Q: How many of our politicians have you taken over [to Huawei’s Shenzhen headquarters]?

Huawei Australia chairman John Lord: I personally have taken about a dozen over the last seven years.

Q: And it’s all expenses paid?

John Lord: No, mostly with these groups, even with non-politicians [they] will get themselves to China. And it’s only with the actual Huawei bits that we cover. Obviously if you come on to our campus, which is huge, we give you lunch.

— ABC RN interview with Huawei chairman John Lord, 4 June 2018 (at 15:27)

New research from ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre shows that no company in the world has funded more trips for Australia’s federal parliamentarians than Huawei in the last eight years. Liberal politicians received most trips to China funded by Huawei, although Australian Labor Party politicians received most non–Australian government trips to China.

As the Australian government weighs a critical decision on whether to allow Huawei to participate in the 5G network, the research found that Huawei sponsored 12 trips at the federal parliamentary level over a period spanning almost eight years. While that’s not a huge number, to put it in context the next biggest corporate sponsor of trips was Fortescue Metals Group, with five trips (four to China and one to Papua New Guinea).

The other technology company sponsoring parliamentarians’ travel overseas was Microsoft, with two trips to the US. The ASPI report defined ‘corporate’ to mean companies run for profit, excluding non-government organisations, think tanks, universities, political parties, foundations, societies, and dialogues/forums.

The research looked at sponsored international travel for federal MPs. It found that the top three destinations for funded travel (flights and accommodation as well as just accommodation) were Israel, China and the United States. The top funders for each destination were, respectively, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (a public affairs organisation), Huawei, and the Australian American Leadership Dialogue (a private diplomatic initiative). A full breakdown of the figures can be found in the report.

That Huawei has sponsored trips is not new (see here, here and here), given that the last trip declared on the registers of members’ and senators’ interests was in August 2015. But this report puts Huawei’s efforts in a broader context and shows how exceptional they have been. Globally, Huawei alone sponsored a quarter of all corporate trips over the period reviewed. And Microsoft (with two trips) was the only other company sponsoring trips to its home country.

The parliamentary registers appear to show that of the 12 flights and accommodation trips, seven were funded solely by Huawei, three were funded by Huawei and Asialink, and two were funded by Huawei and the Australia China Business Council. When contacted, Asialink stated that it paid for its staff member only and has no further information about the logistics of this trip. ACBC has not yet responded to requests for clarification.

The Huawei-sponsored trips identified in the report are not the only Huawei-sponsored trips for parliamentarians across Australia. But a lack of state and territory data for the same time period made similar analysis at this level impossible without physically accessing records held by state and territory parliaments. As the report notes, while the federal parliamentary registers of interests could be significantly and easily improved, most registers for the state and territory parliaments also need reform.

While Huawei’s sponsorship of politicians’ travel to China doesn’t breach any rules, the number of trips it has funded raises questions about whether MPs should be able to accept any funded travel from corporations. At a minimum, it raises questions about the appropriateness of allowing politicians to accept travel paid for by companies like Huawei that are lobbying to participate in Australia’s 5G network—a critical piece of national infrastructure. As Danielle Cave and Elsa Kania have noted, Huawei’s participating in this network matters because it would be obligated under Chinese law to assist the work of Chinese intelligence services.

Julie Bishop was playing a dangerous game when she privately blamed the Australian media’s ‘negative reports’ for adversely affecting Australia–China relations during her meeting with her Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of the G20 in Argentina this week.

The Foreign Minister didn’t include any mention that she had scapegoated Australia’s fourth estate in her own rosy version of the encounter, but Beijing made sure to highlight it in their version of what they pointedly described as ‘not an official bilateral meeting’.

No doubt Beijing will be delighted to amplify Bishop’s message that the Australian media is to blame for the nadir in relations between the two countries. After all, it was the Chinese embassy in Canberra that first laid the blame on ‘fake news’ from the Australian media for ‘harming mutual trust’.

Ever since the leader of the free world took to labelling reports he doesn’t like in the US media as ‘fake news’, Beijing’s propagandists have adopted the term with gusto. Reports of Beijing’s plans for a military base in Vanuatu? ‘Fake news,’ according to the Chinese foreign ministry. Western reports of human rights lawyers being tortured? ‘Fake news!’ according to the People’s Daily.

At any rate, Bishop’s excuse for the deterioration in relations looked fairly hollow when, just a day later, her Western Australian Liberal Party colleague, Andrew Hastie, used parliamentary privilege to shine further light on the Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations in Australia. Pretending the Australian government doesn’t have a beef with Beijing isn’t going to cut it.

Instead of standing up for the free press like Hastie did, the Foreign Minister and her diplomats in the Australian embassy in Beijing have been running down our media to their Chinese counterparts. As Fairfax’s reporter in Beijing, Kirsty Needham, attests, blaming the Australian media has been ‘the consistent line to the Chinese from DFAT’.

It has become depressingly routine for Australian billionaires doing business with China to denigrate the media. Just last week, Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest , while standing next to Julie Bishop, moaned that the Australian media doesn’t run the official government line.

‘They [Australia’s media companies] don’t have government endorsement. They are not the government voice. They are business people trying to sell a few newspapers,’ Forrest told reporters gathered at his Cloudbreak mine. ‘When it gets reprinted in China, it does break my heart.’

But it’s another thing altogether for Australian diplomats, who according to DFAT’s Foreign Policy White Paper, are supposed to be ‘determined advocate[s] of liberal institutions, universal values and human rights’, to do the same.

That’s not to say that the Australian media gets it right all the time. When Yancoal director and former China ambassador Geoff Raby claimed that ASIO was the ‘most likely source’ for the Dastyari/Huang Xiangmo phone-tap story leak in a recent blog post, the Australian media repeated it uncritically.

Left out of the reports was the crucial context that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had specifically ruled out ASIO’s involvement. The claim that particular leak was ‘intelligence agency–sourced’ has been repeated in the media despite the fact that there are other, much more probable explanations.

Of course, Raby’s claim was immediately picked up by the fiercely nationalistic Communist Party mouthpiece, the Global Times. And once that media cycle had run its course, Raby fed the beast once again by dramatically calling for Julie Bishop to be sacked.

It’s an entirely predictable feedback loop that is reportedly frustrating our Beijing-based diplomats immensely. But instead of blaming the media, the government needs to start thinking outside the box.

For one thing, the Australian government should be giving diplomats sufficient resources and leeway to be more on the front foot with their digital diplomacy efforts in China on platforms like Weibo and WeChat. Public diplomacy is vital, and doubly so when bilateral relations occasionally sour.

As my upcoming report on ‘Weibo diplomacy and censorship in China’ will show, the Australian embassy barely makes it into the top 10 foreign embassy accounts on that platform, and is clearly hesitant to be on the front foot with its messaging.

While the Australian government vacillates, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is aggressively running his own line on Chinese social media. Instead of blaming the media, Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull should at least join Weibo and take part in the conversation.

It is good to see Ben Schreer and Nick Bisley set out so clearly the questions that lie unanswered at the heart of Australia’s foreign policy today. They ask whether we’re really serious about defending Asia’s status quo—the ‘rules-based order’—by opposing China’s bid for regional hegemony in East Asia, and if so what are we willing to do about it? These questions have been evaded for too long, at the cost of making our foreign policy position almost incoherent.

But Ben and Nick don’t provide clear answers to these questions themselves. They urge Australia to step up and support America in defending the rules-based order, but they don’t say what we should be willing to do. And yet this is the key choice that we face. We can all agree that sustaining the status quo would be the best outcome for us. But how far should we be prepared to go, and at what cost?

These are awkward questions that we’ve avoided for too long. That can’t last because it’s now so clear that resisting China’s ambitions is going to be much harder than almost everyone expected. We have at last realised just how powerful and determined China is. Nick and Ben themselves plainly acknowledge this when they say, quite rightly, that China’s challenge is the most formidable we’ve faced in Asia since the days of Japanese imperialism.

But that makes it a bit unrealistic of Ben and Nick to soothingly suggest that all we need is ‘a new mix of competition and cooperation, with the balance tipping towards the former’. We needed a lot more than that to deal with Imperial Japan. They’re reverting here to the same old mistake of assuming that we can resist China’s ambitions without really trying. This would only be so if China wasn’t really serious about overturning the status quo, and would be happy to back off if it meets the mildest resistance.

But all the evidence points the other way. Trying to compel them to change their mind won’t mean ‘a new mix of cooperation and competition’ with China. It means confronting China as an enemy—just as we confronted Imperial Japan.

Which brings us to the remark they attribute to Julie Bishop, that Australia ‘had to be prepared to fight to defend the order in Asia’. That does get to the hard nub of the issue: are we prepared to go to war with China—presumably in support of the US—to preserve the status quo rules-based order in East Asia?

Despite their hopeful talk of mixing competition and cooperation, it seems clear that Nick and Ben believe, like Mrs Bishop, that the answer is ‘yes’. And they’re not alone. As I argued in in my recent Quarterly Essay, this seems to be the key underlying message of the 2016 Defence White Paper, and is a view widely shared in Canberra.

But this answer too is seriously incomplete because it doesn’t say what kind of war we should be willing to fight, and at what cost. It isn’t enough for Nick and Ben and Mrs Bishop to say that we should be willing to fight to preserve the current order. They need to tell us how big a fight they’re willing to undertake. How far up the rising curve of scale, risk and cost do they think we should be prepared to go?

Do they envisage a minor skirmish? Or a major and protracted—but still conventional—regional conflict? Or an unlimited nuclear war? If the answer is that they’re only willing to fight a limited war, they need to explain how they can be sure that a limited war would be enough to make China back off. They need to explain the risk that a war once begun might not stay limited, even if both sides want it to. And they need to explain how sure they are that our side would win because that’s not to be taken for granted. China today is, after all, relatively far more powerful than Japan was in 1941.

Let me be clear: I think there could be circumstances in which Australia should be willing to go to war with China—even a very big war indeed. But I don’t think that defending the status quo rules-based order is important enough to justify that kind of war.

That isn’t because I don’t like the status quo, or because I’m not worried about what a new order would be like. I’m very worried about that. It’s because I’m even more worried about the war we could find ourselves fighting to defend it. I think that would most probably be a very serious war indeed, and there’s no reason to be confident that it wouldn’t become a nuclear war. That kind of war destroys the status quo anyway, even if our side wins.

It would be worth fighting such a war to avoid a truly evil and oppressive new order in Asia, but we must think very carefully and clearly about whether that’s what we will face if China gets its way. Some disagree. They think it’s safest, as well as easiest, simply to assume the worst, and to criticise those who suggest a more measured approach as appeasers.

But we have to understand where that leads us. Against an adversary like China, the alternative to appeasement is a high risk of war on a major scale. I don’t need any convincing at all that a Chinese-led order in Asia would be worse, and perhaps much worse, for us than the old order we know and love. But I need a lot of persuading that it would be bad enough to justify risking the kind of war that seems likely to be required to stop it.

I don’t think I’m alone here. Despite the tough-guy talk one hears from so many, I see no evidence that Australians would be willing to fight a major war—let alone a nuclear war—just to preserve the rules-based order in Asia. I doubt very much if Nick or Ben or Mrs Bishop would either. (If I’m wrong, perhaps they’ll say so.) Moreover I see no evidence that our US allies would be willing to fight that kind of war to defend their part of the status quo.

That’s why Australia needs to rethink its aim. We need to stop focusing on preserving the status quo and start thinking about what kind of new order in Asia can realistically be achieved and sustained to meet the new circumstances we face today—especially the new distribution of power—and how we can make the best of it. It’s timely to remember that by 1918, that’s what everyone wished they’d done in 1914. And Churchillian reveries get in the way of that.

The current debate in Australia about China’s influence operations is critically important to protect our interests and way of life. However, we need to avoid an overwhelmingly Australia-centric focus in seeking to understand the global nature of China’s ‘sharp power’. This will enable a better grasp of the true scale of the problem and provide new opportunities to work with like-minded countries in Asia and elsewhere in crafting an effective response.

To begin with, sharp power shouldn’t be conflated with ‘soft power with Chinese characteristics’. Instead, it’s a vital instrument to fulfil President Xi Jinping’s ambition for China to become a global power by piercing, penetrating or perforating the political and information environments in target countries.

Thus it’s about projecting China’s authoritarian influence abroad to shape a more favourable environment for achieving its objectives, including fostering division within and among US allies and partners. And under Xi’s leadership, sharp power activities have become ever-better resourced and more active. For instance, the United Front Work Department has gained significantly in political stature, mandate and staff, gaining some 40,000 new cadres in the past few years. The Propaganda Department has directed an enormous expansion of China’s official worldwide media presence.

As The Economist noted, a particular challenge in countering China’s ‘sharp power’ is that it’s ‘pervasive, breeds self-censorship and is hard to nail down’. That said, many countries have been subjected to these operations. Each of Australia’s Five Eyes partners—New Zealand, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom—has been affected.

In Southeast Asia, concerns have grown in Singapore, and China’s sharp power has arguably been at work to influence governments in Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar. It could also play a role in a potential Chinese military base in Vanuatu owing to that island nation’s growing debt to Beijing.

As well, major European powers have woken up to the challenge, which was demonstrated by, for example, Greece’s veto of an EU condemnation of China’s human rights record at the United Nations in June 2017. That move was attributed to massive Chinese infrastructure investments in Greece.

A series of think tank reports (here and here) also examine the problems for the continent posed by Chinese sharp power. During a visit to China in January, French President Emmanuel Macron voiced concerns that some European countries were much more open to Chinese interests, ‘sometimes at the expense of a European interest’. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has insisted that China shouldn’t link its economic investments in the Western Balkans to political demands.

At the Munich Security Conference in February, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel warned that China was ‘constantly trying to test and undermine the unity of the European Union’ through a policy of ‘sticks and carrots’. He also said that Beijing was using its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure fund specifically to promote a system of values different from the West’s.

The United Kingdom, France and Germany have also introduced mechanisms to monitor and block Chinese takeovers of high-technology companies in sensitive sectors. Moreover, they support efforts to tighten EU-wide regulations to govern Chinese investment so that Chinese entities cannot exploit the weaker regulatory systems of some European countries to gain access to potentially sensitive technologies. Unfortunately, it appears that such EU-wide efforts will fall short.

Australia, therefore, is far from the outlier in responding to China’s sharp power. Instead, its efforts are part of an emerging trend around the world to push back against Chinese influence activities. Sensibly, Canberra’s steps to tighten the rules on Chinese investments and to defend Australia’s way of life are based on the understanding that Beijing’s sharp power is likely to intensify and, left unchecked, could trigger a major ideological confrontation with the West and others.

Australia’s leading role in this instance has been well-regarded by many allies and partners, and can serve as the foundation for concerted strategies of like-minded countries. While we agree with Joseph Nye that countries shouldn’t overreact to China’s sharp power, we also believe that a much more concerted and unified strategy is required to address this challenge.

Part of this strategy should include greater levels of strategic cooperation, consultations and intelligence sharing to build more resilience across like-minded countries. To begin, Australia and its allies should give higher priority to holding regular consultations at senior political and operational levels to share experiences and intelligence about Chinese sharp power activities. These discussions could also canvass appropriate joint responses.

Fostering deeper understanding with Singapore on this issue will be key to assessing related trends in Southeast Asia. Major European powers such as Germany and France are likely to seek closer consultations and cooperation, too. That will provide Australia with further opportunities to play a quiet leadership role.

We’re in Tokyo this week for the fifth Quadrilateral Plus track-two dialogue, along with think tanks from Japan, India and the US. With the Quad starting to get a bit of momentum behind it, it’s time to start thinking about what it might actually do—rather than just talk about—to address the big security issues of our time. This article is adapted from a paper we presented at the meeting.

At the top of the list of issues for the Quad—indeed one of the major reasons the Quad cohered in the first place—is the increasing assertive and at times coercive behaviour of China. China’s militarisation of the South China Sea, an increasingly threatening tone towards Taiwan, border incursions in the Himalayas, and the frequent and often aggressive incursions around the Senkaku Islands are the most obvious practical demonstrations of its emboldened foreign and strategic policy. None of those are helpful in positioning China as a non-revisionist power.

To be fair, when we take a more global view of China’s actions, it doesn’t look as threatening as it does nearer to home—but it isn’t a particularly reassuring picture either. Chinese money talks loudly in the developing world, and it’s used as leverage to get Chinese companies into new places, often as a consequence of soft loans made to governments with little power to resist the funds on offer. Looking at the South Pacific, for example, there are many instances of loans being given for economically marginal ventures, with the locals getting only modest flow-on benefits.

Much of China’s global activity is positive. China is currently the biggest contributor of troops to UN peacekeeping missions, for example, and it would be a stretch to say that selfish motives underlie the current rate of effort. Similarly, the Chinese navy has worked with multinational maritime forces to help police against piracy. China does some things because it wants to be seen as a major power, with the ability to contribute to global efforts, rather than with narrow self-interest as the motivation.

So the aim of any interactions with China should be to encourage behaviour that helps build common goods, while providing disincentives for the more aggressive and unhelpful applications of Chinese power. In recent years China has been very successful in achieving its geopolitical goals, but we should remember that it isn’t an invulnerable colossus.

Weaknesses in elements of China’s power provide potential points of leverage for the Quad countries, especially if we can take a consistent and strategic approach. It’s fashionable in the Western press to talk about how dependent we are on China. That’s especially true in Australia, where the narrative now is that our 26 years of uninterrupted growth are the result of economic ties with China. But that cuts both ways: China needs the rest of the world at least as much as we need it—and may become more dependent as some of its internal structural problems become more obvious. It might be productive for Quad members to think through ways of making those interdependencies clearer. It would certainly help balance a lot of unthinking rhetoric about having no choice but to placate China.

But there’s also a downside risk to the rest of us in Chinese weaknesses. The Communist Party (CCP) has quite skilfully used a combination of appealing to Chinese nationalism and providing economic benefits to strengthen its hold on the country. For most of the past 20 years, the economic element took precedence. Nationalism could be stirred up when it suited and, while an imprecise implement, it probably suited the CCP quite well to have a backdrop of angry nationalists when asserting its position on contested spaces.

But vehement nationalism is a deeply unattractive thing, especially when it’s accompanied by anger at perceived social injustices, and it can lead to disaster if a nation is swept along by it. So the question becomes what happens when there’s a confluence of factors that conspires to release the shackles on Chinese nationalism. An economic downturn, especially one that impacted heavily on China’s relatively newly wealthy middle class, could cause the CCP to try to turn attention away from internal issues towards external ones.

So far China’s assertiveness and unilateral ways have been calculated to not cross the threshold where open conflict is a predictable outcome. China has effectively annexed the South China Sea by never doing anything precipitous, for which a robust military response would be appropriate. Similarly, Beijing backed off the angry rhetoric regarding the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands after President Barack Obama said that the US–Japan Treaty provisions extended over the islands. They didn’t, however, stop the low-level incursions, and in fact have ramped up their frequency—always slowly enough that a big pushback isn’t likely. That calibration depends on Chinese authorities being able to manage and control outbursts of nationalism. Growing public confidence in China’s strength, combined with a desire by the PLA to show what it can do could result in the failure of managed calibration.

It’s now clear that President Xi Jinping sees himself continuing to preside over China for many years to come. His status seems assured, and he has overseen a new level of monitoring and control of public discourse to ensure that his effective takeover is unchallenged. Party control seems solid enough for now, but it might be that the centralisation of power in the person of Xi turns out to be overreach in the party, or overreach in the party’s management of China. It certainly makes it hard for Xi to be associated with failures, and a geopolitical setback might be hard to manage, especially if the economy slows further.

The Quad countries have many strengths as well, and our collective military and economic clout is more than a match for China. We think the Quad can collectively put a bit of a brake on China’s geopolitical ambitions, but there are dangers here. Humiliating China plays into its nationalist narrative, and runs the risk of the CCP acting in response to internal agitation. That shouldn’t stop us from acting in our interests, but we need to factor the risk of inadvertently sparking unrest in China into the calculus of what we might do.