The rapid spread of Covid-19 throughout Indonesia is a serious challenge that could have strategic implications for Australia. But, unlike in previous disasters, there’s little Australia can do to assist Indonesia in the short term. Instead, it will be China that comes to Indonesia’s rescue.

After weeks of denying that it had any Covid-19 cases and claiming that adequate screening measures were in place, Indonesia now faces a health disaster. Although the first infections were reported only a month ago, current numbers indicate that more people in Indonesia are now dying from the virus than have recovered, giving it the highest death rate in Southeast Asia. It’s also ranked among the lowest countries in the world in terms of its testing rate, which suggests that numbers could be worse than reported.

The virus has already been detected in 29 of the country’s 34 provinces, and the densely populated areas of Jakarta, Banten, West Java, Central Java and East Java have over 80% of the more than 1,000 confirmed cases. Videos posted on social media showing Indonesians collapsing of respiratory failure on the streets of Jakarta have sent most of the middle class into self-isolation, forced some ethnic Chinese to seek refuge in Singapore, and driven the elite inside the walls of military compounds and gated communities to wait out the crisis.

The central government has tried to follow other countries by implementing work-from-home and social-distancing measures, but they’re proving difficult to enforce. Millions of Indonesians depend on the income from the informal sector built around the movement of people for their day-to-day living.

Ironically, the closure of offices, markets and factories across Java is increasing the risk of local transmission. Many Indonesians can’t work from home and the decline in economic incentives has forced thousands to return early to their villages ahead of the post-Ramadan Idul Fitri holiday period, likely spreading the virus further. It will be some time before Indonesia and its people understand the true extent of the crisis they face.

The government is now considering a local travel ban to prevent millions from returning to their villages, but it may be too late. Local transmission outside the capital has already occurred, and the safest place for many may now be their villages. Leaving the city could give the urban poor a better chance of isolating for an extended period. The Indonesian military is already building makeshift regional hospitals and commandeering non-vital government property in preparation for what will likely be thousands of patients in the coming weeks.

Indonesia’s health system is struggling to cope with the few cases that it has detected. The country has one of the worst deficits in hospital beds per capita in the region, with about 310,000 for its 260 million population, which roughly equates to 1.2 beds per 1,000 people. The ratio is even worse for intensive care beds, at about 2 beds per 100,000 people. Many of Indonesia’s hospitals also lack stored oxygen, ventilators and other equipment that can save patients with severe infections.

Even if Indonesia can increase its number of beds and acquire enough medical equipment to keep up with demand, it still lacks skilled respiratory and intensive care practitioners. This makes healthcare workers the key to the government’s response and is why the government needs to prioritise the supply of personal protective equipment to frontline workers. At least seven doctors have already died from Covid-19 infections and hospitals have resorted to stop-gap solutions such as plastic raincoats in a last-ditch effort to protect staff.

If the infection rate among frontline healthcare workers continues to rise, the government will face a serious morale problem that could exacerbate the crisis. The government is putting healthcare workers into hotels, ostensibly to keep them closer to hospitals, which will make them easier to monitor. The downside of that move is that it increases the risk of an outbreak among health workers.

Providing medical aid to Indonesia is something Australia would normally do, but it has its own shortages to contend with right now. Instead, Indonesia has been forced to accept offers from China and even to use its own military to pick up medical equipment. That’s a sign that Indonesia is already desperate for medical equipment, and suggests that the success of its response could depend on how much assistance it gets from China.

Indonesia’s options for averting crisis are limited. If lockdowns are implemented to reduce local transmission, enforcing them would be more than a question of manpower. The central government would be responsible for providing food to millions of Indonesians unable to provide for themselves. Food shortages could easily result in a breakdown of law and order and the scale would likely overwhelm security forces and weaken the government’s hold on power.

Like most countries, Indonesia’s priority has been to avert another economic crisis. The government has already injected around US$18 billion of liquidity into financial markets. Indonesia’s economy is consumer-driven, which has helped it weather previous financial crises. But a prolonged Covid-19 crisis will require substantial government spending and policy responses that bring the domestic economy to a standstill. Indonesia will need financial assistance and there will be few options apart from China.

Socioeconomic instability in Indonesia in the past has often been followed by political instability and change. Australia must therefore watch critical indicators closely—some of which Indonesia has already met—and provide medical aid and expertise as soon as possible before Indonesia becomes completely dependent on China to avert this crisis. Australia will have a limited capacity to provide the financial aid that Indonesia might require. But it can offset Indonesia’s dependence on poor-quality equipment from China, which has occurred in countries such as Spain and may actually prolong the crisis.

As soon as Australia has a handle on its own Covid-19 situation, it should start planning to assist Indonesia with expertise in workplace health and safety, diagnosis and treatment, all of which can be done at a distance. Otherwise, China will have a monopoly on influence and potentially take strategic advantage of Indonesia’s dire circumstances—an outcome that would have an adverse impact on Australia’s interests in the region.

Barely a month ago, China was in the grip of the coronavirus. Thousands of new infections were confirmed every day. Hospitals were overwhelmed. People were dying by the hundreds. People couldn’t leave their homes. But the government’s draconian lockdown seems to have worked: the outbreak now seems to be under control. And, apparently, China’s leaders have ignored its most essential lessons.

To see this, it’s worth reviewing how they handled the crisis. Upon hearing that a new coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan in the Hubei province, local authorities’ first instinct was to suppress the information. Police reprimanded whistleblowers like the Wuhan-based doctor Li Wenliang, who subsequently died of the disease. (Wuhan police recently apologised to Li’s family.)

This should have motivated China’s leaders to weigh the costs of censorship and reconsider the appointment of unqualified Chinese Communist Party members to key public health positions. The head of the Hubei Provincial Health Commission, dismissed during the crisis, had no medical training or experience in the health sector.

Moreover, some other countries, especially Singapore and Taiwan, managed to contain the Covid-19 outbreak without incurring the high costs that China did when it placed at least 760 million people under varying degrees of residential lockdown. China’s leaders should be looking to these countries for lessons on smarter crisis response.

But, far from learning from past mistakes, China’s leaders are trying to cover them up. As virtually the entire global economy effectively shuts down to contain the China-born virus, and deaths in Italy—the pandemic’s new epicentre—exceed 8,000, the CCP has shifted its propaganda machine into high gear. Its goal? Change the narrative of the Covid-19 crisis.

At home, this has meant touting the CCP’s leadership in mobilising the country to ‘win the war’ against the virus. It has also meant encouraging the spread on Chinese social media of exaggerated or outright false stories about Western democracies’ ‘inept’ responses to the outbreak.

Abroad, China’s propaganda machine is trumpeting declining infection rates as evidence that strong centralised leadership is more effective than democratic governance. Meanwhile, the government is sending humanitarian assistance—including healthcare workers and medical supplies—to hard-hit countries like Iran, Italy and the Philippines.

But if Chinese leaders hope to use the Covid-19 pandemic to build and project soft power, they are likely to be sorely disappointed. For starters, the world is nowhere near ready to forget the role that its initial cover-up played in allowing the virus to spread.

The prevailing view outside China is that, had the country’s leaders taken decisive action immediately and transparently, the current pandemic may have been avoided. The CCP can challenge that narrative all it wants, but it cannot force international media to do the same. Chinese propaganda has never gotten much purchase in the free marketplace of ideas; indeed, most of the CCP’s previous attempts to influence international public opinion have fallen flat.

Few are tempted by a Chinese-style containment strategy. Shutting down the entire country has cost China dearly in economic terms. First-quarter GDP is expected to plunge 9%. Should a second wave of infections strike, as is likely, repeating the same strategy would lead to economic ruin.

Of course, if this were the only way to save lives, people might be on board. But Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan all seem to have struck a better balance between protecting public health and sustaining economic activity.

Against this background, China’s humanitarian efforts will do little to repair its reputation. Yes, it is better than offering no help at all. But the country could do a lot more to bolster public health globally—beginning with sharing the massive amounts of data and knowledge it has gathered on the virus.

China could also scale up the production of protective equipment, especially hazmat suits and surgical masks. China made half the world’s surgical masks before the Covid-19 outbreak, and it has since expanded production nearly 12-fold. If it really does have the virus under control, there is nothing stopping it from donating this life-saving equipment to countries facing severe shortages.

In particular, China should make a major donation—say, one billion surgical masks and one million hazmat suits (10 days of supply for 50,000 healthcare workers)—to the United States. This could ease tensions between the two countries just enough to enable them—together with the European Union and Japan—to pursue a coordinated response to the pandemic, including action to shore up the global financial system and enact major stimulus packages to stave off a depression.

When this pandemic is finally over, people will remember what China did, not what it said. It can go down in history either as the reason the Covid-19 crisis began, or as one of the reasons it ended.

Against the backdrop of an escalating war of words between Washington and Beijing, and the Chinese Communist Party’s broader campaign to rewrite the history of the Covid-19 outbreak, the attempts by multiple Chinese diplomats to promote conspiracy theories that the virus originated in the US, not China have received widespread attention.

What has been less discussed, however, is how Western fringe and conspiracy media have been supporting these efforts and what the growing nexus between pro-CCP propaganda and conspiracy narratives may tell us about the role China is coming to play in the Western information ecosystem.

There has long been a symbiotic relationship between Russian state propaganda outlets like Sputnik and RT and certain elements of the fringe and conspiracy media in the West. They frequently echo, borrow or seed narratives from one another. In most cases, it’s probably not deliberate collusion (at least, not on a large scale), but rather the result of opportunism and mutual benefits in singing from the same hymn sheet. And now, it appears, China may be joining the chorus.

In perhaps the most notable example of this, on 13 March a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian, used his Twitter account to promote an article from the website globalresearch.ca, titled ‘COVID-19: Further evidence that the virus originated in the US’. The article outlines a conspiracy which claims that the novel coronavirus originated in the US, and that ‘it may therefore be true that the original source of the COVID-19 virus was the US military bio-warfare lab at Fort Detrick’.

To be clear: there is no evidence to support this claim, or to suggest that the virus originated anywhere outside China. Nonetheless, Zhao’s tweets have not only remained up but have been re-tweeted by numerous other Chinese diplomatic accounts. At the time of writing, Zhao’s tweet had received over 20,000 likes and been shared 12,700 times.

Among the many interesting issues this raises, one is the choice to promote that particular article from that particular site. There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories on the internet—so why that one?

The Centre for Research on Globalization, also known as Global Research, is a website run by Canadian economist and conspiracy theorist Michel Chossudovksy that has repeatedly been accused of being a pro-Kremlin mouthpiece. It’s not clear how deep the links between the site and Russian state-linked media run, but according to the independent Russian newspaper Meduza:

What makes GlobalResearch.ca different from other similar websites is the disproportional weight it enjoys in news coverage by the Russian state media. Global Research is prominently featured as the only source in numerous stories by Russia’s leading newswire RIA Novosti, where it’s referred to as a ‘think tank’ or ‘publication’ whose ‘experts’ or ‘journalists’ regularly reveal or uncover some fact that fits into the Kremlin’s current foreign policy agenda …  [I]t is less a news outlet and more an amateur conspiracy website whose founder has subscribed to the Kremlin’s narrative simply because it opposes the one promoted by the ‘deep state’ and its subservient ‘mainstream media’.

Sites like Global Research are valuable to state-linked actors because they put a Western, pseudo-academic face on conspiracy theories and disinformation narratives. They are useful tinder to spark entire narrative cycles, as this example clearly highlights.

In the early days of the Covid-19 crisis, Global Research seems to have sensed an opportunity to reach out to new audiences. Indeed, the pivot to a Chinese audience appears to have been so hasty that no one has yet fixed the typo in ‘Chinese’ on the site’s About page (figure 1).

Figure 1: Screenshot of Global Research’s ‘About’ page, 24 March 2020

Only two articles had actually been translated into Chinese before Zhao picked up Global Research’s English-language piece promoting the US-origin conspiracy theory. Zhao’s tweet was used as the basis for news stories in Chinese state media, including the Global Times and People’s Daily Online.

It also appears to have driven a huge surge in searches for ‘globalresearch.ca’ on 13 March, the day Zhao’s tweet went out (figure 2). What this demonstrates is that the quid pro quo—the benefit (or at least one of the benefits)—for sites like Global Research in aligning themselves with state-linked conspiracies is the enormous amplification which state-linked voices can give to pieces like this that would otherwise receive very little traffic.

Figure 2: Google search trends for ‘globalresearch.ca’

Zhao’s amplification is likely to have been multiplied many times over by the widespread media coverage of his tweets, which in turn will have driven still more traffic to the Global Research site. Not only does this help to propagate the conspiracy theory, it also provides Global Research with an incentive to lean in to the narrative. In the 10 days since Zhao’s tweet, the site has published multiple additional articles (including republishing one from CGTN) on the US-origin conspiracy theory, some citing Zhao’s tweets.

This mutually beneficial ouroboros of conspiracy narratives passing back and forth between state-linked and fringe media already exists in the context of Kremlin-backed outlets. If this example is anything to go by, we may well see Beijing’s state-linked information efforts follow a similar path, as China becomes a more active and aggressive player in the Western information ecosystem.

Lowell Dittmer’s book on the strategic geometry of power relationships in Asia comes at a critical time when regional actors are facing the urgent challenge of shaping their responses to China’s rising power and influence. According to Dittmer, China is seeking to revive the old China dream of having dominance over what it considers its ‘natural region’. However, the region has been resisting such attempts, and ‘China finds its way to its prized Asian leadership role frustrated’. The book takes on an ambitious goal of examining how Asian countries are coping with a rising and assertive China.

Dittmer suggests that the best way of understanding the dynamics of China and its neighbours is by mapping them onto a triangular model of relationship involving the United States as the third actor. This creates, what Dittmer calls a ‘strategic triangle’, in which each participant is presumed to be a sovereign and rational actor. Each actor in a strategic triangle takes into account the third actor in managing its relationship with the second. Each actor is also essential to the game in the sense that its defection from one side to the other would affect the strategic balance. For Dittmer, ‘The rules of the game are to maximize national interests by having as many positive triangles and as few negative triangles as possible.’

With the inclusion of the US in the strategic triangle, China’s asymmetrical power advantage over its Asian neighbours is mitigated, much to Beijing’s chagrin. This explains why China seeks to depict the US as ‘a country outside of the region’ and cast its foreign policy in the region as ‘interference’ or ‘intervention’. China also warns its smaller neighbours to ‘not take sides’ between the two major powers.

The book examines six strategic triangles involving combinations of China, the US, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, ASEAN states, India and Australia (he also posits two smaller embedded triangles involving Pakistan).

According to Dittmer, the Russia–China–US triangle poses the worst possible configuration for America. The Sino-Russian partnership has been growing stronger, placing the US in a disadvantageous position. Dittmer describes how President Barack Obama made a strategic choice to engage China, even ‘downplaying short-term disagreements over the South China Sea’. However, under President Donald Trump, US relations with China and Russia have deteriorated, while Beijing and Moscow have grown closer, putting the US in the worse triangular position.

Dittmer describes the Japan–China–US triangle as an arranged marriage ‘consisting of the Japan–America Security Alliance on one side facing an opposing Sino-Russian alliance on the other’. Increasingly, however, as China’s influence has grown, the China–Japan–US triangle has further entrenched the importance of Japan and the Japan–US alliance.

Dittmer assesses that, in their respective strategic triangles with the US and China, Taiwan and South Korea, both experiencing separation, pursue schizoid foreign policies in the sense of being oriented both to outside powers and to the ‘other half’. Both countries have tried (inconclusively) to bring their policies into ‘alignment’.

Between 1995 and 2005, ‘Taiwan fell into the worst possible position of a pariah facing a Sino-US marriage’. However, given current US–China tensions, Taiwan’s prominence has now risen in American foreign policy. Dittmer thus argues that ‘we may stand at the threshold of a brave, perilous new era in cross-Straits relations’.

While China has repeatedly sought to assure others in the region that is has no intention of pushing the US out of the Western Pacific, it considers the US alliance network in the region and the Taiwan Relations Act to be antithetical to some of its core interests. The triangles involving Taiwan and South Korea serve a different purpose than other triangular configurations. While these relationships may provide some measure of protection to smaller powers, Dittmer argues that they ‘cannot heal national division’ that afflicts both South Korea and Taiwan.

With respect to Southeast Asia, Dittmer represents ASEAN as a monolith that occupies one leg of the triangle. This is a drawback since ASEAN lacks coherent strategic interests at the institutional level. Dittmer outlines the transformation of the grouping since the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, the five-member ASEAN was aligned with the US in an effort to counter communism in the region. Dittmer notes that today’s ASEAN, with 10 member states, is a more neutral actor that could benefit from the increasingly competitive relationship between the two other legs of this particular triangle, the US and China.

Separate chapters on South Asia and Australia are provided, but unfortunately bring more confusion than clarity. There are a number of ‘smaller triangles’ embedded in the larger India–China–US triangle, but the brevity of the book fails to give them justice. Similarly, Australia, while enjoying its own chapter—unlike the countries of South and Southeast Asia, which are grouped together—and arguably the most straightforward triangle, is presented as much more coherent than its domestic debates and decisions may suggest.

Beyond the real cases and the role that these strategic triangles play in mitigating China’s growing power, a question remains as to whether the power transition in Asia will lead to war. Dittmer suggests three conditions that need to be met to ensure a peaceful power transition. First, the challenger should not attack the incumbent’s core interests. Second, the incumbent must gracefully yield to the challenger’s reasonable demands. Third, they both must share a determination not to let their differences become kinetic.

Dittmer’s book is a commendable attempt to capture the complex and rapidly evolving sets of relationships involving China, the United States and major Asian countries. However, some readers may be dissatisfied with some of the author’s oversimplifications. Dittmer, however, defends this approach because ‘simplifications can sometimes be useful’.

In a piece titled ‘The think-tank behind Australia’s changing view of China’, the Australian Financial Review recently gave prominence to a few critics of ASPI’s China research. But instead of engaging with the research and its findings, the criticisms levelled were simple jibes: ‘one-sided’, ‘dystopian’, ‘brings shame to Australia’. That was a pity because ASPI’s China research is addressing head-on one of the most important challenges Australia faces.

For a long time there was a cosy consensus in Australian policymaking circles about how China would rise. It was assumed China would join the international system that had underpinned its economic success and participate in it, largely as a status quo power. As has now become very clear under President Xi Jinping, sadly, that assessment was wrong.

What has been remarkable about this major failure is the desire expressed by some to continue along the same path we were on before.

At the heart of Australia’s failure to accurately predict how China would rise was a failure to understand China under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. Across the Australian policymaking community, Australian think tanks and academia, the number of people with deep expertise on China were few and far between.

While lots of effort was thrown into understanding the Chinese economy, other critical areas were ignored and are still not well understood, such as technology transfer programs, united front activities, military modernisation and interference in diaspora communities. It can be difficult to talk about these more negative and challenging aspects of China’s rise, but, given how important China will be for Australia and the international system, it would be foolish to gloss over or ignore them.

Against this policy gap, what better way to understand China than by looking at what the Chinese government is saying it wants to do? ASPI’s researchers read Chinese-language documents and have the expertise to assess Chinese technology, political and military developments including through the lens of Chinese Australians who can draw analytical depth from understanding both societies.

That objective to clearly understand China is precisely why we set up a China research capability at ASPI. To bring empirical data to one of the most consequential policy debates that will engage the current generation of Australian decision-makers. ASPI has one of the largest concentrations of Chinese-language speakers in any think tank in the country. Their specialisations include China’s military, technology transfer, online censorship, smart cities, social credit and industrial espionage. Our China research runs across different thematic programs and, while it attracts attention, is still only a modest part of ASPI’s total research output.

The simple act of looking at what the Chinese government says it wants to do and is doing has produced some remarkable empirical research and insights into the type of state that Australia, and the world, is dealing with.

Our work analysing Chinese defence universities and Western academics’ support for Chinese weapons programs has raised important questions both here and overseas. This includes questions about the extent to which Australian taxpayer funding and university research should be used to build up an authoritarian state’s military capabilities and measures we might need to take to prevent collaborations on defence-related technologies. Research engagement with China is vital to the Australian university sector, but a small proportion of partnerships are problematic and threaten the integrity of some universities and academic freedom more broadly.

Our research on the Chinese state’s efforts to control and manipulate global debate on key issues has raised equally important questions about free speech, the integrity of democratic institutions and the privacy of people’s data. And our work on the global expansion of China’s technology giants has provided a massive dataset to help policymakers everywhere understand how Chinese companies that will be powerful players in critical new technologies like artificial intelligence differ from the private companies they are used to dealing with because of their links to the CCP, the laws they are obliged to comply with and their attitudes towards human rights abuses.

Of course, ASPI has no monopoly on the ability to trawl through CCP policy documents and statements to unearth new insights and shed light on the party’s stated plans for China and the rest of the world. It’s just that so few others in Australia and elsewhere invest significant time to do so.

ASPI doesn’t have an editorial line on China, but we have a very clear method for how we go about our research. What we focus on—no matter the country or theme—is original empirical research that, wherever possible, generates new data that can help inform better public policy. That requires researchers to trawl through masses of information in multiple languages over months and sometimes years in order to create new datasets to inform their analysis.

This focus on empirical research is grounded in the idea that analysis informed by the hard work of empirical research is the most valuable contribution we can make to the policy debate. People don’t have to agree with our analysis, but it at least provides a factual basis for a debate.

While I’m very glad ASPI’s research has its critics (how else could we have a debate?), a better outcome for Australia would be to debate the issues we face. There is no more urgent or important policy issue for Australia than to think through how to engage China. The more that debate is informed by data and clear-sighted analysis, the better.