Analysis of footage of tennis star Peng Shuai released by Chinese state media indicates that government officials may have orchestrated the coverage.

On 2 November, Peng used Chinese social-media site Weibo to accuse former Chinese vice-premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual misconduct. The post was removed from the platform within 20 minutes. Following the allegations, Peng’s wellbeing became a concern when officials from the Women’s Tennis Association said they had been unable to contact her. That led to global reports of her possible ‘disappearance’.

The Chinese government has received sustained, high-profile criticism for allegedly silencing her, including calls for the cancellation of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

Suspicions about her safety and the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in her silence grew when a ham-fisted email was released by state media outlet China Global Television Network. Said to have been written by Peng, it was sent to WTA chief executive Steve Simon.

The email said Peng was at home resting and that her allegation against Zhang was false. There’s doubt about the email’s authenticity. For example, analysts have noted that the screenshot of the email lacked a date, header or signature but, on the third line, included a cursor, suggesting it was taken before the email was sent or as it was being drafted in a text document.

Chinese state media have since released additional posts purportedly confirming Peng’s wellbeing. Photos of Peng in her house, seemingly shared on her WeChat story, emerged online via state media. These included two of Peng with her cat, presumably taken by a second person, and one selfie-style photo.

On 20 November, Peng was filmed dining at a restaurant linked to the Chinese government in her first public appearance since her allegations were censored. Hu Xijin, editor of the state-run Global Times, tweeted videos showing Peng at the restaurant. Other images and footage were posted on Twitter, which is blocked in China, and have not been widely reported inside China’s ‘Great Firewall’.

Another video released by Hu showed Peng at the opening ceremony of the Fila Kids Junior Tennis Challenger Finals in Beijing.

These videos mark Peng’s only public appearances and show that she has been in the constant company of at least three government officials when in public. Such sightings being reported only by state media, rather than on Peng’s personal account, have added to suspicions.

This is one of the most severe blocks by the state in recent years, with information released for international eyes only. Censorship was most obvious during CNN’s broadcast about Peng’s disappearance, when the feed in China ‘lost signal’.

Peng’s only other appearances have been on video calls with the International Olympic Committee. She was seen talking to IOC president Thomas Bach, Athletes’ Commission chair Emma Terho and an IOC member in China, Li Lingwei, in November. She claimed then to be ‘safe and well’. A second video call was reported on 2 December, though this appears to have been a private discussion of support options for her, rather than a discussion of the allegations.

The authenticity or otherwise of these videos is key to assessing if the CCP and state media were involved in a cover-up. Many believe they are intended as ‘proof of life’ to debunk claims that Peng is under the authorities’ control. Accordingly, it’s worth establishing the identities and backgrounds of those she’s pictured with.

Two videos were released of Peng purportedly ‘having dinner with her coach and friends in a restaurant’, according to Hu. The first shows Peng sitting with a group of people chatting at a table. Multiple references are made to the date. Zhang Junhui, China Open’s tournaments director, asks, ‘Isn’t tomorrow November 20?’ Someone corrects him, saying that tomorrow will be the 21st, and he then repeats that date.

The second video shows the entrance of the restaurant with the date partially in view on a cleaning sign. It then cuts to Peng entering the building with Ding Li. Ding is president of the sports division of Beijing-based lighting and display company Leyard, as well as the legal representative and senior executive of German World Sports (Beijing), also known as Global-D Sports.

Li Xiaobin, secretary of the party branch and president of China Open, was also at the table. Three women are visible but have not yet been positively identified, which may indicate that they’re Peng’s friends rather than officials. Hu claimed Peng was with her coach, yet no reference to any of these individuals coaching her exists.

These videos were accompanied by others of the restaurant meeting, including one from Ding. In a tweet, he refers to the location as the Beijing Yibin Guest House, which is minutes away from the government’s Zhongnanhai HQ and Ministry of State Security and adjacent to Tiananmen Square. In another, he refers to the ‘Beijing Wanghong Restaurant’, referencing its reputation as a popular eatery for officials and influencers.

Open-source analysis of the footage, matched with images of the restaurant (largely provided by the public via reviews), confirms it was the Yibin Guest House. Public records reveal that the restaurant’s primary shareholder is the People’s Government of Yibin City, Sichuan Province. The building is part of a government-owned network of accommodation and working space for officials and dignitaries.

The awkward conversation, and the frequent references to the date, spurred suspicions that the meal was staged.

Additional images were posted on Twitter and Weibo by Ding (@ li_ding1, the first tweet from his account in more than four years). Peng and Ding appear to be long-acquainted, with Ding sharing an image of the pair drinking wine 10 years earlier. Another image indicates they’ve known each other for at least 12 years. Ding has insisted that Peng is not constrained.

Ding Li’s Weibo post highlighting his history of knowing Peng Shuai. The low engagement on the post is noteworthy given Peng’s prominence, suggesting that it may have been censored or unlisted within China.

Ding’s Twitter presence has drawn suspicion, including his criticism of the WTA for its public involvement in calling out Peng’s disappearance.

Approached by the BBC, Ding vehemently denied that there had been a sexual assault and said there was no investigation into Peng’s allegations. He has also spoken on Peng’s behalf multiple times, including saying that she declined the offer to be interviewed by the British broadcaster due to her life being ‘significantly impacted’ by calls for interviews.

A third video, posted by Shen Shiwei, international news editor at CGTN and a Global Times columnist, shows eight people sitting at the table, six of whom are facing the camera. The seventh person, believed to be Ding, is seen briefly from the rear. An eighth person is seen only in a reflection; they don’t appear in any of the images posted by Ding. The cameraman, described by Shen as Peng’s friend, is unidentified. This individual may be present at other events attended by Peng and is a key person to identify. A ninth person is seen crouched in front of the cameraman.

Frame of video posted by Shen Shiwei reveals an eighth ‘friend’ at the table (blue rectangle). A ninth person filmed the encounter, and a tenth person is seen crouching in front of the cameraman. These individuals were not visible in any of the other videos and the latter two do not appear to have eaten at the table.

Zhang, Peng, Li and Ding were together at the tennis finals the next day.

Shen claimed that Peng contacted Simon to criticise the 2 December suspension of tournaments in China. Shen has regularly acted as a spokesman for Peng, but his comments have not been verified.

It has been claimed, though not verified, that the authorities have removed Peng’s photograph from a wall in the National Tennis Training Centre.

Analysis of the images and footage leaves unanswered questions about Peng’s situation. However, the awkward presentation and the unnatural emphasis given to the timing of encounters suggest they may have been staged to ease international pressure on the China Open and the government.

The censorship of Peng’s account, coupled with censorship of the larger story on the Chinese internet, shows these events were for international eyes only, in the face of mounting pressure on officials to demonstrate Peng’s autonomy.

Peng has now told a Chinese-language media outlet in Singapore that she had never accused anyone of sexually assaulting her. She said comments she made on social media had been misunderstood. ‘First, I need to stress one point that is extremely important, I have never said or written that anyone has sexually assaulted me,’ Peng said.

The WTA later issued a statement saying it still wanted a full, fair and transparent investigation, without censorship, into Peng’s original allegation.

A week before Red roulette was due to be published, in September 2021, its author Desmond Shum received two phone calls from his ex-wife Whitney Duan, who had been detained by Chinese authorities and hadn’t been heard from in four years. Duan told Shum that she had been temporarily released and might be reincarcerated at any moment, and asked him to cancel publication. She reminded him of an old Chinese warning: ‘No good comes to those who oppose the state.’ Having no confidence that Duan would be freed, Shum went ahead and published.

Shum’s book is a riveting personal account of the rise and occasional fall of China’s super-rich. However, it is also much more: it offers a detailed case study of the nexus between money and politics at the very top of China’s power structure. Shum wrote the book to set the record straight for his son, but decided that the story should be made public.

The book’s cast reads like a who’s who of China’s red aristocracy, including the families of retired Chinese Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin, retired premier Wen Jiabao, and a raft of other senior officials and their relatives. As Shum describes it, at that level most deal-making is based on mutual understanding, relying on interlocutors, without written records or contracts. Deals are wrapped in an intricate web of holdings to conceal the identity of the real owners.

From a business perspective, Shum and Duan were the ideal couple. He came from a middle-income background, was educated in Hong Kong and the US, and cut his teeth investing in China in the go-go 1990s. Duan’s roots were more modest, and she quickly realised that to get ahead she had to have the right connections, at the highest possible level.

Following extensive networking, Duan managed to become the ‘trusted friend’ of Zhang Beili or ‘Auntie Zhang’, the wife of premier Wen, whom she fronted for in several public listings and other deals. They were close, but ultimately, according to Shum, like ‘the fish that clean the teeth of crocodiles’.

Expanding her network, Duan also formed personal relationships with Wang Qishan, then a vice premier and currently vice president, and Sun Zhengcai, an ambitious young politburo member and until recently a contender to succeed Xi Jinping.

While things were going well, the couple led a charmed life, frequently accompanying Auntie Zhang on trips abroad. Jetting to France with the chief executive of construction giant Evergrande, the entourage ran up a wine bill of US$100,000 at a single sitting. Ironically, in October the heavily indebted Evergrande had to sell its corporate jets to stave off financial collapse.

Duan’s close relationship with key officials gave her access to inside information about party power struggles, including how Xi managed to eliminate adversaries and sideline potential successors. Shum’s most serious allegations are cautiously worded, presumably on the advice of the publisher’s lawyers.

Crunch time came in October 2012, when The New York Times published a front-page article on the hidden wealth of Wen’s family. Auntie Zhang had made the mistake of placing shareholdings in her mother’s name, which made them easy to trace. The article identified Duan as the family fixer, and inevitably relations cooled.

The revelations were made just weeks before the CCP congress that would confirm Xi as its new leader, and there was speculation that the information was leaked by supporters of Xi’s arch-rival Bo Xilai in retaliation for Wen’s supporting his ouster earlier in the year.

Sensing that all was not right, Shum eventually left China, while Duan continued to work on a luxury hotel project in Beijing. In October 2017, Sun, who had risen to party secretary of Bo’s former bailiwick, Chongqing, was detained. The charge was corruption, but there was speculation that he was being penalised for not dismantling Bo’s support network. A few weeks later, Duan and several of her assistants disappeared.

Xi’s decade-long anti-corruption campaign has snared up to 200,000 officials and businesspeople, including many of his competitors and enemies.

Chinese authorities are casting an increasingly wide net. In 2015, five Hong Kong booksellers disappeared, including one who was apparently abducted while travelling in Thailand, and later showed up in detention in China, charged with trafficking banned books. In 2018, somewhat surprisingly, Interpol’s Chinese president, Meng Hongwei, was detained while visiting China and charged with bribery. And most recently there is the case of Peng Shuai, the international tennis star.

In China, having the right connections has long been the best way to get ahead. Shum provides a stark reminder that knowing too much is also the quickest way to disappear into the country’s detention system.

As the world’s largest, strongest and longest-surviving dictatorship, contemporary China lacks the rule of law. Yet it is increasingly using its rubber-stamp parliament to enact domestic legislation asserting territorial claims and rights in international law. In fact, China has become quite adept at waging ‘lawfare’—the misuse and abuse of law for political and strategic ends.

Under ‘commander-in-chief’ Xi Jinping’s bullying leadership, lawfare has developed into a critical component of China’s broader approach to asymmetrical or hybrid warfare. The blurring of the line between war and peace is enshrined in the regime’s official strategy as the ‘three warfares’ (san zhong zhanfa) doctrine. Just as the pen can be mightier than the sword, so too can lawfare, psychological warfare and public-opinion warfare.

Through these methods, Xi is advancing expansionism without firing a shot. Already, China’s bulletless aggression is proving to be a game-changer in Asia. Waging the three warfares in conjunction with military operations has yielded China significant territorial gains.

Within this larger strategy, lawfare is aimed at rewriting rules to animate historical fantasies and legitimise unlawful actions retroactively. For example, China recently enacted a land border law to support its territorial revisionism in the Himalayas. And to advance its expansionism in the South and East China seas, it enacted a coastguard law and new maritime safety regulations earlier this year.

The new laws, authorising the use of force in disputed areas, were established amid rising tensions with neighbouring countries. The border law comes amid a military stalemate in the Himalayas, where more than 100,000 Chinese and Indian troops have been locked in standoffs for nearly 20 months following repeated Chinese incursions into Indian territory.

The coastguard law, by treating disputed waters as China’s, not only violates the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; it also could trigger armed conflict with Japan or the United States. The land borders law likewise threatens to spark war with India by signalling China’s intent to determine borders unilaterally. It even extends to the Tibet-originating transboundary rivers, where China proclaims a right to divert as much of the shared waters as it wishes.

These recent laws follow the success of the three warfares strategy in redrawing the map of the South China Sea—despite an international arbitral tribunal’s ruling rejecting Chinese territorial claims there—and then swallowing Hong Kong, which had long flourished under democratic institutions as a major global financial centre.

In the South China Sea, through which around a third of global maritime trade passes, Xi’s regime has stepped up lawfare to consolidate Chinese control, turning its contrived historical claims into reality. Last year, while other claimant countries were battling the Covid-19 pandemic, Xi’s government created two new administrative districts to strengthen its claims over the Spratly and Paracel islands and other land features. And in further defiance of international law, China gave Mandarin-language names to 80 islands, reefs, seamounts, shoals and ridges, 55 of which are fully submerged.

The Hong Kong National Security Law, enacted in mid-2020, is a similarly aggressive act of lawfare. Xi has used the law to crush Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and rescind the guarantees enshrined in China’s UN-registered treaty with the United Kingdom. The treaty committed China to preserving Hong Kong citizens’ basic rights, freedoms and political self-determination for at least 50 years after regaining sovereignty over the territory.

The strategy’s success in unravelling Hong Kong’s autonomy raises the question of whether China will now enact similar legislation aimed at Taiwan or even invoke its 2005 Anti-Secession Law, which underscored its resolve to bring the island democracy under mainland rule. With China escalating its psychological and information warfare, there’s a real danger that it could move against Taiwan after the Beijing Winter Olympics in February.

Xi’s expansionism hasn’t spared even tiny Bhutan, with a population of just 784,000. Riding roughshod over a 1998 bilateral treaty that obligated China ‘not to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border,’ the regime has built militarised villages in Bhutan’s northern and western borderlands.

As these examples show, domestic legislation is increasingly providing China with a pretext to flout binding international law, including bilateral and multilateral treaties to which it is a party. With more than one million detainees, Xi’s Muslim gulag in Xinjiang has made a mockery of the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which China acceded in 1983 (with the rider that it doesn’t consider itself bound by Article IX, the clause allowing any party in a dispute to lodge a complaint with the International Court of Justice). And because effective control is the shibboleth of a strong territorial claim in international law, Xi is using new legislation to undergird China’s administration of disputed areas, including with newly implanted residents.

Establishing such facts on the ground is integral to Xi’s territorial aggrandisement. That is why China has taken pains to create artificial islands and administrative districts in the South China Sea, and to pursue a militarised village-building spree in Himalayan borderlands that India, Bhutan and Nepal consider to be within their own national boundaries.

Despite these encroachments, very little international attention has been given to Xi’s lawfare or broader hybrid warfare. The focus on China’s military build-up obscures the fact that the country is quietly expanding its maritime and land boundaries without firing a shot. Given Xi’s overarching goal—to achieve global primacy for China under his leadership—the world’s democracies need to devise a concerted strategy to counter his three warfares.

Two recent foreign policy developments in Canberra are shaping Australia’s 21st-century national security agenda. The first is the AUKUS agreement, which has at its core a deep and strategically courageous commitment to deterring China’s malign, hegemonic and military aspirations in the Indo-Pacific and around the world. Given this context, continuing to protect our way of life by generating an Australian Defence Force that sustains competitive advantages, in terms of our men and women in uniform and the technical systems they employ alongside our allies, from seabed to space, is the right thing to do.

The second development has been Australia’s slow approach to reducing the global economy’s carbon footprint to zero, as demonstrated by its contribution at COP26 and refusal to increase our 2030 emissions reduction targets.

Governments need to apply clear scientific evidence in speaking truth to Australian voters, especially those in the mining and agricultural sectors, about the human-made climate catastrophe unfolding around us and the adverse impact it will increasingly have on our way of life.

It’s hard to reconcile the contrasting displays. Shaping a constructive change of behaviour in Beijing is ‘in the national interest’, and most Australians agree. Exporting huge volumes of coal and gas is also said to be in the national interest. Most Australians disagree.

The term means different things to different people, but it boils down to the values underpinning democratic governance and individual freedom, an independent judiciary and media, universal human rights, and a free and open global trading system. Herein lies the rub. The same national-interest calculus around the China challenge that has driven significant investments in Australian defence capability, if applied to the climate challenge, should also have led Canberra to double-down on policies and investments to reduce carbon emissions.

The global socioeconomic pressures building in a bow-wave ahead of the earth’s warming are as much a challenge to Australia’s national interest as are China’s attempts to apply its authoritarian system to undermine and reorient global governance to its advantage. Surely there’s an appreciation in Canberra that the ADF’s focus in the years ahead will increasingly be pulled towards climate-driven domestic and regional disaster responses. This will inevitably dilute the ADF’s ability to sustain perishable higher-end combat capabilities. This tension won’t be resolved by military planners viewing the two threats as separate and sequential. In fact, they are integrated, concurrent and growing.

The US Army recently named China as it’s ‘pacing challenge’ for the foreseeable future. This is a foot-stomping acknowledgement of the threat China poses to the rules-based international order, upon which the vital geoeconomic interests of America and like-minded democracies like Australia stand. Even more important, though, was the declaration by President Joe Biden earlier this year that climate change poses an ‘existential threat to humanity’.

There’s a compelling argument to be made that the threat to the Australian national interest posed by climate change is much greater than that posed by the People’s Liberation Army, even though it has made great strides under Xi Jinping in its all-domain ‘intelligentised’ warfare capabilities and may have achieved a leap-ahead advantage in some disruptive technology and weapons capability areas.

Still, the centre of gravity for the CCP lies in the support it receives from the Chinese people. That support will inevitably weaken when the hundreds of millions of Chinese lifted out of poverty by China’s extraordinary economic rise find themselves adversely affected by the increases in drought, floods, fires, coastal inundation, fish protein collapse and mass migration pressures that will come if global warming tips past 2.0°C, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts it will unless urgent global emergency response measures are taken now.

In addition to the hugely disruptive climate-related tipping points predicted to occur soon (if not already underway) at the poles, in the Himalayas and in the North Atlantic, another tipping point before 2050 could occur at that moment when the CCP realises it is unable to deploy the PLA for any substantive expeditionary force projection mission because it has become fixed internally on domestic, climate-related, large-scale crisis mitigation and the survival of the party.

A similar future could await us in Australia, as explained in the recent Australian Security Leaders Climate Group’s Missing in action report. Unless collective steps are taken now to limit global warming as close to 1.5°C as possible, the ADF will find itself repeatedly fighting the battle of the black summer. The increasing frequency and intensity of climate-related humanitarian and disaster response missions both at home and across the region will quickly consume available human and materiel ADF resources, making it extremely difficult to focus on sustaining combat readiness.

There is recognition in the Pentagon and in like-minded capitals that climate change is having a profound impact on the way militaries are trained, equipped and deployed. Climate security has emerged as a critical strategic planning factor for defence forces. Unless Australia and the global community find the collective will to stop contributing to global warming, climate security will become the predominant defence planning factor. In that scenario, climate change trumps China as Australia’s greatest national security risk in this century.

The impressive and necessary $270 billion investment in new capability for the ADF in this decade, announced in the 2020 defence strategic update and force structure plan, should have been accompanied by a similarly vital focus on reducing the existential threat of climate change, with plans for greater ADF involvement in climate-driven operations, both at home and over the rising seas. In that way, not only could the climate-related risks to Australian lives, property and natural ecosystems be reduced, but the ADF would remain well positioned to defend Australia from China or climate change, or a combination of both.

As fast as Australia is moving to strengthen alliances and regional partnerships, the pace of strategic change is moving faster.

China is building up its military forces at breakneck speed and preparing to strike at Taiwan. Xi Jinping hopes that surprise and overwhelming force will cow the democracies into inaction. In this Beijing risks misreading US President Joe Biden, who may not be Winston Churchill but is no Neville Chamberlain either.

The stakes for war and peace could hardly be higher. The Morrison government and the leadership of our defence, intelligence and security agencies understand these developments.

But it’s one thing to see you’re facing a crisis and quite another to know what to do. Strategic trends in the region are lifting the importance of northern Australia. Our north is, in fact, the essential southern rampart of the Indo-Pacific.

The outcome is to make the future of the Port of Darwin a central strategic question. This becomes clear by looking at the plans and purposes of Chinese military growth.

In the past fortnight, two US government reports concluded that Chinese preparations for an attack on Taiwan had reached a military tipping point for Beijing.

Late last week the respected US–China Economic and Security Review Commission released its 2021 annual report to Congress.

‘China’s increasingly coercive approach to Taiwan puts almost daily pressure on the cross-Strait status quo and increases the potential for a military crisis,’ the report says. It found that China’s military leaders ‘now likely assess they have, or will soon have, the initial capability needed to conduct a high-risk invasion of Taiwan if ordered to do so’ by Chinese Communist Party leaders.

Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense released its annual report on Chinese military capability. It says that ‘persistent military operations near Taiwan—and training for a Taiwan contingency—likely signals a greater urgency for the PLA to continue to develop and perfect its strategy and capabilities should PRC leaders look to a military option to achieve their objectives’.

China is growing its military forces at an astonishing speed. The awkwardly named People’s Liberation Army Navy is already the largest in the world with 355 major ships. A further 65 major ships will be added in the next four years.

The PLA Air Force and Navy have between them 2,800 aircraft, an increase of 300 from last year’s Pentagon report. China launched more than 250 ballistic missiles in tests in 2020—more than the rest of the world combined.

The Pentagon has dramatically revised its 2020 assessment that China’s nuclear warhead stockpile was in ‘the low 200s’. Now, ‘Beijing has accelerated its nuclear expansion, which may enable the PRC to have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027.’

Contrast this to the bizarre assessment of former prime minister Paul Keating, writing in the Australian Financial Review on 3 September (and gleefully reported in the Chinese media), that military aggression is ‘a posture China has never shown any sign of’.

Australia needs an urgent stocktake of its current defence capabilities and of our broader national capacity to withstand some tough military shocks. What might the early stages of an attack on Taiwan look like? If conflict does break out, Defence Minister Peter Dutton is correct that it would be ‘inconceivable’ for Australia not to be involved.

Our involvement would not be driven by a phone call from Biden. Australia will be involved because Beijing’s attack will rapidly draw in Japan, surrounding countries and US forces around the Indo-Pacific.

The world’s consequential democracies will not be able to tolerate an unprovoked attack on a liberal democracy of 23 million people. Australia had better hope that’s the case if we have any expectations that our security matters to friends and allies.

A Chinese attack on Taiwan, and the preparations for it, will not be narrowly focused on the island. Beijing understands that its best chances of success will involve pre-emption and seeking to degrade and push back US and allied forces as far from Taiwan as possible.

Published Chinese military doctrine holds that Beijing’s best prospects for a successful attack on Taiwan is if a major lodgement of forces can be achieved before the US mobilises its forces in the Indo-Pacific.

China will try to control a large swathe of air and sea space around Taiwan, excluding civil and military aircraft and ships from all other countries. Trade and movement through the South and East China seas will come to a halt. Fuel shipments, including to Australia, will cease. Cargo vessels won’t put to sea for fear of being sunk.

Communications and military satellites will be disabled. China will distract opponents with cyberattacks designed to disable critical infrastructure. This could mean attacks on the electricity grid, on hospital IT networks, on the communications and computer systems of ministers and government bodies.

Anything that can distract, slow down, confuse, hamper and misdirect allied responses to China’s preparations for an assault on Taiwan will be used.

Early in a crisis, the US Navy will put to sea and US military aircraft will have scattered from bases in Japan, Guam and Hawaii. With Australian agreement, significant numbers of these aircraft will be in northern Australia. American strategy is to spread its forces and keep them moving, making them as difficult a target as possible.

Xi’s speeches show that he sees opportunities for China in a world where ‘the East is rising and the West is declining’. Beijing’s relentless military incursions around Taiwan’s air and sea space are designed to test if the world will push back.

This is why the arrival of the AUKUS security pact and increasingly close cooperation of Japan, India, Australia and the US in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue are so important.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison made the link clear in speaking at ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue this week: ‘Australians recognise instinctively that to remain a free, open, sovereign and prosperous nation we need strong and durable partnerships—now more than ever.’

The potential of AUKUS and the Quad is that they will be a platform for closer cooperation among democracies in areas such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and hypersonic and undersea technologies—fields into which China is pouring vast money and effort.

Technology breakthroughs take time, however. The immediate challenge Australia faces is how to strengthen its military capabilities, reduce national vulnerabilities—for example, on supply chains—and deepen practical AUKUS and Quad cooperation as soon as possible.

There is no more important step the Morrison government could take than to end the 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin to Chinese company Landbridge.

The threadbare excuses that were deployed to justify the lease in 2015 have long been abandoned by government and opposition. Now, when Morrison warns about the priority ‘to enhance the resilience of Indo-Pacific supply chains’, we must realise that our ports and airports are critical joints in those supply chains.

The Port of Darwin, and the Top End in general, is the place from which Australia can mount efforts to resist Chinese subversion of the Pacific islands. The port is also the place to which the US and other partners can disperse and sustain their forces while deterring Chinese aggression.

Six years into the lease, the promised development of infrastructure for tourism isn’t happening. The strategic outlook has changed fundamentally. Landbridge’s presence is now a bone in the throat preventing the development of Darwin as a facility for greater engagement by the AUKUS and Quad partners.

Frankly, this is a problem our bureaucracy has denied for too long. The government and opposition should make a bipartisan commitment to end the lease after the next federal election by passing enabling legislation if necessary. With that done, there should be a major effort to expand Darwin Port and to refurbish and add to the infrastructure of airbases in the Top End.

In addition to the now decade-long US Marine Corps presence in the north, Australia should invite AUKUS and Quad partners to locate military units with their Australian Defence Force counterparts in the Top End.

Fundamentally, this is an exercise in strengthening deterrence to make it clear to China that military adventurism towards Taiwan or elsewhere is too risky to consider.

Failure to strengthen deterrence will lead to war. If Xi concludes we are pushovers, China will push the democracies over.

A vital step in showing that we are stronger than that is to resume the ownership of the Port of Darwin as the crucial strategic asset it really is.