Tag Archive for: China

The Great Game in the South Pacific

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The Great Game was played by Great Britain and Russia throughout the 19th century and reflected the two powers’ political and strategic jostling for influence across Central Asia. It was essentially about geographic positioning, and a 21st-century version is now being played in the South Pacific. The outcome will change the strategic balance across Asia and most of the Pacific. Australia needs to consider how to position itself in this contest in order to shape what’s likely to be a significantly altered strategic landscape.

On one side is China, cashed up, with a clear strategic direction and a willingness to play over the long term. It is also willing to play by a completely different set of rules. On the other side is a grouping of players, spread across the Pacific. There are Japan and South Korea, which don’t seem to know they’re in the game, but will be significantly affected by the outcome. There’s the United States, at the moment the best player, trained up, with the best kit, but increasingly disinterested and in more of a mind to just go home. Then there’s Australia, wanting to play alongside the US but not able either to convince America to stay in the game or to play alone.

The latest moves by Australia and China are illustrative. Australia’s was two-pronged: to re-establish a naval base at Manus Island and to comprehensively engage the South Pacific island states. The jury is out on the effectiveness of the first move and the second was a partial own goal. Manus Island was intended to be a mechanism to bring the US more into the game while providing a forward base for surveillance of regional developments. The Pacific islands move was warranted, albeit late, but the lack of commitment by Canberra to address climate change has arguably harmed some relationships, particularly in countries facing an existential threat from rising sea levels.

The latest China move builds on the position gained through the developments in the South China Sea, centred on militarising a string of artificial islands and on the build-up of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) systems. China has given itself the capability to essentially close the sea routes across this important area in situations short of war.

China’s strategy is to build a permanent presence in the Southwest Pacific, a move made clearer and more real by an attempt by China, since deemed illegal, to lease the entire island of Tulagi in Solomon Islands for 75 years. The importance of that move to the players is brought into stark relief by a map from the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ ChinaPower project, reproduced below. It highlights the impact of the progressive denial of the archipelagic straits and the South China Sea to shipping.

If all these routes are closed, the strategic value of the South Pacific islands will be elevated. Traffic to Japan and South Korea will have to travel even further out into the Pacific, the ability of the US to manoeuvre freely will be affected, and Australia may be isolated from our increasingly reluctant ally.

Source: China Power Team, ‘How much trade transits the South China Sea?’, 2 August 2017; updated 10 October 2019.

The next Australian move in the game is crucial and needs to take advantage of geography and not just be dictated by it. The priorities should be to:

  • establish a submarine presence on the east coast to allow easy access to where the game is being played—now, not when the new submarines come into service; having the totality of the submarine force on the west coast renders that force less potent
  • undertake persistent surveillance of the area to the east and the northeast, not primarily the north and the northwest; this should involve the use of autonomous, persistent assets to build a highly reliable picture of surface and subsurface activities
  • address theatre anti-submarine warfare, not just talk about it
  • develop an ability to look south, which is something we haven’t had to do before in any meaningful way; increased shipping to the south of Australia will bring not only increased surface traffic, but also the potential for increased subsurface activity
  • build a deeper, more meaningful relationship with Papua New Guinea, as that country will be a key determinant in what the regional future looks like
  • conduct a wholesale review of national security strategies, and of the military force structure that we are currently developing.

Australia needs to prepare for a more independent defence industry as an increasingly isolationist United States is less likely to come to our aid. We need to have real sovereignty over the strategically important aspects of our military capability. That means matching defence industry capabilities with the military forces considered critical to our defence strategy.

Australia is steadily being outflanked and outgunned. The main game in the Pacific has always been a maritime one. Both Japan and the US understood that during World War II. China obviously also seems to understand it today. Our defence and foreign affairs strategies need to evolve to reflect this reality. We simply don’t have the funds to outbid China in this area. We need to understand and more meaningfully engage with the South Pacific nations, beyond defence cooperation. This includes a fundamental recognition of the threat posed by climate change to South Pacific island states.

China’s risky endgame in Hong Kong

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Although the rapid escalation of violence in Hong Kong seems terrifying enough, things may be about to get much worse. The communiqué of the recently concluded fourth plenum of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party indicates that President Xi Jinping is planning to tighten his grip on the former British colony at any cost. He should prepare to rack up a formidable bill.

The communiqué includes two ominous pledges. First, China’s central government will ‘control and rule’ (guanzhi) Hong Kong (and Macau) using ‘all the powers vested in [it] under the constitution and the Basic Law’, the mini-constitution that defines Hong Kong’s status. Second, it will ‘build and improve a legal system and enforcement mechanism to defend national security’ in both special administrative regions.

A few days after the plenum, the CCP’s plan to assert its control over Hong Kong became clearer when it released the full text of the resolution endorsed there by its central committee. China’s central government intends to change the process for appointing Hong Kong’s chief executive and key officials, and reform the system governing how the Chinese National People’s Congress Standing Committee interprets the Basic Law. Moreover, China will support the strengthening of Hong Kong’s law-enforcement capabilities and ensure that the city government enacts legislation to enhance national security. It will also deepen Hong Kong’s economic integration with the mainland and expand ‘education’ programs to cultivate a ‘national consciousness and patriotic spirit’, especially among civil servants and young people.

Though the details of the plan have yet to be worked out, it seems evident that China’s leaders intend to gut the Basic Law, exercise more direct control over the appointment of key officials, weaken or eliminate Hong Kong’s judicial independence, curtail civil liberties and suppress political dissent, including through ideological indoctrination. In other words, they have decided effectively to abandon the ‘one country, two systems’ model, which Deng Xiaoping promised to uphold for 50 years after Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule in 1997.

China’s leaders must know that they will run into powerful resistance. While some initial steps will be taken in Beijing, the plan’s most substantive measures will require action on the ground in Hong Kong. And if the ongoing protests have shown anything, it’s that Hong Kong’s people won’t go down without a fight.

In fact, China has tried to get Hong Kong’s legislative council to pass national security legislation before, in 2003, but more than half a million residents took to the streets to protest, forcing the government to withdraw the bill. Likewise, China’s attempt in 2012 to institute ‘patriotic education’ in Hong Kong by changing its history textbooks ignited a rebellion among parents and students, forcing the government to back down.

As the CCP attempts to exert total control over Hong Kong, even larger demonstrations, marked by even more violence, are likely. The city will descend further into chaos and become ungovernable. But that may well be what China’s leaders want: an excuse to deploy security forces and impose direct control over the city. In that sense, the fourth plenum may mark the beginning of the end of Hong Kong as we know it.

What Xi and the CCP seem not to understand is how much this approach will hurt them. After all, China is likely to lose much of its access to the global financial system as countries revise their relationships with the new Hong Kong.

Already, the US House of Representatives has adopted a bill that, if also passed by the Senate, would mandate an annual review by the State Department to determine whether Hong Kong remained sufficiently autonomous to justify its special trading status under US law. As China’s central government tramples on Hong Kong’s rights, more Western democracies—including those that have hesitated to support US President Donald Trump’s efforts to contain China—are likely to support comprehensive economic sanctions.

It should be obvious that this would be a devastating development for Xi and the CCP, whose legitimacy depends on continued economic growth and improvements in living standards. But in a country whose top leadership brooks no dissent, there are few safeguards against bad policymaking.

Two years ago, Xi declared that by the time the People’s Republic of China celebrates its centenary in 2049, it should be a ‘great modern socialist country’ with an advanced economy. The fourth plenum communiqué reiterated this objective. But if China’s central government reneges on its obligations to Hong Kong, that goal is likely to become little more than a distant dream.

Southeast Asian narratives about US–China competition (part 1): choice and necessity

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Language and rhetoric are important in a time of consequential power shifts and may even form a key front in Asia’s great-power rivalry—especially now, looking at US strategy in the region. Washington’s declared strategy of a free and open Indo-Pacific—despite what the name suggests—still struggles to convince that it has transitioned from mere rhetoric into genuine action.

The pulse of the regional debate suggests that there are now four dominant—albeit misleading—narratives in Southeast Asia about great-power competition and the differing roles of China and the US.

The first is the push-back against a paradigm of great-power competition in which smaller states are compelled to choose between Washington and Beijing. The narrative of choice isn’t a new one, but it has gained currency particularly among the ASEAN leaders over the past year. At the 2018 ASEAN summit, Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong declared that making such a choice might be unavoidable. ‘Circumstances may come where ASEAN could have to choose one over the other,’ he said.

Some six months later, as the debate intensified, Singapore’s PM steadfastly resisted the notion that the region should have to choose. In a keynote speech at the 2019 Shangri La Dialogue, Lee stressed that Singapore wants to be friends with both, rather than choose one over another. This view is not exclusive to Singapore; as a recent report from the Brookings Institution, Don’t make us choose, makes clear, it’s now widespread across ASEAN.

While this narrative narrowly—and falsely—frames the choice as either/or, it does reflect a level of anxiety about the impact of growing great-power competition and resistance to the return of bipolarity. While Beijing has a track record in pushing binary choices, the debate has shifted the focus onto the US. Now it appears that Washington is the great power that’s asking states in the region to choose.

US Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have appeared to convey the following message at previous regional summits and in public speeches: ‘Don’t go for the debt-trap diplomacy of the Belt and Road Initiative. The free and open Indo-Pacific is a much better alternative to the Sino-centric regional order.’ The Huawei ban declared by the US and some of its closest allies also involves regional fears about a new technology iron curtain. Rather than seeing viable and attractive alternatives, more often than not Southeast Asia sees having to choose as an imposition.

Indeed, the Trump administration’s language fuels this interpretation. The narrative also misleadingly suggests that all other actors are destined to fall victim to the great-power contest and that they have no, or little, power to influence events. In fact, the US–China choice serves different purposes for some of the Southeast Asian states in manoeuvring in a tenser strategic environment—a development that deserves a separate analysis. But that doesn’t change the fact that this narrative is being popularised.

When it comes to ASEAN’s relations with China, another dominant refrain is the narrative of destiny.

The tyranny of cartographic reality, aggravated by the sheer power asymmetry, translates to a kind of strategic fatalism—an assumption, however unwillingly, that there’s no option other than working with Beijing. The alternative—confronting it—is simply undesirable, if not unacceptable to some.

This applies even to the giant of Southeast Asia, Indonesia. The country’s newly re-elected president, Joko Widodo, was quoted as saying, ‘There is no choice but cooperate and co-exist.’

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte—whose country won an unprecedented international legal action over a maritime dispute with China—has on many occasions expressed the logic behind his government’s failure to pursue maritime territorial claims. ‘What can we do? Go to war with China? Educate me please’, he has said.

At the ASEAN summit last week, Malaysia’s veteran prime minister, Mahathir Mohammad, said: ‘We pointed out that we are a small country. [We] can’t confront China. If they want to claim [the] South China Sea as theirs, that’s their concern.’

This narrative bears a striking resemblance to the words uttered by Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi at the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Hanoi in 2010, when he reminded his counterparts in the region that ‘China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.’

It flows from a recognition that China will continue to play by far the most significant economic role in Southeast Asia—something that concerns each and every country, regardless of their political relations with China.

A regional survey conducted by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute reflects this reality, with over 73% of respondents seeing China as having the most economic influence in Southeast Asia compared with only 7.9% who thought the same about the US. This is despite the fact that US direct foreign investment in the region remains higher than that of China.

China’s geostrategic shadow looms large over Southeast Asia and promises an intertwined economic future. The notion of a common destiny with Beijing, accompanied by a certain sense of strategic fatalism, is increasingly being touted in the region.

To support that contention, there are two other narratives that suggest that China is cooperating with ASEAN and that US engagement with the region—under President Donald Trump at least—is in decline. I will discuss these in part 2.

A quest for global dominance: China’s appetite for rare earths

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China’s dominance of the rare-earths industry is the result of a 40-year campaign by the Chinese state that has given it a market share of between 80% and 90% of the mining, processing and manufacturing of the minerals and their end-use products.

Rare earths are a tiny market worldwide—the total value of mine production is only around US$4 billion—but their uses in high-technology applications have multiplied over the past two decades.

China had been mining rare earths since the 1950s as a by-product from an iron ore mine, Bayan Obo, in Inner Mongolia. It set up a research institute into rare earths near the mine site in the early 1960s, but it remained an essentially cottage industry until the 1970s, when a Chinese chemical scientist, Xu Guangxian—who had played a key role in China’s nuclear program—developed a method of separating the various rare-earth elements, which are usually found combined in the ore.

Production of rare earths from the Bayan Obo mine soared from 1,000 tonnes in the late 1970s to 11,860 tonnes by 1986, which surpassed production in the United States.

The 1970s and the early 1980s were a period of intense resource nationalism around the world. OPEC was formed, and producer groups, with varying aspirations to control market prices, were established in the bauxite, copper, tin, uranium, phosphate and iron ore industries.

As the Cultural Revolution subsided and the administration of Deng Xiaoping began focusing on China’s economic development, exploiting natural resources and adding value to them became a priority. In 1986, Deng approved a national high-tech research and development plan to help China ‘to gain a foothold in the world arena; to strive to achieve breakthroughs in key technical fields that concern the national economic lifeline and national security; and to achieve “leap-frog” development in key high-tech fields in which China enjoys relative advantages or should take strategic positions’.

In 1992, on a visit to inner Mongolia and the rare-earths district of Baotou, Deng famously commented:

The Middle East has its oil, China has rare earth: China’s rare earth deposits account for 80 percent of identified global reserves, you can compare the status of these reserves to that of oil in the Middle East: it is of extremely important strategic significance; we must be sure to handle the rare earth issue properly and make the fullest use of our country’s advantage in rare earth resources.

China’s mercantilist approach to rare earths was reinforced by Deng’s successor Jiang Zemin, who, on a similar visit to Baotou in 1999, declared that China’s task was to ‘improve the development and application of rare earth, and change the resource advantage into economic superiority’.

China’s production of rare earths rose strongly, reaching 50,000 tonnes by 1996 and 120,000 tonnes by 2010.

At least 40% of China’s output was ‘illegal’ production by small-scale entrepreneurs in the south of China who found they could extract rare-earth oxides from clay soils either with strip mining or by soaking trenches with sulphuric acid.

Efforts to shut down these operations, which cause extensive environmental damage, have been only been partially successful, in a striking reminder that the power of the monolithic Chinese state diminishes with the distance from Beijing.

While building its own production, China has also sought to control the output of rivals. In 2005, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation bid US$18.5 billion for the US oil business Unocal. Unocal had large proven oil and gas reserves in Asia which were attractive to the Chinese oil company. Unnoticed during the heated US debates over the bid was that Unocal also owned the only rare-earths mine in the US, Mountain Pass (it was mothballed at the time). CNOOC’s bid raised a political storm in the US which ultimately led it to withdraw.

In May 2009, China Non-Ferrous Mining Company offered Australian rare-earth developer Lynas a financial lifeline after its funding had been torpedoed by the global financial crisis. The Chinese company would buy 52% of Lynas for $252 million and would provide guarantees for a further US$184 million debt package, which would be sourced from China. CNFMC would take four of the eight board seats and be guaranteed a share of its output.

Treasurer Wayne Swan had taken the papers from the Foreign Investment Review Board recommending that the offer be accepted with him to a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington. Swan had earlier signed off on an FIRB recommendation that he approve the purchase by Chinese investors of a 25% stake in another rare-earths prospect, Arafura, which had also lost access to funding following the financial crisis.

In the US, Swan was startled to read a New York Times report detailing China’s dominant stake in the global rare-earths market. He then asked the FIRB to reconsider the Lynas deal. It came back, suggesting a maximum Chinese shareholding of no more than 49.9% and less than half the directors, leading the Chinese to withdraw their bid. Lynas was eventually developed with Japanese government finance.

The most striking example of the Chinese state seeking integrated control of the rare-earths industry was its 1997 purchase of the General Motors subsidiary Magnequench, which had, in the early 1980s, developed and patented the technology for making permanent magnets using the rare earth neodymium (Japan’s Sumitomo Metals patented a different method for making rare-earth magnets at the same time).

In the mid-1990s, GM was going through a period of corporate restructure, shedding ‘non-core’ subsidiaries, and the magnet-making firm was sold to a joint venture of two Chinese state-owned firms for US$70 million. The sale was controversial—regulators demanded a commitment that the Chinese buyers would retain the assets of the business in the United States for at least five years. There were suggestions the sale helped GM gain permission to establish an assembly line in China.

The buyers were impeccably connected: the new Chinese chairman of Magnequench, Hong Zhang, was married to the daughter of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, Deng Nan. Under its Chinese ownership, the firm established a parallel permanent magnet-manufacturing business at Tianjin in China. In 2002, the day after the five-year commitment expired, the US manufacturing operations were closed and the entire plant was shifted to China. The US has only regained a fraction of its capacity to manufacture rare-earth magnets.

Chinese investors remain active in securing stakes in rare-earth prospects around the world, including in listed Australian rare-earths companies Arafura and Northern Minerals.

Fears that China may use its dominant position as a weapon in its trade war with the US were sparked when China’s president Xi Jinping visited the leading rare-earths miner and magnet manufacturer JL Mag in June this year, a few days after the US had announced it would ban the export of technology-sensitive products to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

He said rare earths were an important strategic and non-renewable resource, but he emphasised the importance of adding value through their application. ‘We should firmly grasp the strategic basis of technological innovation, master more key core technologies and seize the commanding heights of industry development’, he said.

A new Sino-Russian high-tech partnership emerges as US tensions mount

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China and Russia have not only expanded their military cooperation but are also undertaking more extensive technological cooperation, including in 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, new media and the digital economy.

In our new report, A new Sino-Russian high-tech partnership: authoritarian innovation in an era of great-power rivalry, published today by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, we map out the unique ecosystem underpinning expanding technology cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.

Sino-Russian relations have been adapting to an era of great-power rivalry. This complex relationship, categorised as a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era’, has continued to evolve as global strategic competition has intensified. When Russia and China commemorated the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in October 2019, the celebrations highlighted the history of this ‘friendship’ and a positive agenda for contemporary partnership that is pursuing bilateral security, ‘the spirit of innovation’, and ‘cooperation in all areas’.

This rapidly emerging ecosystem shows that Beijing and Moscow recognise the value of joining forces in the development of dual-use technologies—which possess clear military and commercial significance. This cooperation is growing across five key areas: dialogues and exchanges; the development of industrial science and technology parks; the expansion of academic cooperation; joint investment funds; and the promotion of joint competitions.

The distinct deepening of this relationship is also a response to increased pressures imposed by the US. Over the past couple of years, US policy has sought to limit Chinese and Russian engagements with the global technological ecosystem, including through sanctions and export controls. Under these geopolitical circumstances, the determination of Chinese and Russian leaders to develop indigenous replacements for foreign, particularly American, technologies, from chips to operating systems, has provided further motivation for cooperation.

These advances in authoritarian innovation should provoke concerns for democracies for reasons of security, human rights and overall competitiveness. Notably, the Chinese and Russian governments are also cooperating on techniques for improved censorship and surveillance and increasingly coordinating on approaches to governance that justify and promote their preferred approach of cyber sovereignty and internet management to other countries and through international standards and other institutions. Today’s trends in technological collaboration and competition also possess strategic and ideological implications for great-power rivalry.

It will be important to track the trajectory and assess the implications of these Sino-Russian technological collaborations, given the risks and threats that could result from those advances. In a world of globalised innovation, the diffusion of even the most sensitive and strategic technologies, particularly those that are dual-use in nature and driven by commercial developments, will remain inherently challenging to constrain but essential to understand and anticipate.

To avoid strategic surprise, it’s important to assess and anticipate these technological advancements by potential adversaries. Like-minded democracies that are concerned about the capabilities of these authoritarian regimes should monitor and evaluate the potential implications of these continuing developments.

The US and Australia, along with allies and partners, should monitor and mitigate tech transfer and collaborative research activities that can involve intellectual property theft and extra-legal activities, including through expanding information-sharing mechanisms. This collaboration should include coordinating on export controls, screening of investments, and restrictions against collaboration with military-linked or otherwise problematic institutions in China and Russia.

It’s critical to continue to deepen cooperation and coordination on policy responses to the challenges and opportunities that emerging technologies present. For instance, improvements in sharing data among allies and partners within and beyond the Five Eyes nations could be conducive to advancing the future development of AI in a manner that’s consistent with our ethics and values.

Today, like-minded democracies must recognise the threats from advances in and the diffusion of technologies that can be used to empower autocratic regimes. For that reason, it will be vital to mount a more unified response to promulgate norms for the use of next-generation technologies, particularly AI and biotech.

The end of Sri Lankan democracy?

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One of Asia’s oldest democracies may be in jeopardy. Sri Lanka’s presidential election next month is expected to bring to power another member of the Rajapaksa family, whose affinity for authoritarianism, violence and corruption is well known. While Sri Lanka’s democracy survived the last test—an attempted constitutional coup by outgoing President Maithripala Sirisena a year ago—it may not survive a Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency.

Gotabaya, as he’s popularly known, is the current frontrunner and previously served as Sri Lanka’s defence chief under his older brother Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sirisena’s predecessor. Mahinda’s decade-long tenure, which ended in 2015, was characterised by brazen nepotism, with the four Rajapaksa brothers controlling many government ministries and about 80% of total public spending. And by steadily expanding presidential powers, Mahinda created a quasi-dictatorship known for human-rights abuses and accused of war crimes.

Moreover, Mahinda’s pro-China foreign policy allowed for the swift expansion of Chinese influence in Sri Lanka—and rapid growth in Sri Lankan debt to China. It was the debt incurred during the last Rajapaksa presidency that forced Sirisena in 2017 to sign away to China the Indian Ocean’s most strategic port, Hambantota, along with 6,070 hectares (15,000 acres) of nearby land, on a 99-year lease. This Hong Kong–style concession was modelled on the United Kingdom’s 19th-century colonial imposition on China.

There’s little reason to doubt that Gotabaya would revive his brother’s corrosive legacy. Simply by becoming president, he could gain immunity from two lawsuits pending in US federal court over war crimes allegedly committed while he was Sri Lanka’s defence chief. (With the parliament’s restoration of presidential term limits prohibiting Mahinda from running again, Gotabaya renounced his US citizenship to become eligible to contest the election.)

Mahinda oversaw the end of Sri Lanka’s brutal 25-year civil war in 2009. But he was no agent of peace. During the war’s final years, thousands of people—from aid workers and Tamil civilians to the Rajapaksa family’s political opponents—disappeared or were tortured. And the final military offensive against the Tamil Tiger rebels was, according to the United Nations, a ‘grave assault on the entire regime of international law’, with as many as 40,000 civilians killed. According to the wartime military commander, Sarath Fonseka, Gotabaya ordered the summary execution of rebel leaders as they surrendered.

Despite the horrors they inflicted on Sri Lanka’s mostly Hindu Tamil minority, the Rajapaksa brothers became heroes to many among the country’s largely Buddhist Sinhalese majority. That emboldened Mahinda to step up efforts to fashion a mono-ethnic identity for a multiethnic country.

Renewing this approach, as Gotabaya is sure to do, will hardly ease the sectarian divide that triggered the civil war, let alone more recent tensions between the Sinhalese and Sri Lanka’s Muslims. Those tensions increased sharply in April, when Islamist militants carried out a series of bombings on Easter Sunday that killed 253 people and wounded hundreds more.

Not only was this one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history, it was also the first major Islamist militant attack that Sri Lanka, where Muslims constitute one-tenth of the population, had ever experienced. But that doesn’t mean it was unforeseeable.

In fact, Sirisena admitted that defence and police officials had received an Indian intelligence report warning of an imminent attack and identifying the plotters, but that he had not seen it. Nor did Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe—the target of Sirisena’s attempted coup last October—receive the warning. (Sirisena abruptly fired Wickremesinghe and swore in none other than Mahinda Rajapaksa, before dissolving parliament to avoid a challenge. His actions were reversed when the supreme court ruled them unconstitutional.)

The Rajapaksas have already used the Islamist bombings to fan the flame of Sinhalese nationalism. And Gotabaya has promised his supporters that, if elected, he will strengthen the intelligence services and reintroduce surveillance of citizens, in order to crush Islamist extremism. The prospect of an alleged war criminal still wedded to extrajudicial methods becoming president rightly terrifies minority groups, the media and civil-liberties advocates.

There’s more worrisome news, though. Gotayaba’s camp has also confirmed that, as president, he plans to ‘restore relations’ with China. Given Sri Lanka’s strategic location near the world’s busiest sea lanes, the implications of this pledge extend well beyond the island. Indeed, Sri Lanka could play a pivotal role in the struggle for maritime primacy between China and Indo-Pacific democratic powers (India, the United States, Japan and Australia). China’s ‘string of pearls’ strategy has been encircling India by securing strategic military and commercial facilities along major Indian Ocean shipping lanes. The Hambantota port, which Chinese President Xi Jinping described as central to his Maritime Silk Road project, is a particularly valuable pearl.

At a time of growing international skepticism toward Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Rajapaksa family’s potential return to power in Sri Lanka is welcome news for China, which hopes to turn the country into a military outpost. But it’s bad news for practically everyone else. A Gotabaya presidency would block already-delayed justice to victims of his brother’s regime, deepen ethnic and religious fault lines, and help China gain strategic supremacy in the Indo-Pacific. Sri Lankan democracy appears more vulnerable than ever.

Engineering global consent: the Chinese Communist Party’s data-driven power expansion

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The Chinese party-state’s technology-enhanced authoritarianism is expanding globally. But the way it’s doing it isn’t always distinctly coercive or overtly invasive. While there’s been an important focus on technologies such as 5G, surveillance and cyber-enabled espionage, that narrow view misses the bigger picture. The Chinese Communist Party has a much more ambitious vision for harnessing a broad suite of current and emerging technologies in support of its own interests, including some that might seem relatively benign, like language-translation technologies.

By leveraging state-owned enterprises, Chinese technology companies and partnerships with foreign entities—including Western universities—the CCP is building a massive data-collection enterprise that gives it control over large data flows.

For the Chinese party-state, data-gathering is a means of generating information to enhance state security—and, crucially, the political security of the CCP—across multiple domains. The party-state intends to shape, manage and control its global operating environment so that public sentiment is favourable to its own interests. The CCP’s interests are prioritised over the Chinese state’s interests and the Chinese people’s interests. The effort requires continuous expansion of the party’s power overseas because, according to its own articulation of its threat perceptions, external risks to its power are just as likely—if not more likely—to emerge from outside the People’s Republic of China’s borders as from within.

As this approach continues to take shape, many Western governments will find themselves both struggling to understand the problem and struggling to respond.

A new report from ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre uses the company Global Tone Communications Technology (GTCOM) as a case study to explain how this new phenomenon can work. GTCOM is a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise that the Central Propaganda Department directly supervises. It provides both hardware and software translation tools. GTCOM describes itself as a ‘cross-language big data’ business: it collects bulk data globally in more than 65 languages and processes it for output into other products and services for government and corporate clients. The products can be applied to tools that have global implications, such as parts of China’s social credit system.

GTCOM claims to collect ‘billions’ of pieces of globally sourced unstructured data. Through just one of its many platforms, focused on traditional and social media, GTCOM claims to gather 10 terabytes of data a day (equivalent to 5 trillion words of plain text) as part of its ‘cross-language big data’ business, and 2–3 petabytes a year (equivalent to 20 billion photos on Facebook). Anything translated by the company’s translation services is part of the bulk data it collects.

The company uses bulk data collection and artificial intelligence processing of data for information platforms and tools provided to the party-state. Such tools include propaganda, intelligence, social credit system–linked creditworthiness determination products, and government services.

As GTCOM is a company openly contributing to state security and intelligence data collection, the case study sheds light on many other issues that should be of critical importance to global decision-makers. It demonstrates, for instance, the global consequences of the PRC’s military–civil fusion priority, which ‘seeks to break down the barriers between China’s civilian and military sectors’.

National and local governments across the globe—under liberal and illiberal regimes alike—are choosing to buy technologies from PRC companies such as GTCOM’s strategic partners Alibaba Cloud and Huawei. For instance, ASPI’s Mapping China’s technology giants report conducted research into 75 smart city projects around the world, most of which involved Huawei. Many of those projects include more coercive and overtly invasive technologies, such as surveillance cameras and facial and numberplate recognition technologies, but they can also include services like smart transportation and smart parking meters.

Companies such as GTCOM and its strategic partners can simultaneously act in their best interests to provide services and generate profits and to support the party-state’s larger objectives. After all, it’s the party-state that allows them to operate. No single PRC-based actor is shielded from the reality of the CCP’s suite of state security legislation, which delivers the consistent message that every individual and entity is responsible for state security.

While ideal solutions to this emerging set of problems don’t exist yet, partly because research on these issues hasn’t been in-depth or forward-looking, there are a range of areas that governments should be investing in and working with industry and civil society on. The report recommends strengthening data privacy laws and foreign influence transparency schemes. It also recommends greater investment in data literacy and data transparency programs, and calls for a rethink of how governments deal with foreign propaganda in the digital age.

The Chinese Communist Party’s confected outrage machine

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A basketball official, a big gaming company, Tiffany jewellers and Apple have all apparently ‘hurt the feelings of the Chinese people’ by either saying something in support of the Hong Kong protesters or allowing their products to be used by protesters or people who support them. It’s all so petty and yet so important.

We need to notice the sheer ridiculousness of this claim.

The notion of 1.4 billion Chinese people having a single set of feelings is simply nonsensical. So is the idea that 1.4 billion Chinese people are all taking the time to notice what a gamer playing Hearthstone thinks about Hong Kong.

The ‘hurt feelings’ of Chinese people is merely a subtext of the Chinese Communist Party’s core narrative, carrying resonances of the century of humiliation. The CCP acts as the self-appointed mouthpiece of a citizenry it has rendered voiceless.

Despite basketball’s popularity in China, it’s insane to believe that 1.4 billion people without extensive internet access are fixated on and outraged by a Houston Rockets administrator’s tweets. Let alone that this mass of people are taking the time to think through how a Tiffany ad with a model holding one hand in front of an eye might pose a risk to Beijing’s rule and getting just plain mad as a result.

Yet, the American individual and companies responded as if it’s perfectly rational that their actions—and inactions—outraged and offended ‘the Chinese people’. It’s not. It’s insane.

We need to bell this cat and call out the sheer chutzpah of the Chinese authorities and state-owned media outlets that are channelling and stoking these claims.

There do indeed seem to be many Chinese ultra-nationalists who have been deeply immersed in the CCP’s decades-long ideological patriotic education program and who receive distorted, state-curated perspectives on Hong Kong and on the perfidy of Western companies and individuals. In the echo chamber that’s inside Chairman Xi Jinping’s Great Firewall, these radicalised Chinese ultra-nationalists have their angers and anxieties stoked and channelled by the state.

The NBA, Blizzard Entertainment, Tiffany and Apple all may well lose business and revenue in China because of this ridiculous yet palpable outrage, so it’s a serious business issue—which is exactly what the Chinese authorities want it to be.

However, Xi and his CCP are culpable for deliberately and cynically creating a population that reacts in this way when told that foreigners—or their own people in Hong Kong—are ‘hurting China’.

Their anger and ‘hurt feelings’ are not somehow natural products of humans responding spontaneously to their environment. They are artificially cultivated behaviours fostered, encouraged and enabled by the Chinese state. In effect, they’re an extension of the CCP’s power. The result is a new form of economic and political power that serves the purposes of the CCP. Xi has created another magic weapon that is at least as dangerous as his united front.

But that’s only true if those against whom this power is used don’t push back in two ways—over the sheer ridiculousness of the claim, and, more importantly, over CCP information control and propaganda that is creating this mass of motivated outrage in its own citizens, and then using it to great effect.

The only good news here is that the case of Hong Kong makes it pretty straightforward to sketch out how the CCP has curated and manipulated the information environment that got us here. The CCP has controlled how the mass protests in Hong Kong are portrayed in mainland China, labelling protesters as radical and violent—terrorists acting against the Chinese people. This has set the scene for Chinese citizens to react to the Rockets official’s tweet as if he were openly encouraging terrorism and violence in Hong Kong. And it also allows Chinese officials to denounce companies that are supporting the protesters—or even not actively working against them by disabling functionality on various apps and systems—on the grounds that they are also enabling violence.

We all seem to be forgetting that the reason there are increasingly violent protests in Hong Kong is that Beijing and its Hong Kong authorities are simply stonewalling very reasonable demands by Hong Kong’s people for an independent inquiry into police violence and arrests, and equally reasonable demands to have a system of government in Hong Kong that listens to the voices and views of the citizens who live there.

On top of this, Xi and Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam are also escalating police and paramilitary violence against the young, the old, the peaceful and the violent seemingly indiscriminately. So, the real enablers and creators of violence in Hong Kong are Xi and Lam. They are the ones outrage should be directed against.

The Hong Kong people’s demands are about universal issues of human freedom and rights that must be protected—including from abuse by their own governments.

The culprits here are not companies or individuals who cave in to this Chinese-state-driven pressure for fear of losing access to ‘the China market’. The real culprits are the 89 million members of the CCP who are weaponising their citizens’ emotions and then professing to represent their people when they denounce foreign companies and individuals.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether China is a developed market economy or not, but this cynical manipulation of citizens’ views and emotions shows that it is actually not so much a developed market as a disturbed and distorted one.

No World Trade Organization reform will sort this out. This is a deep political and ideological problem for the 6.2 billion people and their governments who live and operate outside Xi’s Great Firewall to confront.

As we’ve seen with other cases of Chinese state pressure against companies—from airlines to clothing manufacturers—if they’re left on their own they are simply overmatched. It is the job of other governments—which are the homes and bases of the increasingly large number of companies being cynically silenced and browbeaten by the CCP and its weaponised population—to speak up and stand up against this corrosive and cynical abuse of market power.

Doing so is about much more than protecting companies’ bottom lines and shareholders’ returns. It’s about stopping the kind of thought control and self-censorship that is so prevalent and effective in the CCP’s domain from spreading into our own societies.

We must not allow the CCP to create a world beyond its borders in which we all feel compelled not to think—and so not to say—what Beijing doesn’t want to hear. And we need to see this paranoid CCP behaviour for what it is: weakness and anxiety masquerading as power.

China and Southeast Asia: lessons from the past, opportunities for the future

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Wang Jen-shu, the first ambassador to Indonesia of the People’s Republic of China, spent a troubled couple of years as Beijing’s man in Jakarta in the early 1950s. He clashed repeatedly with a prime minister, Sukiman Wirjosandjojo, known for pro-American sympathies, as he sought to advance the shared interests of the Chinese and Indonesian communist parties.

Wang, a firebrand writer of poetry and short stories who published under the name Baren, had been a stalwart of the Chinese Communist Party from the 1920s. He spent the war years in Indonesia and spoke the language fluently. But the belief of Chinese leaders that Indonesians saw ‘their own tomorrow’ in the Chinese people proved badly wrong.

They misread the strength of their position in Indonesia. Wang gave speeches critical of the US, railed against a Sukiman crackdown on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and tried to lure local Chinese away from the rival Kuomintang. Sukiman retaliated by forbidding the entry of a group of Chinese officials and restricting consular activity. Wang was eventually called home, the bilateral relationship in disrepair.

The awkward start to relations between the two newly declared republics set the scene for a roller-coaster relationship in the following decades. From the opening of diplomatic relations in April 1950 until Jakarta unilaterally broke them off in October 1967, Indonesia and China veered from being virtual allies under one president, Sukarno, to bitter foes under another, Suharto.

To varying degrees, Indonesia’s neighbours in Southeast Asia shared these difficulties, witnessing upheaval in their international and domestic affairs as a direct result of the emergence on the Asian mainland in 1949 of a united, communist-controlled China bent on asserting its influence in the developing world.

Cold War superpower rivalry, communist insurgencies often backed by Beijing, precarious relationships with local Chinese populations, and fragile, ideologically divided domestic politics bedevilled the management of ties between China and Southeast Asian countries that were struggling to build viable states and modern economies at the end of an era of European colonisation.

China’s fraught relationship with the region only started to change in the 1970s—first, with the Sino-American détente and, second, with the launch of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s open-door economic policy. By then, Beijing had renounced contentious foreign policy doctrines like united fronts with overseas communist parties and ‘third camps’ in opposition to both US and Russian power. Deng’s economic pragmatism and his ongoing rapprochement with the US established a new foundation for China’s foreign policy and diplomacy in Southeast Asia.

Still, the story of the past 70 years of China’s relations with a region of immense strategic importance to it has remained one of simultaneous opportunity and apprehension.

Generations of Southeast Asian leaders have been drawn to Beijing in recognition of the vast economic and strategic potential of China. They have also brought with them long memories and lingering concerns over how China uses or abuses its power. And they have viewed the accomplishments of the Chinese political system and people with both admiration and ambivalence, probably in equal measure.

Along the way, Beijing has had only mixed success with its regional foreign policy and diplomacy.

It has enjoyed its moments of ascendency, like during the Asian financial crisis in 1997 when it refused to devalue the yuan, relieving pressure on the Thai baht and Indonesia rupiah, or in the early 2000s when a charm offensive under presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao saw China emphasise respect for the sovereignty of ASEAN states, sign their treaty of amity and cooperation, and start negotiations on a code of conduct in the South China Sea.

It also has been embroiled in a variety of conflicts with countries that have very different histories, cultures and national interests. The problems have not always been of China’s making. Within months of Beijing’s diplomatic win during the financial crisis, Chinese foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan delivered a blunt warning to Indonesia over the deliberate targeting of ethnic Chinese in the riots of May 1998, which he said had sparked ‘indignation among Chinese all over the globe’.

But too often China has been guilty of overreach. No strategic issue has loomed larger for Southeast Asia in recent years than China’s unilateral declaration in 2009 of sovereignty over more than 80% of the South China Sea. It’s not just the claim that’s caused angst; it’s what it says about the calibre of Beijing’s strategic judgement and how China will behave as it becomes militarily and economically stronger.

China is steadily acquiring the military capability to project power over vital Southeast Asian sea lanes as it builds bases in the South China Sea. For archipelagic states that regard control of waterways as intrinsic to national cohesion and ideas of sovereignty, this is a sensitive issue.

Against this backdrop, the martial character of the 70th anniversary parade overseen by President Xi Jinping might be a matter of pride to China, but it can appear unnerving to its neighbours. It invites attention to a yawning gap between the rhetoric of Chinese leaders in recent years and their actions.

Pham Quang Vinh, a former senior official in the Vietnamese foreign ministry, accuses China of using ‘intimidation and coercion’ to assert its claims in the South China Sea, raising the question of whether it can really negotiate a code of conduct for the area in ‘good faith’.

It’s a sentiment many others share, but feel powerless to do much about. Malaysia harbours grievances over the oppression of Uyghur and Hui Muslims in China and the regular intrusion of Chinese survey vessels into what Kuala Lumpur regards as national waters.

‘We don’t go around trying to be aggressive when we don’t have the capacity, so we use other means’, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said in an interview with local media just ahead of the PRC anniversary. But in a subtle jab at Beijing, he referred to how in the days of imperial China emperors exacted tribute in the form of ‘gold and silver flowers every year as a symbol of our being practically, well, subservient to them’.

Xi has promised peaceful engagement and mutual benefit in dealing with Southeast Asia in a ‘community of shared interests and common destiny’. Much of that is built on the pull of Chinese trade and investment. With two-way trade of US$588 billion, China is Southeast Asia’s biggest trading partner.

But there are worries the economy too could be a source of leverage for Beijing to pursue its strategic ambitions. Across the region, governments are hedging against dependency on Chinese markets and capital.

Even as they sign up to infrastructure projects under China’s huge Belt and Road Initiative, they spread the risk by inviting other countries to participate in major investments. For example, India is building a deep-water port at Sabang in Aceh, on the westernmost tip of the Indonesian archipelago, which Indian media say will give New Delhi ‘wide access to Southeast Asia as a counter-balancing force’.

The implied message to Beijing is that ‘we need you, but you need us’, according to Philips Vermonte, the executive director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta.

The key question is whether China and the region can reach an understanding that avoids the trap of repeating a conflicted history. Southeast Asia eagerly embraced the softer version of Chinese power on display during the charm offensive of the early 2000s. The region now inevitably has to create space for a more powerful China that wants to see the regional order ‘gradually readjusted and reconstructed’.

How that is done could prove very unsettling to a region that prizes its own autonomy as much as the opportunity inherent in Chinese wealth. China too will have to recognise that it serves many of its own core interests when it accommodates the interests of its southern neighbours.

Cybersecurity and geopolitics: why Southeast Asia is wary of a Huawei ban

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‘The race to 5G is a race America must win’, US President Donald Trump said on 12 April. Just over a month later, on 15 May, he issued an executive order banning Huawei equipment in US networks. That decision has since been rippling well beyond Sino-US relations and will have an impact on the digital future of many other countries.

The US ban fuelled the already lively debate about the world facing a possible ‘digital iron curtain’​ The implications go beyond wireless providers and could lead to a division of countries between ‘Team America’ and ‘Team China’ in terms of technology.

The fear of an unwanted digital bipolarity is already present in Southeast Asia, where some countries have military-cooperation or intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US, forcing them to make what some see as an impossible choice between Washington and Beijing.

US concerns about China on such issues as unequal market access, forced technology transfer, human and cyber-enabled state-supported theft of intellectual property, currency manipulation and state subsidies—as well as China’s expansive conception of state security and its belief that individuals and organisations should support state espionage—are all legitimate. But Trump’s ban on Huawei doesn’t address these concerns effectively, nor has it been communicated sufficiently to other countries, such as those in Southeast Asia.

US security concerns about Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese technology companies are shared by its closest allies in Asia—Australia and Japan. But while the debate has spread globally, the ban has also created a rift with other allies and partners, making the picture in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as Europe, more complicated.

Countries in Southeast Asia can be divided into three categories: allies and partners of the US with a strong sense of strategic convergence; countries with some convergence with the US in strategic interests; and countries that are distant from the US in the traditional sense of alignment. Put in the language of international relationships, there are those who side with a major power of their choice, those who hedge between two or more major powers, and those who balance against a major power that is seen as threatening.

In the controversy surrounding the 5G rollout and future digital technology, we see a similar pattern in how countries are reacting to US pressure over Huawei. It is a palpable dilemma in some Southeast Asian countries.

Among those that have embraced Chinese tech companies are two US treaty allies, Thailand and the Philippines, along with Cambodia and Myanmar.

In February, the Thai government launched a test of 5G and is promoting 5G infrastructure investment in its planned ‘eastern economic corridor’. According to a report in The Diplomat, the Thai government’s Digital Economy and Society Ministry has convened a committee on 5G with 29 members, both local and international, including Huawei.

In the Philippines, market leader Globe Telecom has confirmed a partnership with Huawei to develop 5G. On top of improving relations between Manila and Beijing since Rodrigo Duterte became president, Huawei has also supported the Philippines’ controversial public safety campaign related to Duterte’s so-called drug war, which the government claims is about cleaning up drug-related crime. A US$383 million deal was signed last year with China Telecom and Huawei to create a video surveillance system in Metro Manila and the city of Davao with a view to reducing crime rates.

Cambodia’s Smart Axiata announced in April that it had partnered with Huawei to develop a 5G solution. Prime Minister Hun Sen has said he wants Cambodia to be the first ASEAN country to launch 5G—with the help of Huawei and ZTE. While the state of Cambodia’s telecoms doesn’t suggest it would be an early adopter of 5G, the political will of Phnom Penh—whose relations with Beijing are increasingly good—is behind the effort to leapfrog into the new technology.

In Myanmar, ZTE has signed a memorandum of understating with the country’s Ooredoo to launch a 5G mobile network. In fact, all four mobile carriers in Myanmar are believed to use equipment made by ZTE or Huawei, mainly because of its accessibility and affordability.

Huawei representatives, meanwhile, have confirmed they are supporting digital transformation in Laos. With a market share of 15%, the company is the country’s third-largest mobile vendor, after Samsung (37%) and Apple (22%).

Among those that are more hesitant about adopting Chinese technology are Malaysia, Singapore and Indoneisa, which have signed up for 5G trials with Huawei, but are still cautious about considering a 5G network involving the company.

Huawei has a long history and strong foundations in Southeast Asia. It entered the region some 20 years ago—relatively early on and with competitive financial assistance. Its presence goes beyond wireless communications. The company provides funds for disaster relief, for example. In Malaysia, it has collaborated with Telekom Malaysia and Celcom Axiata to provide US$121,000 in assistance to communities affected by floods. Few other telecom giants have offered that.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said at an event in Tokyo in May, ‘Malaysia is too small to have an effect on a huge company like Huawei, whose research is far bigger than the whole of Malaysia’s research capability, so we try to make use of their technology as much as possible. Yes, there may be some spying, but what is there to spy on in Malaysia? We are an open book.’

Days later, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted in a speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue that Singapore is carefully studying the impact of 5G. However, he downplayed the security challenges posed by Huawei, emphasising that it’s not a ‘black-white’ issue, but rather a matter of degrees: ‘I would also say from the technical point of view, it is quite unrealistic to expect 100% security from any telecoms system you buy. Even the hand phone you buy is not 100%  secure, much less the entire telephone network. It does not matter whom you buy it from; it can be a friendly country, it can be a hostile country, or you can design it yourself—every system will have vulnerabilities.’

Indonesia’s minister of communications, Rudiantara, has also seemed to defuse fears of Huawei-enabled espionage, telling Reuters in February that Indonesia cannot be ‘paranoid’ about curbing Huawei. There are some 300 base transceiver stations in Indonesia that use foreign technology already, so excluding one foreign company would be a political decision rather than a practical one, he said.

Another important factor is the drive for smart cities. Southeast Asia is urbanising at one of the world’s fastest rates. Thailand and Malaysia are exploring the benefits of 5G broadband in building their Smart Cities networks and Smart Government initiatives, as well as disaster management preparedness. With Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s recent announcement of a project for a new capital city, as well as ongoing efforts to upgrade Jakarta, there are likely to be plenty of new opportunities for both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ infrastructure investment.

Southeast Asian leaders are clearly downplaying the US government’s security arguments about the trustworthiness of Huawei’s 5G network. But given China’s ranking in the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index—82nd out of 126 countries ranked—Southeast Asian countries, many of them ranking in similar brackets, are also less alarmed at the prospect of using technology from Western liberal democracies.

Vietnam is the only country in Southeast Asia that is avoiding Huawei technology based on security concerns, although without an explicit ban. Instead, Vietnam wants to be among the very first in the world to develop its own 5G technology. State-owned telecom Viettel, in cooperation with Sweden’s Ericsson, has developed a network that was successfully tested earlier this year in Hanoi. Planned to be launched by 2021, if successful, it may be a model for other countries.

It’s worth noting that Chinese state companies have had access to Vietnamese telecoms before. ZTE partnered in the past with Viettel in developing 3G. But in developing 4G, Viettel already relied on its own self-produced base stations.

Vietnam’s plans for wireless communications aren’t purely based on rejecting the Chinese Communist Party–linked Huawei. It is also an integral part of the country’s national strategy for succeeding in the fourth industrial revolution—a key focus of Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. It fits in with Vietnam’s efforts to reform its economy and make the high-tech manufacturing sector a key pillar of economic development. Hanoi’s decision has little to do with Trump’s ban, but rather comes from a long-term strategic awareness of security challenges coming from the big northern neighbour.

There’s no doubt that the young, vibrant population of Southeast Asia will remain one of the most dynamic markets in the internet economy, which was estimated at US$50 billion in 2017 and is expected to quadruple by 2025 to US$200 billion.​ According to Huawei estimates, Southeast Asia provides opportunities worth US$1.2 trillion, with a potential 80 million 5G service subscribers.​ This is an attractive region worth competing for.

If the estimates of the distribution of subscribers worldwide by 2023 are correct (see Figure 1), then the market will be shared, rather than dominated, by Huawei. The digital future of Southeast Asia will most likely be very competitive. But one thing is certain: a viable US alternative is missing from the picture. Unless countries are willing to invest in developing their own networks, either on their own or in cooperation with other global providers as Vietnam did, there are few options to consider. Currently, Huawei has an advantage because it is available now, offers competitive rates and is easily accessible.

The deciding factor for the future of 5G in Southeast Asia is not political alignment or even security concerns; it’s about the practical needs of these economies.

The level of development, infrastructure and connectivity among Southeast Asia’s economies is very unequal. There’s also a vast disparity between cities and remote areas. Given the region’s young population and large proportion of mobile networks, most capital cities boast good connectivity and network coverage.

For many in the region, Huawei’s technology is more advanced than its Western competitors’ offerings, but it also comes at a fraction of the cost.​ Huawei is certainly bearing the fruits of Chinese government subsidies, and the security argument is often dismissed not because of a lack of awareness, but because, as one analyst says, ‘Huawei is the most efficient and cost-effective platform available to us.’​

Will the US pressure backfire? Even America’s long-term European allies and liberal democracies such as the UK and Germany have resisted the ban. Out of the 10 ASEAN countries, two of which are treaty allies of the US, no one is willing to blindly follow Washington’s ban on Huawei.

The implications of how Southeast Asia responds is beyond just 5G technology, or even Huawei’s services. It is ultimately about the technological dominance and the success of China’s digital silk road. While infrastructure is the main area of competition, the soft infrastructure is no less crucial.

Individual Southeast Asian countries will of course make their own decisions. But so far no country in the region, including US treaty allies, is willing to support the ban for political reasons.

The hyper-focus on 5G is counterproductive. Security concerns are legitimate and need to be addressed in the same way as concerns about privacy protections related to internet applications. At the same time, Southeast Asian nations should treat seriously the possibility that China-linked technology that penetrates their critical infrastructure could be used for coercive purposes in the future.

The conversation about 5G choices in Southeast Asia is not divorced from the larger issue of Sino-US competition and the debate about choosing one side or the other. But, can the issue of high-speed internet connections be disconnected from the wider context of cyber norms and cyber laws in the region?

The cybersecurity warnings coming from the US are too focused on Huawei. Online restrictions and recent cyber laws across a number of countries, including those in Southeast Asia, legitimise censorship, restrict data flows and certain content, allow for the collection of personal information or constrain foreign companies from storing data offshore. These also should be part of the debate.

Recent regulations and cyber laws in Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam reflect this trend. Cyber-enabled authoritarianism, in fact, seems rather attractive to many Southeast Asian governments.

The political implications of the presence of US companies, or pressure from the US government, in the telecoms sector in Southeast Asia go much further than the ability to block Huawei. 5G is another key example of a standard-setting opportunity that was missed. As with the Trans-Pacific Partnership—the trade deal that involved 12 Pacific Rim economies before Trump pulled the US out of the deal—the decision by the US to withdraw from the agreement has been held up as one of key examples of a lack of US commitment to the region.

The TPP wasn’t only about trade and economic benefits. It was also about the ability to set and enforce standards. An example is Vietnam, which had to go through a number of economic reforms—including workforce rules and regulations on specific industries—in order to join the TPP. But once the US pulled out, it no longer had the ability to influence that sphere.

A similar logic applies to high-speed internet in Southeast Asia, or anywhere. If American technology providers are not offering an alternative to Huawei—the two other major players are Nokia and Ericsson—the US won’t have a say in setting standards of cybersecurity. To avoid a repeat of the TPP lesson—where the US withdrew for the sake of domestic interests—the US 5G strategy needs to go beyond banning Huawei and asking partners and allies to do the same. It needs to have a horse in the race.

Most Southeast Asians are not comfortable choosing sides in the great-power competition between China and the US. So, if this is a race where the US has to work harder to find partners in Southeast Asia, Washington needs to remind itself that much of its global primacy has been based on its technological prowess and that the innovation imperative is the only way to sustain its position.

A version of this piece was published in Global Asia’s September 2019 issue; it has been republished with permission.