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Peter Jennings’ ‘Darwin: storm in a port’ has brought to broader attention the apparent nonchalance with which the lease of the port of Darwin by Chinese firm Landbridge  has been treated by many parts of the Australian Government.

Landbridge came to Australian public attention in mid-2014 with its share offer and purchase of Brisbane-based gas producer Westside Corporation. The purchase was celebrated by PRC newsagency Xinhua, and widely by the Australian government. The signing of this agreement by Landbridge principal Ye Cheng  was held at Parliament House in front of Xi Jinping and Tony Abbott during Xi’s November visit to Australia.  Westside soon set about pursuing Armour Energy.

Last month, Landbridge agreed to pay $506 million for a 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin. Labor has suggested that the deal be scrutinised by the Foreign Investment Review Board and some ADF officials have registered security concerns. However, the long-term ramifications of this century-long deal haven’t even begun to be considered by Australia.

What then is the nature of Landbridge? Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles calls it a ‘private sector partner’, and both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have adopted the ‘private enterprise’ description.  However, given that ownership of major economic entities in China is always murky, it behoves us to look at this entity a little more closely.

The company itself asserts that it is a ‘private’ enterprise. Landbridge Chairman Ye Cheng is, however, intimately tied to the PRC party-state as a member of  the 12th National CPPCC Committee, a PRC united front body, in which he represents the All China Federation of Taiwan Compatriots.

More importantly, the company—like any organisation of influence in China—is guided by a powerful branch of the Communist Party of China. This 200-member body takes its orders—through a dendritic structure—from the party central committee and ensures that the company acts in accordance with the party-state’s interests and strategies.

The Secretary of Landbridge’s CPC branch committee is He Zhaoqing, an ex-PLA officer, who has been deputy political commissar of the Public Security office at Shijiu Port, and head of the party committee office of Rizhao Port.  He’s now also the general manager, a director and party committee member of the Rizhao Port Group. It’s thus He Zhaoqing and the CPC who control the port development activities of Landbridge.

And, as if to underline the party-state links of the company, in August last year, with the support of the People’s Liberation Army, Landbridge established a people’s armed militia within the company with He Zhaoqing being appointed to lead it. He Zhaoqing had also been cited by the provincial government in 2013 as one of the ten outstanding figures of Shandong province who have devoted themselves to the building of national defence. In short, Landbridge is a commercial front intimately tied to state-owned operations, the party and the PLA.

But this should come as a surprise to no-one. Party control within nominally commercial operations is precisely how the PRC ensures that Chinese economic activity abroad is fully in accord with and serves PRC strategic interests. That is obvious from Chinese efforts to develop Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port, Pakistan’s Gwadar Port (only a 40-year lease) and the port of Djibouti.

Darwin is intended to be a key link in China’s new 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, providing Chinese access to both the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, as well as to Indonesia and PNG. China’s ‘sister port’ tie ups with Kuantan, Melaka, Kedah and Port Klang in Malaysia  and with Townsville Port in Queensland are readying further nodes in the network. It’s no surprise that Landbridge Infrastructure Australia’s director, Mike Hughes, says the Darwin port project aims to ‘put Darwin on the map for Chinese business.’ And even less surprising is it that Landbridge CPC Committee Secretary He spoke to his members of the company’s role in achieving the ‘dream of a strong nation‘, the ‘dream of renaissance.’

The Maritime Silk Road, along with associated Chinese initiatives such as the $100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the $40 billion Silk Road fund, as well as offshore infrastructure projects such as ports, dams, farms and industrial zones are intended, through realising regional economic domination and subsequent client dependency, to  achieve this Chinese renaissance, the ‘China dream’. This in turn will facilitate contention for regional and then global primacy with the United States. The PLA sees one of its key roles as being to protect these economic initiatives offshore. The Darwin deal is thus, among other things, a key element in the PRC’s efforts to weaken the Australian alliance with the US. For these reasons there must be great security concerns about the Darwin deal.

That the Federal Government and the Northern Territory administration should repeatedly claim that Landbridge is a private company and that its investment in Darwin is simply an economic decision suggests either targeted disingenuousness or woeful ignorance. In either case it underlines the urgent need for both much further investigation of the Darwin contract with Landbridge and the creation within Australia of a public database which records and analyses the swiftly-expanding breadth of the interconnected PRC economic, cultural and political activities across Australia, Southeast Asia and Oceania.

While China’s unilateral declaration of an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) over disputed waters in the East China Sea (ECS) caught many by surprise, today’s debate circles around the likelihood that Beijing might take the same action over the South China Sea (SCS). In its pursuit of maritime primacy in Northeast Asia, China has strayed far from the international norms that dictate the implementation and use of an ADIZ.

An ADIZ is an airspace beyond a country’s sovereign territory within which the state requires the identification, location and air traffic control of aircraft in the interest of national security. The mechanism is a legacy of the Cold War, having first been declared by the US in 1950; Over 20 states now administer their own ADIZ.

According to the Chinese Ministry of National Defense, when entering the zone, such as the one declared over the ECS, all aircraft are required to identify themselves, report flight plans and inform ground control of their exact position. Such regulations apply to commercial aircraft as well as military aircraft. On the latter count, China’s ADIZ fails to uphold the normative principle that military aircraft simply transiting through an ADIZ shouldn’t be obliged to report to the host country. China has threatened to meet non-compliance with ‘military defensive measures’. The US State Department was highly critical of the coercive measure, claiming that ‘the US does not apply its ADIZ procedures to foreign aircraft not intending to enter the US national airspace.’ The State Department urged China ‘not to implement its threat to take actions against aircraft that do not identify themselves or obey orders from Beijing.’

China’s reinterpretation of how an ADIZ is declared and operates raises questions about the legality, legitimacy and intentions of its controversial efforts over the ECS. ADIZs are legally ambiguous, and aren’t regulated by any defined international regime. Although there’s no explicit prohibition on ADIZs, they can be used in ways that violate other international legal provisions. China’s specific identification requirements placed on military aircraft are in violation of Article 87 of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that protects ‘freedom of overflight’ and to which China is a signatory. The 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation—the Chicago Convention—also rules against unilateral attempts to restrict air navigation beyond a state’s territorial seas. Therein lies the danger: China’s attempt to maintain de-facto control of its surrounding waters will contribute to establishing a precedent outside of current international law.

Worryingly, China has recently signalled its willingness to treat its ADIZ as an extension of its sovereign territory. According to Air Transport World a Laos Airlines plane flying through China’s ADIZ in late July was requested to fly back as it hadn’t met its reporting requirements. Despite vehement denials from China’s Ministry of National Defense that the ‘event has no connection with the ADIZ in the East China Sea’ and silence from the Laotian government, presumably due to fear associated with upsetting Sino-Laos trade relations, the incident is potentially a sign of things to come. Moreover, the possibility that China may declare an ADIZ over the South China Sea only brings more uncertainty to the protection of freedom of overflight in international waters.

So what can be done to mitigate the chances of escalation in the ECS and the possibility that China will announce an ADIZ over the SCS?

Despite tough rhetoric emanating from the US immediately after the declaration of the ADIZ over the ECS and later dispatch of two American B-52 bombers to fly through the zone, the US response has been relatively quiet overall. Although President Obama employed tough rhetoric when pledging that Article V of ‘US–Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security’ provided an ‘ironclad’ security guarantee to protect the Senkakus in the ECS, a lack of tangible US action has hardened China’s claims of sovereignty over the disputed waters. It’s imperative that the US continues to fully exercise its right to fly its military aircraft through the East China Sea.

As a regional power in the Indo–Pacific region, Australia also has a role in upholding freedom of overflight in its neighbourhood. The initial condemnation of China’s ECS effort by Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop must be bolstered with action so as to avoid Chinese de-facto control over the ECS. It’s important that Australia unilaterally flies its military aircraft through the ECS ADIZ, or publicly demonstrates support for allies who do so to avoid the emergence of a new status quo where China rules its surrounding seas. Inaction has the potential to encourage China to declare a South China Sea ADIZ in the foreseeable future.

Now that Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington is out of the way, China might see a window of opportunity to declare an ADIZ in the SCS before the International Court of Arbitration rules on the Philippines’ territorial claim in the near future. Australia must act sooner, rather than later, to protect its right of overflight or it may one day face a situation where it requires permission from China to exercise its own international freedoms.

This was never going to be an easy meeting between the leaders of one of the oldest democracies and the world’s largest dictatorship. The two countries have an increasingly conflicted relationship: on the one hand, they are global partners, especially but not solely in the international economic sphere, but, on the other hand, their strategic rivalry, particularly in the Indo–Pacific region, is becoming worrisome. Accordingly, the meeting went as well as one could expect. But given the trajectory of the bilateral relationship this summit may well be the last one with a veneer of courtesy.

This meeting was, without any doubt, more important for Xi than Obama. This gave the Chinese president a public platform from which to be perceived back home as an equal (whether true or not) to the president of the sole superpower. It also gave Xi the opportunity to state publicly and forcefully—as he did—China’s position on issues on which the two countries disagree. Let me focus on just three of these.

The first issue on which the Obama administration has been particularly irritated about is cyber-theft. This was made abundantly clear when Obama suggested at a recent business roundtable, that the issue of cyberattacks would ‘probably be one of the biggest topics‘ during President Xi’s visit. And indeed it was. At their joint press conference, Obama said that he had told Xi that cyberattacks against US targets ‘had to stop’. In response, Xi pledged that the Chinese government wouldn’t ‘in whatever form engage in commercial theft and hacking against government networks’.

Given that, according to US officials, China was behind the recent theft of the security files of some 22 million Americans, not too many people are convinced in Washington that the Chinese government will stop cyber theft, or prevent Chinese companies from doing so against US companies. There’s little doubt that were the Chinese caught once again hacking and stealing American trade secrets that the US administration would impose a package of economic sanctions against China, as per an executive order signed by President Obama in April.

The second issue, of particular interest to Australia, is China’s aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea. President Obama broached the issue directly at the joint press conference, stating that he ‘had significant concerns’ over China’s reclamation activities which made it more difficult to resolve disagreements peacefully’. Xi didn’t budge and instead asserted that China was acting within its rights and that it wasn’t pursuing any militarisation. Any wishful thinking that China would embrace Washington’s recent proposal for Beijing to halt land reclamation and end militarization was put to rest absolutely there and then.

A third issue on which there was unsurprisingly no movement was human rights in China. Obama forcefully re-iterated his ‘deep concerns’ over this matter, and, in return, Xi, as all previous Chinese leaders have done in the past, repeated the well-worn mantra that ‘countries have different historical processes’. Given Xi’s heavy-handed approach to any opposition since he came to power in 2012, it’s no surprise that thousands of political prisoners are languishing in jails and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

Still, the summit wasn’t all bad news. The big surprise was of course Xi’s announcement of a selective cap-and-trade emission plan that would kick in by 2017. Given China’s massive environmental problems and its status as the world’s biggest polluter, this was welcomed by US officials and environmentalists. But many are sceptical that this ambitious plan can be implemented so quickly. Nevertheless, it’s a step in the right direction, and it now puts pressure on the US Congress to also take stronger action on climate change.

However, the good news on the climate change front did little to dispel Washington’s concerns about China’s overall behaviour. And some of its latest actions have done nothing to assuage those feelings. Aside from the issues discussed above, it’s obvious that China is increasingly flexing its muscles well beyond its immediate neighbourhood.

The PLA Navy has been making deep forays into the Indian Ocean, including having submarines berth in Sri Lanka and Pakistan earlier this year. Even more worrisome is the report that a Chinese aircraft carrier has been sited off the Syrian coast in the last few days and Chinese advisers are on their way. But to demonstrate that they too can hug the other’s coastline, Chinese navy ships were spotted inside US territorial waters off Alaska during Obama’s visit to that state earlier this month.

Needless to say, all this is grist for the Republican Party mill. A number of presidential candidates, with Trump leading the pack, even suggested that Obama cancel the summit. Even Hillary Clinton has jumped on the anti-Chinese bandwagon.

So while there are areas where China and the US can work together, strategic competition between the two nations is real and is more than likely to become nasty down the road. The recent Xi–Obama summit has done nothing to dispel this perception.

The red carpet was rolled out in Washington DC this week as some A-list visitors hit the town. On Thursday, Pope Francis became the first pontiff to address US Congress—full text and video here. In his speech, the Pope challenged US policymakers to ‘make a difference’ on a wide range of issues, from environmental degradation to the abolition of the death penalty. DefenseOne carries an interesting piece on the Catholic Church’s zero tolerance stance on nuclear weapons, which sits in contradiction to Ash Carter’s defence of the US nuclear budget last week. For more on the papal visit, check out this excellent photo essay from Sam Ellis, and The Atlantic’s break-down of the address to Congress. And for all the transportation fans out there, The Washington Post has a short history of the Popemobile.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s much-anticipated first state visit to the US began within hours of the Pope’s departure on Thursday, after the GOP failed to have the visit cancelled. US National Security Advisor Susan Rice defended the visit on Monday, branding alternative views as ‘dangerous and short-sighted’—a burn that was reportedly directed at ex-GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker, who dropped out of the race earlier this week. Check out CSIS for some quality reads on two of the meatier topics expected to be addressed at the Summit: cybersecurity and US–China economic relations.

The Climate Council this week released a cracking new report called ‘Be Prepared: Climate Change, Security and Australia’s Defence Force. Their effort is well worth a read.

If you love a good map as much as we do, head over to The True Size to play around with an interactive map that will give you a real sense of country size—a perspective that you won’t get from the familiar Mercator presentation. The project was inspired by the West Wing and a similar infographic that focused on Africa (PDF).

Dark Fields of the Republic, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in DC, shines a light on the battlefield photography of Alexander Gardener, whose dramatic images show the ravages of the US Civil War. The BBC carries a compelling piece that highlights the collection, Gardner’s story and some of the abiding questions around the appropriateness of war photography.

CSIS’s drip-feed of South China Sea satellite images has been collected by the ABC, which has compiled some handy before-and-after snapshots of China’s land reclamation work across seven different reefs. Catch up with it here. New PM Malcolm Turnbull this week said that China’s efforts in the South China Sea have been ‘pushing the envelope’.

Foreign Policy has given a whole new meaning to #flashbackfriday by shredding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Instagram account @syrianpresidency. Sifting through pages of happy, shiny images taken around Syria, FP has chosen some choice shots from the account, and contrasted them with what was actually happening in Syria at the time they were captured.

Head over to The Economist for a primer on Japan’s recently passed security bills, as well as some consideration of the Chinese reception to the legislative changes.

Laser-drones: the future is nigh—and it’s awesome! San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is aiming to mount a 150-kilowatt solid-state laser onto an Avenger drone to create a new generation of military weapon by 2017. Or, if mounting weaponry on drones is too high-tech for your taste, why not try dogs? Visual Engineering has created the Cerberus camera system, which can be attached to the backs of military and police dogs to give their human counterparts advantages in warzones.

Podcasts

As part of its Global Thinkers series, Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson and Yemeni activist Farea al-Muslimi sat down to chat about how the West could contribute to a solution for the Middle East’s proxy wars, and why Saudi Arabia is taking big risks in Yemen. Listen here.

The Bridge recently featured a piece which argued that returning foreign fighters actually present a marginal threat to their homelands, and evaluated counter-radicalisation efforts. The author, Collin Hunt, was recently interviewed by The Loopcast.

Videos

Brookings recently hosted a discussion with Will McCants on ISIS’s strategy and the future of jihadi terrorism, on the back of the launch of his recent book, The ISIS Apocalypse.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, sat down with Jon Alterman and Ben Daus-Haberle as part of a three-part series on foreign policy, global politics and global crisis. In part one (6 mins), Brzezinski thinks about how the US should approach its relations with China and Russia.

Events

Canberra: The AIIA’s National Conference will kick off on 19 October, and is set to include a stellar line-up of speakers, such as Julie Bishop, Tanya Plibersek, Gareth Evans and Brian Schmidt. Be sure to register your interest here.

Since assuming the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership in November 2012, Chinese president Xi Jinping’s great ambitions have become well known. Domestically, he’s advanced the grand goal of what he calls the China Dream: ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people’. He has surprised virtually every observer by the speed and efficiency with which he’s consolidated power in the party and military. Xi is now seen as China’s most powerful leader after Deng Xiaoping, if not Mao Zedong.

The two major pillars of Xi’s assertive foreign policy—security activism predominately in the maritime domain, and economic diplomacy by way of the so-called ‘one belt, one road’ policy—suggest that Xi isn’t content with making China a great power in the region and beyond; he also wants to make China a leading and even dominant power in key areas of Asia–Pacific regional relations. Indeed, as a keen student of history, Xi may be trying to restore the role of China in the contemporary East Asian system to its historical height during the era of the Chinese empire (221BC–1911AD).

Is Xi’s China ready to resume the glory of its imperial predecessor? We may compare China today with China during the early Ming dynasty (1368-1424), which achieved an incomplete regional hegemony in East Asia. By GDP, the economic position of Ming China at the height of its power was stronger than that of the US today. But hegemony is about more than material capabilities—it’s the conjunction of material primacy and social legitimacy; the ability to control important international outcomes and some degree of consent and acceptance from other states in the system.

Early Ming China’s neighbours adopted four principal strategies in their response to and dealings with the Ming imperial court. Ranked from the most to the least cooperative, these four strategies are identification, deference, access, and exit. Almost all of Ming China’s neighbours adopted a strategy of deference, whereby they deferred to, but didn’t necessarily accept as legitimate, imperial China’s hierarchical scheme of foreign relations embodied by the tribute system.

Ming China thus only achieved an incomplete hegemony in East Asia. But that’s hardly surprising: every hegemony is incomplete, even in the case of contemporary US hegemony. Ming China never had to confront a systemic, anti-hegemonic response in the form of, say, a counterbalancing coalition characteristic of modern European politics. On the whole, early Ming China’s material primacy in East Asia was also a Chinese hegemony accepted by its neighbours to varying degrees.

An important criterion for measuring Chinese influence today is the type and nature of regional responses to China’s rise. None of China’s neighbours are developing a strategy of identification, not many states are adopting one of deference either. The main strategy adopted by most states today is in fact access, an instrumental attempt to maintain relationships with China in order to obtain economic benefits from China’s rise. Some are also adopting a strategy of exit by downgrading their relationships with China or by switching to closer relationships with other countries, including China’s archrival, the US.

The contrast with early Ming China is thus clear and striking. Whereas Ming China succeeded in making deference the major regional strategic response to its power, with a nice addition of identification from Korea, today’s China has only achieved the level of an access strategy, and it is in fact struggling with a number of countries even at that level. Moreover, whereas Ming China never had to face a counterbalancing coalition from its neighbours, such balancing is a constant spectre for today’s China. Current Chinese foreign policy leaves much to be desired, and the PRC still has a long way to go before reaching the glory of its imperial predecessor—if indeed it can ever reach such heights.

The problem isn’t with the trajectory of China’s development, which is still largely sound and positive, but rather,  it’s with the ways in which some Chinese policymakers and analysts perceive China’s strengthening position in the international order and how that power should now be used. A palpable sense of triumphalism emerged in some segments of the Chinese policy and intellectual community after the country’s success through the Global Financial Crisis. Yet, as a senior scholar in Beijing pointed out to me, overestimation of China’s power is much more harmful to China’s interests than underestimation. China faces serious economic headwinds and the constraints on Beijing’s foreign policy have consequently tightened over the past few months. President Xi’s foreign policy remains in search of a foundation, a purpose and an effective strategic approach.

Chinese foreign policy has now entered an important stage of multiple changes and adjustments, and is open to be shaped by a variety of domestic and international factors. It will be wise for Chinese leaders to take a long-term historical perspective when considering the potential of Chinese influence in the region and the limits of current approaches. If they are really historically minded, the strategic goals of China’s Asia–Pacific policy should include both a positive and negative goal—a positive goal of encouraging a new kind of deference from regional states appropriate to the norms and conditions of 21st century world politics, and a negative goal of preventing an implicit or explicit counterbalancing coalition forming against China. Whether they can achieve those goals will depend heavily on their strategic wisdom and foresight.