The crisis in Hong Kong appears to be careening towards a devastating climax. With China’s government now using rhetoric reminiscent of that which preceded the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters—and, indeed, its democracy—could well be in grave danger.

Hong Kong has been beset by protests for more than two months. Triggered by a proposed law to allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China, the demonstrations have since developed into broader calls to safeguard—or, perhaps more accurately, restore—the semi-autonomous territory’s democracy, including by strengthening state (especially police) accountability.

As the unrest drags on, the Chinese government’s patience is wearing thin—and its warnings are growing more ominous. The People’s Liberation Army garrison in Hong Kong is, in the words of its commander, Chen Daoxiang, ‘determined to protect national sovereignty, security, stability and the prosperity of Hong Kong’. To drive the point home, a promotional video showing Chinese military officers in action was released along with the statement.

Yang Guang, a spokesperson for the Chinese government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, has echoed this sentiment, warning the protesters—whom he calls ‘criminals’—not to ‘take restraint for weakness’. He then reiterated the government’s ‘firm resolve’ to ‘safeguard the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong’.

Zhang Xiaoming, the director of the office, then took matters a step further, declaring that China’s government ‘has sufficient methods and enough powerful means to quell all sorts of likely unrest (dongluan)’. This came just two months after China’s defence minister argued that China’s stability since the Tiananmen crackdown proved that the government had made the ‘correct’ choice.

Increasingly harsh warnings against Hong Kong’s protesters point not just to a hardening of positions, but also to the ascendance of figures in the Chinese government who favour asserting total control over the territory. And they have been reflected in the response from the police force, which has been deploying rubber bullets and tear gas with rising frequency. Hundreds have been arrested, and 44 have been charged with ‘rioting’.

Yet, far from being deterred, the protesters are challenging the Chinese government with increasing resolve. In July, they vandalised the outside of the Chinese government’s liaison office in the city centre. Last week, they mounted a general strike that nearly paralysed the city, one of Asia’s most important commercial hubs. Yesterday, they staged a sit-in at Hong Kong’s airport, causing transport chaos and the cancellation of more than 150 flights. Perhaps counterintuitively, this radicalisation has come alongside broadening support for the movement, with members of the middle class—such as lawyers and civil servants—openly joining the cause.

With their stark warnings having no effect, China’s leaders may well be sensing that the best—or even the only—way to restore their authority in Hong Kong is by force, though President Xi Jinping may wait until after the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the people’s republic on 1 October to act. But, whether now or in two months, a Tiananmen-style crackdown is not the answer.

For starters, Hong Kong’s 31,000-strong police force is not up to the task of carrying out such a crackdown. Not only does it lack the manpower; its officers may refuse to use deadly force. After all, there’s a big difference between firing rubber bullets at a crowd and murdering civilians. This means that China would have to deploy the local PLA garrison or transfer tens of thousands of paramilitary soldiers (the People’s Armed Police) from the mainland. Chinese state media has released video showing that a large PAP contingent has been deployed to the city of Shenzhen near the border with Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s residents would almost certainly treat Chinese government forces as invaders, and mount the fiercest possible resistance. The resulting clashes—which would likely produce high numbers of civilian casualties—would mark the official end of the ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement, and force China’s government to assert direct and full control over Hong Kong’s administration.

With the Hong Kong government’s legitimacy destroyed, the city would instantly become ungovernable. Civil servants would quit their jobs in droves and the public would continue to resist. Hong Kong’s complex transit, communications and logistics systems would prove easy targets for defiant locals determined to cause major disruptions.

After the Tiananmen crackdown, the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to reinstitute control rested not only on the presence of tens of thousands of PLA troops, but also on the mobilisation of the party’s members. In Hong Kong, where the CCP has only a limited organisational presence (officially, it claims to have none at all), this would be impossible. And because the vast majority of Hong Kong’s residents are employed by private businesses, China can’t control them as easily as mainlanders who depend on the state for their livelihoods.

The economic consequences of such an approach would be dire. Some CCP leaders may think that Hong Kong, which now accounts for only 3% of Chinese GDP, is economically expendable. But the city’s world-class legal and logistical services and sophisticated financial markets, which channel foreign capital into China, mean that its value vastly exceeds its output.

If Chinese soldiers storm the city, an immediate exodus of expats and elites with foreign passports and green cards will follow, and Western businesses will relocate en masse to other Asian commercial hubs. Hong Kong’s economy—a critical bridge between China and the rest of the world—would collapse almost immediately.

When there are no good options, leaders must choose the least bad one. China’s government may loathe the idea of making concessions to the Hong Kong protesters, but considering the catastrophic consequences of a military crackdown, that is what it must do.

The protests in Hong Kong started over CEO Carrie Lam’s extradition bill and have turned into a defining issue for the trajectory of China as a state and a society, and for the Chinese state’s relationships internationally.

What Carrie Lam does is important, but what President Xi Jinping orders to be done is definitive.

The protests are not, as Chinese state media likes to say, about ‘escalating violence by radicals’. Some 2 million out of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million people have taken part in the demonstrations—which makes this a mass expression of views, not the efforts of a ‘tiny number of radicals’.

Footage over the past two months has shown the world that the protesters come from all walks of life and all age groups. Professionals like air-traffic controllers, civil servants, construction workers, lawyers and finance workers have joined in strikes or other protest action, disrupting essential services. Their bravery in doing so should shame all of us who mutter about Xi’s state ‘punishing us’ by holding up wine shipments. John Howard’s recent comments about our fundamental democratic values, the effects of authoritarianism and the resilience of the human spirit on display in Hong Kong remind of us of what’s really at stake here.

The violence has been perpetrated by a mix of police action, dubious thugs and exasperated protesters. For the scale of the mass movement, though, the protests have been remarkably peaceful. That might change as Hong Kong authorities fail to engage with what is driving the protests and treat them as simply a public order problem and a challenge to their own and Beijing’s authority.

The protesters certainly want more from Lam than her condemning the protests and painting them as violent radicals. They want her to withdraw the extradition bill she has suspended and they want an independent public inquiry into police actions. They’ve also called for Lam’s resignation, an end to labelling the protests ‘riots’, and universal suffrage to elect the legislative council.

Most of all, though, what’s got millions of Hong Kong residents onto the streets and disrupting services is Beijing’s and Lam’s moving away from ‘one China, two systems’ towards Hong Kong being assimilated into authoritarian China’s one-party political and legal system. So it’s ironic to hear Chinese state media talking about the protests as endangering the ‘one China’ framework.

The protesters’ fundamental call is about preserving Hong Kong’s rule of law and expanding the people’s voices in how they are governed. They want more difference in the two systems, while Beijing wants to fast-track convergence.

What must be causing sleepless nights in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai compound is what to do from here. It’s not really about Hong Kong now, but about the future of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule of the multi-ethnic empire that makes up today’s China, and about the kind of relationship Xi’s state can have with other nations.

Handled badly, Hong Kong will ripple through China, further widening the unhealed wounds from Tiananmen and showing the repressive will and brutality of the CCP and its security organs. It will make clear to any doubtful Taiwanese that unification means assimilation and doesn’t mean Taiwan’s democracy becoming one of two systems. And it will make it even harder for advocates of uncritical, deepening engagement with China under Xi to look themselves in the mirror and be credible in public.

You can sense the anxiety about internal stability and unity in China’s latest national defence white paper. It’s like hearing someone desperately telling themselves things are fine when they know they are not: ‘China continues to enjoy political stability, ethnic unity and social stability.’ That’s why China’s expenditure on internal security forces is higher even than its expenditure on the People’s Liberation Army.

In this Beijing echo chamber, problems don’t flow from the CCP’s authoritarian rule, but instead come from surprising, isolated outbreaks of ‘separatist forces’, with ‘external separatist forces’ responsible for unrest in Tibet and ‘East Turkistan’. This pretence appears to be fooling no one but the party, those without a source of news other than Chinese state media, and the wilfully blind advocates of getting hold of as much of China’s wealth as they can. It’s certainly not fooling Chinese citizens in Xinjiang, Tibet or Hong Kong about the reality of Xi’s China Dream.

But Xi and his colleagues on the CCP’s central committee and the Central Military Commission, including defence minister General Wei Fenghe, don’t have many good options given the actions they and Lam have taken to date. Had it been delivered early in the protests, a gesture of withdrawing the extradition bill could have taken momentum out of what is now a mass movement.

Done now, concessions from Hong Kong’s authorities—like withdrawing the bill and announcing a public inquiry into the use of violence by police—might split off some of the protesters and so slow momentum. It would fit with the way the CCP tries elsewhere in China to use local actions to spot and neuter dissent before it grows.

Lam’s resignation might sound like an appropriate response; however, the immediate obvious problem is what happens next. Any candidate Beijing might produce to replace her would almost certainly bring protesters back out onto the streets. A popular public Hong Kong candidate would be unacceptable to Beijing. Lam will probably stay on as a shock absorber for dissent.

Voices like Wei’s won’t help. His remarkable dose of truthfulness at June’s Shangri-La Dialogue, when he said the Tiananmen Square massacre of unarmed Chinese youths and other citizens by the military at the party leadership’s direction was ‘correct policy’, shows adherence to the CCP and ‘Xi Jinping Thought’.

The temptation to intervene has to be there, just as proved to be the case in June 1989. Well-publicised footage of PLA units stationed in Hong Kong training to do urban operations is partly about sending a message. Beijing could order in the PLA and say the incident was ‘political turbulence’ and the central government took measures to stop it. They could also order in the aptly named People’s Armed Police. That would fit with the party’s line about subversion, separatist forces and external forces fomenting unrest.

Can Xi manage Hong Kong so that it doesn’t become a petri dish example of the limits of his rule? To do so, he’ll need to shift strategy and provide some outlets for the mass public sentiments expressed by the people of Hong Kong. His instincts are probably to keep a tough line and wait things out, but Hong Kongers seem to be gaining energy from this approach, not losing it, and the stakes for Xi are increasing as this happens.

If Xi sends in the PLA or People’s Armed Police, it will be a crystallising moment for all people, governments, companies and universities engaging with the Chinese state and economy.

In 1989, a similar use of force by Xi’s predecessor led Australia’s Bob Hawke to grant asylum to 20,000 Chinese students and families living in Australia. Just as it did then, the Chinese state’s use of lethal force against its own people will split the international community.

There will be states and individuals who will downplay even the most egregious violence—talking airily and in abstract terms about the importance of ‘stability’. There will be voices saying we should separate trade from foreign and defence policy and turn a blind eye to actions against our deepest values and our interests. But Xi’s China Dream of win–win peaceful development and resolution of disputes will be an artefact of propaganda that can be stored with back copies of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’.

Xi will have demonstrated that the PLA remains the party’s armed wing, to be used against his people and any other enemies of the party. Trade deals and investments will have a bald new context. The term ‘trade war’ will be exposed for the overblown label it is in light of real violence. Xi will be at war with his own people and the question for the rest of us will be, ‘Whose side are you on?’

Hugh White’s How to defend Australia is an elegant book but also something of a party trick: engagingly clever but not realistic. It will be essential reading for every national security master’s degree by coursework program for years to come. And it’s fundamentally wrong on just about every judgement it contains. Any government that tried to implement it would damn Australia to a form of global and regional irrelevance that would make New Zealand look like a security colossus. Many will enjoy White’s homage to a rising China and eulogy for a declining United States, but there’s not a lot of data to support either thesis.

I’ll set out here the seven biggest nots of White in the interests of further promoting sales of the English-language edition.

China’s rise is not unstoppable

In a book that slips and slides like an eel on a roller coaster, White is, in fact, clear and consistent in his view of China. Everything he writes ‘hinges on the rise of China and how it changes the distribution of wealth and power in Asia’ (page 9). China’s rise is effectively unstoppable, and China is determined ‘to take America’s place as the leading power’ in Asia (page 10). Resistance will be futile because ‘the more strenuously America tries to contain China, the more likely war will become’ (page 12). This is pretty much the guts of White’s argument. Everything thereafter follows as a footnote to the iron laws of gravity.

This is a lot to hang a book on, and one of the oddities of White’s approach is that he spends no time trying to prove his China thesis. There is actually very little about China in the book beyond the observation that, as the legendary Andrew Marshall said, ‘You know, China is really big.’ Well, yes, but China is also a country which for the last century and a half has reliably imploded every generation to reshape its political system, usually at the cost of millions of Chinese lives.

No one could dismiss the possibility that such an internal convulsion could happen again. Further, China is surrounded by a bunch of countries like Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Russia and the US that are simply not going to roll over for a tummy rub while bowing to inevitable Chinese greatness.

White might counter that anticipating a reversal in China’s fortunes is hardly a strategy either. What if China keeps unstoppably rising? A lot depends on the type of great power China may become. I very much doubt that President Xi Jinping can sustain the plan to make China look like mid-1930s Germany. This is a comparison White explicitly rejects, but a closer look at the system of political and social control the Chinese Communist Party is building, matched with its assertive overseas behaviour, points to a deeply worrying trajectory.

If China rules the world, it will be a planet where there’s oppressive conformity, a highly efficient police state and an ugly ideology of power and superiority. White seems to imply that the likely global response to this will be acquiescence. That’s a big judgement but a profoundly ahistorical one. Although the costs could be high, I doubt the world will let China get away with it. On the other hand, a China that’s liberal, tolerant and democratic (like modern Germany, or Taiwan for that matter) may emerge some day and it’s surely in the world’s interests to push it in that direction.

America’s fall is not inevitable

The other side of this coin is the thesis that America is pretty much a busted flush. White is more opaque here: ‘Of course, America shall remain a very powerful country … and it will retain important interests in Asia that it will seek to uphold’ (page 15). But apart from that caveat the rest of the book would make you think that Uncle Sam had already checked out of Hotel Asia–Pacific. In White’s judgement there’s simply no way that Australia could rely on such a clapped-out partner. Indeed, the only question worth pondering is whether America’s slide down the strategic plug hole will be fast or somewhat slower.

Well, tell that to the US Marines participating in Exercise Talisman Sabre who stormed Langham beach last week in ‘the largest Australian-led amphibious landing and offensive assault since the Second World War’. There isn’t a scintilla of evidence to support White’s thesis and a great deal of observable data pointing to a powerful United States reinforcing its position in Asia. A booming economy, sprightly demographics, first-rate innovation, an immense capacity for reinvention and an instinct for alliance-building that even Donald Trump can’t stifle forever—these are all essential American qualities.

Yes, America wants its allies to do more and is exasperated with security free-riding. But America is not in the Pacific to do Australia a favour. It’s here because of its own strategic interests and has no more capacity to withdraw from the region than Tasmania can abandon Bass Strait.

The real question is not whether America will cede security leadership in Asia but rather the manner of its engagement with the region. It must be said that Trump is doing more than Barack Obama did. We should be so lucky.

It’s not just about size

At base, White’s unit of measurement for strategic importance is size. But size doesn’t explain everything about strategic weight. Nor does it explain nothing about strategic weight. What matters is what countries do with their strategic weight. White’s approach doesn’t accept that subtlety. His is a world in which big fish eat small fish and that’s all you need to know about China—or, for that matter, India, Japan and Indonesia, all of which he thinks could threaten Australia.

Likewise, White’s size theorem consigns Australia to the tiddler category. He gloomily concludes, ‘We could never hope to shape the major power balance in Northeast Asia or elsewhere independently’ (page 85). But, in coalitions, Australia did just that in 1945 and 1953.

Australia is not alone

The size fixation creates an oddly atomised world where states rocket around like differently sized billiard balls and smack into each other. There’s no possibility for lasting or meaningful collaboration, no ability to align because of shared values or strategic outlook, and no acceptance that the world can evolve norms of behaviour that limit consumption of tiddlers by the big fish. Even for a grizzled strategic realist like me, White’s world of dominance by size looks a bit cartoonish and not a reflection of the more complex reality.

Perhaps this is what leads him to the book’s most artificial point, when China and Australia square off into a conflict, mano a mano. Hang on, where are all the other fish? They have fled the tank, leaving it to us with our 36 submarines and hundreds of combat aircraft to bat away at the opponent much like taking turns in a game of battleship.

But Australia is not alone. We have always fought in concert with friends and allies. Almost always that fight has been to preserve an international system that represents more to our interests than the ability to patrol our maritime approaches. If we were ever to be in a world where China wanted to physically attack us, that would mean the entire global order had broken down. We would hardly be alone in wanting to resist a Chinese military advance.

It’s not the late 1980s

White’s force structure proposals have been widely discussed, including in The Strategist, so I won’t deal with them in detail here, save to note that his conclusion that ultimately we have to fight at home and alone drives him down the track of a very 1980s-looking military. Thus we are back in the world of shaping an army to ‘contain any adversary forces that make it ashore’ (page 125). We apply ‘highly offensive’ tactical operations to disable enemy forces moving towards Australia, perhaps even attacking the bases from which they deploy.

If this feels like a back-to-the-future scenario that’s because it is. White trialled some of this thinking in the 1997 statement of Australia’s strategic policy. At the time, I was chief of staff to defence minister Ian McLachlan and we thought ourselves cluey strategists for arguing that ‘our self-reliant posture may require us to undertake highly offensive operations in defence of our country’. Back then, this wasn’t intended to substitute for the US alliance or thorough-going efforts to work with neighbours to prevent maritime incursions.

I don’t think White succeeds in making the case for structuring the force for independent defence against maritime attack. It’s no more persuasive now than it was a generation ago; in fact, it’s less so, because it misses changes in technology such as the cyber threat to critical infrastructure and the use of grey-zone warfare by authoritarian regimes. The further forward we can start our defence efforts the better for the security of the continent.

Just adding ‘not’ is not a way of not saying something

White is a master of advancing an argument by building the case for what something is not. Thus it is ‘far from unlikely’ that China will become the ‘region’s leading power’ (page 38); ‘strategic independence does not mean we would always stand by ourselves’ (page 46); and when it comes to nuclear weapons, ‘I neither predict … nor do I advocate … but the question is one we will not be able to avoid’ (page 231). Not for nothing is White regarded as a gifted writer, but I puzzle over this reluctance to offer sharper, simpler judgements. An edifice is constructed but one wonders at the end of the day if White really buys this structure.

Capitulation is not a strategy

Finishing How to defend Australia I was left with the thought that White seems almost to have talked himself into thinking that it just can’t be done. ‘When we weigh the costs of independent defence … we might decide that the risks do not justify the costs. Rather than bear those costs we could elect to take our chances’ (page 20). He hopes that China’s leaders will learn that ‘they would be better off exercising primacy with a light touch’ and indeed ‘the more we go along with Beijing, the lower our strategic risk will be’ (page 41).

White concludes that Christmas and Cocos Islands would be hard to defend and worries about ‘emotive questions about how much we should be willing to pay to defend every part of our sovereign territory’ (page 129). That strikes me as a particularly despairing judgement. White rightly worries about how a potential attacker might seek forward lodgements in places that would help enable attacks on Australia. But what a crestfallen judgement for a person who has spent his professional life in and around Australian defence policy. Will anyone heed White’s call for reforming the defence organisation? He ends the book by saying it will probably take ‘some tectonic event’ for our leaders to realise that change is necessary. ‘By then of course, it may be too late’ (page 299).

White’s proposals about the alliance with the US, about relations with China and other countries, on force structure and on nuclear weapons are not the right strategies for Australia. He’s most certainly right to worry about the capacities of senior policymakers to effect sweeping change and he’s correct on the need to lift defence spending. The tectonic shock he anticipates isn’t some future possibility but a current reality that is jolting Australia daily. I hope his overall pessimism is unfounded.

All that said, don’t not buy the book. You should engage with it, admire its lithe contours and work through its artifices until you have thought your way to a better strategic place about Australia’s defence.

The global debate has shifted beyond why we shouldn’t trust Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to why we can’t trust any equipment vendor. How can we trust US companies after the Edward Snowden disclosures? Doesn’t the US also spy?

One way to look at mobile telecommunications networks is to divide them into two parts: a ‘core’ where sensitive functions such as billing and subscriber management occur, and a less sensitive radio access network, or RAN, which manages how towers talk to handsets.

In the RAN equipment sector, Huawei’s competitors are Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and NEC. Beyond the RAN in the rest of a 5G network there are many other vendors, including US companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Juniper and Cisco.

In the past, the Australian government excluded ‘high-risk vendors’—vendors the government had security concerns about—from the core of critical networks. In 2012, for example, Huawei was banned from Australia’s National Broadband Network, and this informal policy was applied to Australia’s 4G mobile network. Huawei equipment was used in the RAN but not in the core of Australian networks.

But the assessment by the Australian Signals Directorate, Australia’s signals intelligence and information security authority, was that ‘the distinction between core and edge collapses in 5G networks’ and so ‘a potential threat anywhere in the network will be a threat to the whole network’.

Given that we can no longer restrict vendors to the low-risk part of our telecommunications infrastructure, how should we think about the decision to trust a foreign vendor with supplying equipment for our 5G network?

For all vendors of critical infrastructure, there’s what I call product risk—the risk that a product won’t perform as described, is insecure and will have bugs or flaws that will affect its security and reliability. Some vendors may have better processes than others and therefore make better or more reliable products and have lower levels of risk. A technical assessment of products from different vendors would be useful to determine the relative levels of product risk.

Coercive state policies are a second, separate source of risk that should be considered. A state may coerce or compel a vendor in a way that could damage another state’s critical infrastructure or make it less secure. Everyone thinks of back doors, but that’s only one type of coercion. An engineer could be compelled to give up passwords or to provide network infrastructure diagrams. Or an employee could use their access to the system to change something consequential, but perhaps in a way that is difficult to detect. This is a geopolitical risk that really should be examined at the national level as it’s not clear to me that individual companies can make risk assessments of this kind.

Without an entirely indigenous supply chain, there’s always some element of this type of geopolitical risk, so decisions must be made to reduce or manage the risk. That sometimes means choosing the lesser of two evils.

A number of factors make me think that the risk from Chinese vendors is far higher than it is with vendors from the US and most other countries.

The first has to do with the rule of law. In China, legislation tends to support the Chinese Communist Party rather than being independent of it. Chinese companies and individuals can be compelled to assist in intelligence-collection efforts. Prominent Chinese citizens disappear without explanation. In the US, by contrast, technology companies have publicly opposed state lawful access orders—for example, the Apple v FBI case over a locked iPhone and a US v Microsoft case on extraterritorial data—so there’s at least some transparency. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that tech companies in China may ‘go slow’ on government access orders—but they never say no.

Second, there’s the Chinese state’s history of wide-ranging cyberespionage. I’m particularly talking about theft of intellectual property for commercial gain; in some cases the People’s Liberation Army has created databases for Chinese companies to sift through the intelligence that it has gathered for them. Regardless of the scope of US espionage, there are no examples of the US directly aiding its own companies in that way.

Third, China has a history of supply-chain attacks in which vast numbers of devices are compromised to reach a small number of targets. The Cloudhopper attack involved the Chinese Ministry of State Security’s compromising of contracted IT service providers to steal corporate secrets from their customers. When CCleaner, a software utility tool, had its update process subverted, the computers of 700,000 customers were infected in order to upload more complex malware to just tens of individual computers in high-tech companies and telcos, including Intel, Microsoft, Cisco and Vodafone. Similarly, the Taiwanese hardware company ASUS had its software update tool compromised by Chinese hackers and half a million innocent customers were affected to reach just hundreds of target computers.

By contrast, the US approach to compromising supply chains—intercepting shipments destined for target organisations—is extremely precise. From the perspective of an innocent bystander, the Chinese approach undermines trust in the entire tech ecosystem; the US approach is far less likely to cause collateral damage.

Finally, taking an Australian perspective, when it comes to the constellation of non-China-based 5G equipment vendors—in the US, Finland, Sweden, Korea and Japan—it’s very difficult to imagine ourselves in a military conflict with these countries anytime soon. But we could very plausibly end up in a conflict involving China within a matter of weeks or months.

An accident in the South China Sea or some confrontation in the Taiwan Strait could lead the US and China into conflict. Washington would probably ask for our assistance, even if just for moral support—and we’ve never said no when the US has asked. In such a scenario I find it impossible to believe that China wouldn’t seriously consider using our networks against us—if it had access.

So it is all about trust, but I think there are very good reasons to trust some countries more than others.