The arrest of Hong Kong media figure Jimmy Lai on 10 August and the subsequent police raid of the offices of his Apple Daily news company sent a clear signal of how Beijing intends to use the new national security law to bend the population of Hong Kong to its will.

It’s unsurprising that Chinese authorities have Hong Kong’s independent media at the top of their list of targets for the new legislation. Local media coverage of protests in Hong Kong since 2019 not only played a role in sustaining the pro-democracy movement through saturation coverage, but also acted as a constraining influence on the actions of local security services.

If Lai’s arrest proves to be the first step in a campaign by Beijing to throw a shroud over events in Hong Kong—by using the new law’s ambiguously worded offences—then the environment in Hong Kong will change fundamentally.

And, given that events in Hong Kong over the past year have arguably threatened Beijing’s authority, one only has to look at what’s been happening in Xinjiang to predict how the situation might unfold in Hong Kong over the next decade.

Comparisons between Xinjiang and Hong Kong have already been drawn by long-time China watchers, who see Xinjiang as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Clearly, Hong Kong is not Xinjiang, not the least because of the profile of Hong Kong on the international stage. The influence of Hong Kong’s diaspora communities far exceeds the influence or voice of the global Uyghur diaspora. There’s also a deeply ingrained anti-Muslim sentiment and potentially racism at the heart of Beijing’s treatment of its Uyghurs that isn’t a factor in Hong Kong. And not even the most foolhardy of commentators would suggest that Beijing intends to roll out a Xinjiang-style program of mass internment of Hong Kong’s population.

Nevertheless, comparisons of Hong Kong and Xinjiang are valid because both regions are viewed by Beijing as threats to its authority. In this context, the experiences of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang provide a cogent case study on how Beijing deals with perceived security threats that might help us understand the potential future of Hong Kong.

In the case of Xinjiang, Beijing has arguably not faced a genuine separatist threat there since the People’s Republic of China absorbed the Second East Turkestan Republic in 1949. Yet, since 2016 it has used the pretext of Uyghur separatism and terrorism to conduct an escalating campaign of persecution that has mutated into a program of genocide involving mass incarceration, forced labour, forced sterilisation of Uyghur women and organ harvesting from detainees.

The protests in Hong Kong over the past year, on the other hand, have rocked the foundations of Beijing’s authority, and the relative moderation of Beijing’s response so far stands in stark contrast to the brutality of its treatment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. But Hong Kong is now seeing the start of a more oppressive and brutal response from Beijing.

Importantly, a number of ingredients that were critical to Beijing’s ambitions in Xinjiang are present, or becoming apparent, in Hong Kong.

First, Beijing benefited from pervasive electronic surveillance infrastructure and the ability to deploy an overwhelming physical security presence across Xinjiang. Much of the technical infrastructure required for pervasive electronic surveillance is already in place in Hong Kong. And since the introduction of the new security law, Beijing has also started augmenting its police and security intelligence presence in Hong Kong.

Second, Beijing was able to almost completely curtail the media’s ability to directly chronicle the events unfolding in Xinjiang. Our understanding of the situation in Xinjiang has relied on rare first-hand accounts of witnesses, occasional disclosures of official documents outlining the details of Beijing’s anti-Uyghur program, scrutiny of government contracts and procurement, and satellite imagery.

The paucity of information has enabled Beijing to counter reports of human rights abuses with claims that the reports are fabricated or merely anti-Chinese propaganda, and mount personal attacks against some of the more prominent commentators on the plight of Xinjiang’s Muslims. If the arrest of Lai is the first step in a campaign to extinguish free media in Hong Kong, it won’t be long until Beijing is able to dictate the media narrative in Hong Kong in the same way it does in Xinjiang. To paraphrase the Washington Post’s masthead, human rights die in darkness.

Third, Beijing has been allowed to act in Xinjiang with relative impunity. While some commentators were encouraged by Washington’s decision in early July to target Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang with sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, there was no real cause for optimism. The symbolism of these sanctions was largely lost in the noise surrounding Washington’s increasingly toxic relationship with Beijing and ultimately their impact will likely be so inconsequential as to be meaningless.

And even when 22 countries issued a statement condemning Beijing’s treatment of its Uyghur minorities in mid-2019, almost twice as many countries were prepared to commit their names to a register of shame praising Beijing’s ‘remarkable achievements in the field of human rights’.

Chinese investment bought the silence and complicity of a large number of states with regard to the human rights abuses it is perpetrating in Xinjiang. And, despite the strength of the Hong Kong diaspora and Hong Kong’s status as a technologically advanced global financial hub, it’s possible that Chinese money will also buy the silence of other countries if Beijing embarks on a brutal campaign to bring the Hong Kong populace to heel. Already, 53 countries have voiced their support for Hong Kong’s national security law, eerily echoing earlier support for Beijing’s campaign in Xinjiang.

But there is a further aspect to Hong Kong that differentiates it from Xinjiang, and which may prove to be the primary determinant of its future. Hong Kong’s vibrant, innovative and cosmopolitan population has a long tradition of active political and social participation, public mobilisation and debate on issues affecting Hong Kong society.

Hong Kong, along with Taiwan, is a model of Chinese society that is free, vibrant, engaged and wealthy. By its very existence, Hong Kong stands as a direct rebuke to the hyper-intolerant, oppressive and totalitarian regime in Beijing.

Hongkongers, then, present a much more fundamental threat to the enduring authority of Beijing than the Uyghurs of Xinjiang ever have, and will likely be treated accordingly.

Iran is considering an offer from Beijing to revive an agreement which, combined with an enhanced security and military relationship, could give China a new strategic foothold in the Middle East.

In early July, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told Iranian MPs that an Iran–China 25-year strategic cooperation agreement was ‘under consideration’. This is not a new initiative but the renewal and update of a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ document signed by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in Tehran in January 2016.

Few details about the 2016 partnership and the 17 accords which Xi also signed then were ever disclosed. Reportedly, the document was a roadmap for upgrading the bilateral relationship and involved some US$600 billion in two-way trade and investment over the following 10 years. Iranian exports to China were identified as primarily oil, gas and other petrochemical products. China is Iran’s major trading partner and oil is Iran’s primary export to China. Chinese investment in Iran would focus on energy, manufacturing and transportation with road, rail and port projects linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The implementation of the partnership and related investment was dependent on the lifting of global sanctions against Iran and was timed to occur shortly after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) took effect on 16 January 2016.

China appears to have put much of the 2016 agreement on hold after signing. Its principal reason would have been the need to work through the complexities of its relationship with the US, especially after Donald Trump’s election as president and given his hostility to the JCPOA. That became even more complex after the withdrawal of the US from the agreement in May 2018 and its imposition of unilateral sanctions.

Zarif has so far disclosed little detail about the renewed agreement. From information available so far, in addition to trade and investment, it also includes security, military and intelligence cooperation. Two-way trade and investment is valued at US$400 billion, with China investing some US$280 billion in Iran’s energy sector and US$120 billion in transport, telecommunications and manufacturing. A major mutual benefit is China’s guarantee to buy Iranian oil for 25 years, reportedly at a discount price, and Iran’s guarantee to supply it—assuming there’s sufficient long-term stability in the Middle East to allow that to happen.

For Iran, the renewed partnership would provide a significant and desperately needed economic lifeline that it would hope would circumvent crippling US sanctions. Bilateral offset financial arrangements would enable the trading of Iran’s major export resource, oil, without involving the international banking and financial system. Iran’s economy would also benefit significantly from upgraded and new industries, and the jobs they’d create.

For China, the  multiple benefits would include the long-term guaranteed supply of oil at a discounted price, the use of Iran as a hub to progress the BRI land transportation corridor between Western China and Turkey, and marketing and manufacturing opportunities for Chinese goods. That would happen, in many cases, at the expense of the Europeans, who are severely constrained or intimidated by the US sanctions.  This would demonstrate that, despite its tensions with the US, China is still able both to successfully pursue its geopolitical and economic interests and to secure this new strategic foothold.

The timing of Zarif’s announcement, presumably agreed to by the Chinese, was undoubtedly calculated to rattle the US cage, and especially to unsettle Trump this close to the November presidential elections. One major message from Iran is that it can survive, despite Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign to force regime change.

Responding to Zarif’s announcement, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview on 2 August that China’s action would ‘destabilise the Middle East’. He said arms and money from China would enable Iran to continue as ‘the world’s largest state sponsor of terror’ and, particularly, to put Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates at risk. These three countries were singled out because of their growing relationships with China, and the pressure they could put on China to limit the scope of its agreement with Iran.

China and Iran may hasten slowly to implement the agreement. Both are likely to hold back on many detailed aspects until the outcome of the US presidential election is known. Critical considerations for Iran will be whether the US rejoins the JCPOA, and, if so, under what conditions, and whether US sanctions will be lifted.

Iran also will reject any aspect of an agreement with China that suggests any ceding of sovereignty of land or major national resources, or any potential debt trap, as has occurred with other countries. Strict boundaries of sovereignty are enshrined in Iran’s constitution. Iran also will insist that any new infrastructure projects employ Iranian labour and are not, as occurs elsewhere, outsourced to imported Chinese labour.

China’s political, economic and strategic interests in the Middle East are very much regional, and Beijing will be careful not to alienate others and prejudice its broader interests through its dealings with Iran. It will heed representations by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, other Gulf states and Israel, and seek to strike an acceptable balance of respective interests.

On 6 August, Al Jazeera cited Indian media reports that India’s relationship with Iran may be a casualty of the renewed agreement with China. The report claimed that Iran had dropped plans for India to build a railway line between the port city of Chabahar and Zahedan, near the Afghan border. When completed, the project would have provided India with a trade route to Afghanistan and Central Asia. It would also have competed with China’s proposed trade to these countries along BRI-upgraded routes through Pakistan.

Pending clarification of the Indian reports, it seems unlikely that Iran would sacrifice its longstanding relationship with India. As for China, it will seek to balance its interests.

Indonesia appreciated being comprehensively briefed on Australia’s recent defence strategic update before it was announced, says seasoned diplomat and politician Dr Dino Patti Djalal.

The former deputy foreign minister, who now heads the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia think tank, told ASPI’s online ‘Strategic Vision 2020’ conference that the world was living in ‘a hot peace environment’ with relations among the major powers deteriorating and many potential flashpoints.

Interviewed by journalist Stan Grant, Djalal said he was very pleased that Australia explained its plans to Indonesia. He said that contrasted dramatically with the 2011 announcement that Australia would host US marines in Darwin.

He remembered well being with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Hawaii when journalists asked them what they thought about the US sending marines to Darwin. ‘He looked at me and I had the stupidest look on my face. We did not know about this. We were not told and consulted by the Americans or by the Australians. That was a big lesson.’

Djalal said it was important that the update contained no suggestion that Indonesia was a threat to Australia, ‘Because that was always there in the past. Somehow, Indonesia is seen as some kind of a threat.

‘But I think this document makes it clear that Indonesia is a strong partner for Australia in addressing security issues in the region.’

He said Indonesians were not comfortable seeing defence spending rising around them, as with record levels in the US. ‘We don’t like to see hot peace combined with some sense of an arms race.’

Indonesia favoured soft power and diplomacy. Australia and Indonesia could cooperate on peacekeeping, Djalal said.

Indonesia did not intend to spend more on defence, especially with the pandemic. ‘We are going to need a lot of resources for economic and cultural development’, Djalal said.

Military development had to be accompanied by confidence-building measures, and that was not happening.

On Indonesians’ view of Australia, Djalal observed, ‘I’m out of government, so I can say this, but there’s still some wild conspiracy theories about Australia within the Indonesian body politic.’ Many Indonesians blamed Australia for promoting East Timorese independence. Some felt the deployment of US troops to Darwin was part of some bad strategic design towards Indonesia ‘which obviously is not the case’.

Indonesians loved conspiracy theories, Djalal said. ‘There’s still a bit of that, but the important thing is that the overall structure of the relationship now has changed. The feel between the leaders, the relations between the institutions, the degree of strategic trust between the two sides, this is unlike anything that we have ever seen before in terms of Indonesia–Australia relations.’

That could be affected by issues, he said, as when he discovered via Wikileaks that he and his president were among Indonesians being spied on by an Australian security agency.

At the same time, many Australians were unaware that Indonesia was a thriving democracy.

Now, he said, there was a ‘psyche of partnership’ between Indonesia and Australia. Of all Western countries, Australia knew Indonesia best and had the most invested in having good relations with it.

Indonesian and Australian diplomats worked well together, Djalal said. When he was ambassador to Washington, his best partner was Kim Beazley. ‘Indonesian and Australian diplomats always call each other. Always go to coffees and discuss issues and how to work together.’

This year, Djalal was asked which country Indonesia had grown closer to in the past five years and he responded, ‘China.’

He explained that while relations between Indonesia and China ‘froze’ decades ago, they had improved to the point where China was now Indonesia’s largest trading partner and export market. ‘Chinese diplomats are very active in Indonesia’, he said. Many Chinese tourists visited Indonesia each year and there were now more Indonesian students studying in China than in the US. ‘The number one is still Australia, but China is second after that.’

Ministerial consultations were routine and frequent, Dijlal said. ‘So, I think relations with China have dramatically and significantly intensified, particularly in the last five years or so.’

Dijlal said the driver was economic. China moved very fast on trade, he said. ‘Two decades ago, they were nowhere to be seen, but now they’re one of the biggest investors in Indonesia.’

The relationship was multidimensional and had varying levels of intensity. ‘But if you look at the metrics economically and politically, these are two different things. The Chinese have some difficulties in terms of public reception in Indonesia—the Chinese workers, for example. And then politically on the Natuna issue.’

Indonesia has named the area around its Natuna Islands the ‘North Natuna Sea’. This body of water embraces the southernmost part of the South China Sea and lies within the ‘nine-dash line’ which Beijing says marks out its territory.

Djalal said China’s claim over those waters had raised serious discomfort in Indonesia.

Grant noted that an Indonesian naval vessel had, in 2016, fired warning shots to drive Chinese fishing vessels away from the islands. Djalal responded that this was something new in the last five years. ‘But before that, the Chinese tended to be shy’, he said.

‘But then after 2014 onward, the Chinese seem to be pushing it to our face that, “Hey, we got some claims, they may be overlapping within the nine-dash line”.

‘Our position is very clear that there’s no need to negotiate. There’s no dispute because we don’t recognise the Chinese claims. We don’t recognise the nine-dash line.’

Indonesia did not believe China’s claims were consistent with international law. ‘The one thing that’s different is that the Chinese seem to be more assertive and pushing that issue into our diplomatic relations, but we’re holding tight to our position that we do not recognise that there is an overlap’, Djalal said.

‘With regard also to the rest of the South China Sea, there is a pathway to its resolution or its management through the discussion on the ASEAN–China code of conduct, which is now going on.

‘We don’t support any claims by the claimants and we want peaceful negotiations among them. We want them to exercise self-restraint, not just China but also the other ASEAN claimants, and we want to finalise the code of conduct negotiations.’

Djalal said Indonesia, like other ASEAN nations, had a lot invested in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea because its national territorial structure was embedded in that convention.

‘But this has added urgency now that you have more maritime disputes. And with China, again, pushing the nine-dash line strongly and more assertive behaviour, there needs to be a basis of understanding on how to move forward with this.’

The UN convention provided very clear rules and China had agreed to them, so that was the best basis on which to move forward, he said.

Asked about rising tension between the US and China, Djalal responded that as a Southeast Asian, he was not comfortable with Washington’s tone on China. President Donald Trump was very harsh on China. ‘We have our differences with China, but I think the tone from the US, I’m not comfortable with. I think many Southeast Asians find it disagreeable as well, even though we don’t say it out loud.’

Australia’s position on China had also become harsher, Djalal said. ‘I think there’s a tendency at China bashing in certain quarters in the Western world. This is qualitatively different from how Southeast Asians see China. So, I think that needs to be recognised.’ He said greater finesse was needed in dealing with China.

Djalal said that if Joe Biden won the US election, he would be tough on China but his administration would not play such a strong blame game and its approach would be more sophisticated.

Last month, US President Donald Trump signed into law a bill allowing him to impose sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the mass incarceration of more than one million Uyghurs and members of other largely Muslim minorities in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. The bipartisan Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 (UHRPA) condemned the abuses and called on the Chinese authorities to close their ‘vocational education’ centres in the region immediately, ensure respect for human rights, and allow people living in China to re-establish contact with family, friends and associates outside the country.

In theory, Trump could show genuine global leadership by implementing the act vigorously. Researchers in many countries have reported that, in addition to detention, Uyghurs are being subjected to torture, forced labour and sterilisation. And two Uyghur groups have accused the Chinese authorities of physical and cultural genocide in a complaint filed with the International Criminal Court.

Anne Applebaum has compared Western indifference to what is happening in Xinjiang today with the wilful determination of European governments and the Vatican to ignore the famine Joseph Stalin engineered in Ukraine in 1932–33, and the Nazi concentration camps a decade later. One might add more recent examples to the list. Viewed against this background, the United States’ willingness to condemn China’s behaviour and impose costs for it, even if only with individual sanctions, is a step in the right direction.

Moreover, this step might well gain the attention of Muslims in countries like Pakistan, Indonesia and Turkey. The Pakistani and Indonesian governments are willing to play by Chinese rules in order to secure investment; Pakistan signed a letter last year defending China’s treatment of Uyghurs, while the Indonesian government says that it ‘will not meddle in the internal affairs of China’. Turkey initially offered Uyghurs asylum in the 1950s when Chinese communists took over Xinjiang. Today, Turkish police are reportedly arresting Uyghur activists and sending them without explanation to deportation centres, sometimes for months.

In this context, a broad US-led effort to hold the Chinese government even partly to international account for its treatment of Uyghurs—particularly at a time when America is having to reckon with its own current and past racist crimes—could mark an important turning point. At the very least, it would remind China that the world is watching.

Sadly, Trump’s actions will likely convince Muslims only of the depths of his hypocrisy. Trump signed the UHRPA on the same day that allegations contained in his former national security adviser John Bolton’s new book were flooding the airwaves. According to Bolton, Trump was not merely indifferent towards Uyghurs’ human rights, but actively encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to build concentration camps to hold them.

Then there are Trump’s own Muslim travel bans. The initial ban, issued in January 2017, barred all refugees and immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries from entering the US; the measure was struck down by the courts and then revised several times until it passed constitutional muster. Since then, numerous stories have emerged demonstrating the devastating and potentially life-threatening impact of these restrictions on refugees, Muslims and non-Muslims living in the designated countries.

One of those affected is Afkab Hussein, a former Somali refugee now living in Columbus, Ohio. Afkab has been waiting since 2015 for his wife and young children to join him in the US, but Trump’s bans have prevented them from doing so. Trump’s support for a law that calls on the Chinese authorities to permit re-establishment of contact between people in China and outside the country therefore rings hollow.

The UHRPA also accuses the Chinese government of ‘using wide-scale, internationally-linked threats of terrorism as a pretext to justify pervasive restrictions on and serious human rights violations’ against Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang. But Trump’s executive orders seeking to bar Muslims from entering the US included similar clauses.

His first executive order cited the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US as a justification for banning refugees and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, despite the absence of evidence that citizens of any of these countries, much less refugees, carried out the attacks. Subsequent iterations of the ban continued to cite terrorism as a rationale. In practice, however, the Trump administration has merely blocked family members from joining loved ones in the US, and reduced admissions of vulnerable refugees to historically low levels.

The tension between Trump’s belated embrace of Uyghur rights and his all-too-evident dislike of Muslims (unless they are Saudi princes) raises the deeper question of who the ultimate audience is for America’s—or any country’s—foreign policy. Ordinary Muslims can have no doubt about how Trump feels about them, no matter what he might say to their governments. They only have to follow his Twitter feed or watch his press conferences.

Trump is the first US president to disdain normal processes for crafting and vetting official statements, preferring instead to engage directly with US voters and citizens of other countries via social media. But although he has mobilised a large constituency, he has also succeeded in alienating large segments of the public in America and elsewhere. His denigration of entire populations—such as calling Mexicans rapists or Muslims terrorists—resonate louder and longer than any official statements issued by the White House or the US State Department.

It remains to be seen whether those impressions will outlast Trump’s presidency. The US House of Representatives just passed the ‘No Ban Act’, which would repeal the Muslim travel ban and prevent the use of religious discrimination to bar immigrants. And if a new US administration succeeds Trump following November’s presidential election, it will have to address other countries’ governments and citizens with one voice—and without the glaring hypocrisy to which they have grown accustomed.