

—Signed on to China’s Thousand Talents recruitment program (under which she stood to be paid up to C$1 million) and had prepared applications for other talent programs in China;

—Travelled several times, with NML’s blessing, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to train staff on biosecurity; and

—Published a peer-reviewed paper with a major-general in the People’s Liberation Army who held a position at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences and was ‘China’s chief biological weapons defense expert engaged in research related to biosafety, bio-defence and bio-terrorism’.

Perhaps the most concerning allegation was that in March 2019 Qiu had arranged for a shipment of 15 virus strains, including Ebola and Nipah, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the act that ultimately led to her and Cheng’s suspension.

That has raised the question, still unanswered, of why the scientists, though suspended in 2019, were not let go until January 2021, despite such an adverse finding having been made against them in June 2020.

Could this same lapse in security happen in Australia? The question raises a difficult issue, the personnel security arrangements around life sciences research, especially where that research is considered to be high-risk to national security or to the general public.

For example, the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, run by the CSIRO, requires anyone accessing its labs to have a security clearance. But whether a clearance is needed for similar labs in Victoria, New South Wales or Queensland isn’t clear. And even security clearances don’t seem to be enough: both Qiu and Cheng held clearances to work at NML, but still engaged in a whole range of potentially compromising and questionable behaviour.

Nor does the veil of complete secrecy over biosecurity research appear to be working. According to Global Biolabs, a service that tracks high-security disease labs around the world, Australia is home to four labs just like NML that can handle the deadliest diseases in the world. While there is no evidence that any have had problems like NML’s, we might never know even if they did.

Ebola (along with diseases like anthrax, SARS, and the bacteria that cause botulism and tularaemia) is classified as a security sensitive biological agent, so any such work on such agents that goes on at these labs is secret. Even unauthorised identification of which labs work on such agents is a crime. Freedom of Information requests for those details can be ignored. And, if such evidence could ever make it to court, the government could seek orders to have proceedings heard in secret.

Since 2020 academics have been the target of foreign intelligence and military services. That threat is increasing, according to ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess. An analysis in 2021 showed that more than 300 Australian academics were enrolled in Chinese talent recruitment programs, raising concerns about China’s access to Australian technology. Participation in such programs isn’t illegal, but it can raise significant concerns about conflicts of interest and potential access to sensitive information. And even steps taken to publicise foreign arrangements don’t seem to have discouraged collaborations with potentially adversarial governments.

In November 2023 Australia’s most prominent funding body, the Australian Research Council, took steps to beef up research security. But these steps don’t seem to have been matched by either the CSIRO or National Health and Medical Research Council, some of the biggest supporters of life-sciences research in Australia. And, even if they were, such steps wouldn’t apply to labs that funded their own research.

Biotechnology is just one of Australia’s critical technologies. If Australia wants to avoid the Canadian experience, it needs to embed personnel and physical security checks into the conduct of all of its high-risk research. Universities and funding bodies need to share the risk and due diligence investigations with government, especially intelligence agencies. And, when red flags arise, law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to respond swiftly and provide authoritative and comprehensive guidance to research entities on their next steps.

Journalists, it has been said, write the first rough draft of history. This is particularly true in China, where official sources and local media provide an incomplete picture and unofficial sources are scarce. As a result, international media play a crucial role in digging up and publishing the facts.

In the past 75 years, the position of American journalists in China has come full circle. From the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 to US President Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972, American journalists were barred from the mainland and had to report on China mainly from Hong Kong.

Once the US and China established diplomatic relations in 1979, American media were allowed to set up bureaus in China. The opening of the economy by Deng Xiaoping ushered in a period of relative freedom for journalists that lasted until the violent crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen square in 1989. However, relations picked up under the reform-driven leadership of Jiang Zemin, who was concerned to convey a Western-friendly image as he sought accession to the World Trade Organization.

The runup to the 2008 Beijing Olympics was also marked by openness, but was followed by a gradual tightening of restrictions. The publication in 2012 of several controversial exposés angered the authorities, and the decline in relations culminated in 2020 with the mass expulsion of journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

With the mainstream US media currently covering China largely from Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei, their field presence is back to where it was in the late 1970s.

In Assignment China: An oral history of American journalists in the People’s Republic, Mike Chinoy reviews the entire period from World War II to the present day. Chinoy, one of America’s leading China watchers, first visited China in 1973 and worked for 24 years for CNN, including as the network’s first Beijing bureau chief, Hong Kong bureau chief and senior Asia correspondent. Many will recall him regularly signing off with the old Chinese saying ‘may you live in interesting times’.

Chinoy’s narrative is built around interviews with over a hundred journalists, scholars and diplomats, giving it exceptional granularity. His list of interviewees is a who’s who of ‘old China hands’, including such names as Chris Buckley (an Australian), Nicholas Kristof, Melinda Liu and Orville Schell.

Chinoy discusses historical turning points from a correspondent’s point of view, from the opening of the economy and the ‘golden era’ prior to the Beijing Olympics to Xi Jinping’s rise to power and the Covid crisis. He also provides a fresh take on recent major China stories.

The 1989 Tiananmen square demonstrations coincided with the visit to Beijing of Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, for which the authorities had lifted restrictions on international media. CNN was even allowed to set up a satellite dish in the square. Unintentionally Beijing gave the media unusually open access to the demonstrations.

Cameramen Jonathan Schaer of CNN and Jeff Widener of the Associated Press were staying at the nearby Beijing Hotel, and describe in detail how they captured the iconic images of ‘tank man’ blocking the advancement of the People’s Liberation Army tanks. Their footage was taken from a hotel balcony, with warning shots fired by the PLA over tank man’s head literally whizzing by.

The 2008-2009 global financial crisis bolstered Chinese authorities’ confidence in their own development model. Their growing assertiveness turned relations with international media into a cat- and-mouse game, forcing reporters to find new ways to bypass ever tightening controls.

Once information was available on the web, journalists had more opportunities to hone their investigative skills. In June 2012, Bloomberg News published a report on the hidden wealth of the relatives of then Vice President Xi Jinping just four months before the Communist Party congress that would endorse him as the new secretary general. This was followed in October by a carefully researched front-page story in The New York Times on the enormous family wealth of outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao.

As the authorities extended their repression of the ethnic Uighur population in the province of Xinjiang, in 2017 BuzzFeed News published a story referring to China as a ‘21^st century police state’. An opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal at the start of the Covid crisis labelling China the ‘sick man of Asia’ was the last straw, and the expulsion of most US journalists followed.

Sources have always been a challenge for China watchers, and Chinoy provides an insider’s perspective. For three decades from 1953, journalists relied heavily on China News Analysis, a weekly review published in Hong Kong by the Jesuit priest Laszlo Ladani, who monitored official Chinese media closely, and on infrequent interviews with refugees and academics returning from China.

Once reporters were let into China, they were closely monitored, travelled with ‘minders’ and had to be careful to protect their sources. Nowadays, even journalists barred from the mainland have access to wide-ranging sources, from the Chinese internet and commercially available satellite imagery to a virtual cottage industry of China-focused online publications.

Assignment China offers a fresh perspective on China’s recent history, and many of the people who wrote it. And it’s a riveting read.

The Singapore government has designated Philip Chan, a naturalised Singapore citizen from Hong Kong, as a ‘politically significant person’. It assessed that Chan was susceptible to foreign influence and willing to advance those interests, essentially naming him an agent of influence.

While Singapore did not identify the foreign country, Chan is likely to have been seen to advance the interests of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as he attended China’s 2023 Two Sessions parliamentary meetings and publicly commented there that overseas Chinese communities have a duty to ‘tell China’s story well’. That’s a euphemism for China’s external propaganda intended to enhance the power of its international discourse. Similarly, Australia recently convicted Di Sanh Duong, an ethnic Chinese refugee who fled Vietnam in the 1970s, of planning to covertly influence a federal government minister to advance the aims of the CCP.

It’s surprising that individuals from Hong Kong, which has seen some of the biggest pro-democracy protests in recent history, and from Vietnam, where Communist Party atrocities are documented, to become agents of influence for an authoritarian government. It must be hard for those who have lived through such events to forget them—but the reality is that virtually anyone can become an agent of influence.

In Chan and Duong’s cases, some might assume that their loyalties and actions were based on their background or ethnicity, but those factors played less of a role than their beliefs and motivations. It is certainly not true that all ethnic Chinese people are supporters of the CCP. Neither are all immigrants or people from Western backgrounds unsusceptible to foreign influence. In some cases, actions can be driven by personal interests like money and power.

The CCP is seeking to control the information environment to shape the beliefs of those in the ethnic Chinese diaspora on China and the world. An ASPI report from 2020 found that almost all Chinese language media in Australia was controlled by Beijing barring a few independent outlets and the Chinese language sections of our major broadcasters and newspapers. But the content on Chinese social media platforms is monitored and regulated by Beijing’s internet censors. Broadcasters like SBS Mandarin have also self-censored by not posting sensitive content, such as stories about Australian journalists fleeing China, on their WeChat accounts.

It is very difficult for the diaspora community to get a complete picture of current events, especially developments in China or those related to Australia-China relations, when they rely on Chinese language media. They are much more likely to consume CCP propaganda and develop less critical views of the CCP through long-term exposure to biased or incomplete information. Eventually, some may grow distrustful of alternate viewpoints and become staunch supporters and defenders of the CCP and its policies, even if they emigrated to Australia or other countries to escape authoritarian rule.

The narrative that China has undergone rapid economic growth and development over decades feeds into the views that China needs to rise against Western powers after the ‘century of humiliation’, and that China’s current military and economic prowess proves that it is possible.

The Chinese community is particularly vulnerable to this narrative. Many struggle to fit into their new country because of language and cultural barriers, and have faced racism, discrimination, and isolation. The CCP preys on members’ ethnic identity and their sense of belonging to their home country. Democracies and their governments can mistrust individuals who have lived under authoritarian regimes and that can lead them to further questioning their of identity and sense of belonging. Again, that could push them back into an attachment with the autocratic power they fled from.

By contrast, China’s rise and power may have given them ‘face’ in Australia, allowing them to feel proud of their Chinese identity.

There is nothing wrong with being proud to be Chinese, but the CCP has ingeniously tied the Chinese identity to supporting modern China, including its ruling party and its political system by replacing China’s cultural heritage with a ‘new culture congenial to the state’. By controlling the information space, the CCP is dominating the definition of being Chinese.

A homogenous definition of Chinese identity that is dictated by the CCP is dangerous. It can hinder the ability of democratic societies to truly foster diversity and multiculturalism, makes it easier to label those who are anti-CCP as anti-China, and it increases the likelihood of racism being directed at the diaspora community by those who do not differentiate between the party and the people.

Sometimes the CCP’s domination goes beyond disseminating propaganda into direct interference. Chinese consular officials protested Vision Times Media’s sponsorship of the Georges River Council’s Lunar New Year celebrations, leading to the council scrapping the sponsorship. Vision Times Media is one of the few outlets with no funding from, or connections to, the CCP or CCP-controlled social media sites. The council may not have wanted to anger its constituency or endanger the economic opportunities at stake. But its action has limited people’s access to alternative Chinese newspapers and enabled the CCP to further its control of cultural events and the definition of Chinese culture.

Having immigrants and members of the diaspora community such as Chan and Duong as agents of influence is especially powerful and consequential as they are likely to be viewed as trusted cultural representatives by democratic governments. Policymakers, journalists, and the broader community will overlook their true intentions as there is an assumption based on their background that they would not support the CCP. Their voices—which can effectively become the CCP’s voice—can become dominant within the broader Chinese community, drowning out dissenting voices.

We will probably never know why Chan and Duong became agents of influence. But their cases are a timely reminder of the CCP’s reach regardless of your background. Even the ethnic Chinese diaspora community living in the democratic system can be susceptible.

While this piece has focused on CCP actions targeted at the Chinese diaspora, ASPI research has found that the party is also actively cultivating foreign influencers who ‘endorse pro-CCP narratives on Chinese and global social-media platforms’. The foreign interference allegations against Alexander Csergo in Australia and Chris Cash in the UK indicate that individuals with other than Chinese backgrounds can attract attention from a foreign government.

Australia’s Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme (FITS) is one step towards countering malign foreign influence. But it doesn’t address the long-term influence that comes from the lack of diversity in the Chinese language media landscape, and the CCP’s continued attempts to cultivate and develop domestic agents of influence within Australia. It is also failing to enforce transparency since many Beijing-controlled Chinese language media outlets have not registered under FITS for their communication activities.

Democratic governments should support the growth of neutral and unbiased Chinese language media. The Chinese language sections of Australia’s major broadcasters should be expanded, and independent Chinese language outlets should be protected from pressure and harassment by the CCP. The Australian government should look to build media literacy by raising public awareness and understanding of the implications of being exposed to selective media sources.

There must be a clear distinction between Chinese ethnic and cultural identity and one’s support for the CCP. The Chinese community should be able to celebrate its heritage without political interference or being perceived to be advancing foreign political interests. It must also be made clear in the broader community that one’s background does not define a political stance.

Otherwise, we risk both losing the skills and valuable first-hand knowledge of the members of ethnic communities, but also driving them into the arms of an authoritarian power they may well have once escaped from.