The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) anti-corruption drive is of staggering scale, reach and audacity. From the powerful ‘tigers’ to the low-ranking ‘flies’, the anti-corruption policy of Xi Jinping’s leadership has targeted and frightened multiple segments of the party, government, military, and state-owned enterprises.

Many have since wondered about the motivation and nature of the wide-ranging and ambitious anti-corruption policy unleashed by President Xi and carried out by Wang Qishan, who is Secretary of the powerful CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and one of the seven members in the Politburo Standing Committee.

On 9 September, I attended a now-annual conference co-hosted by the International Department of the CCP Central Committee and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CCP Central Committee. This year’s theme was To Discipline the Party: Responsibility of the Party. It was appropriate that Wang—who’s in charge of the party’s anti-corruption drive and the broader strategy of ‘comprehensively disciplining the party’—agreed to offer his views to a select group of scholars and officials from China and abroad.

As I listened to Wang’s remarks at the Great Hall of the People, I realized that he was making a revolutionary statement in the history of the CCP. Wang raised an extremely provocative and hitherto taboo idea in CCP political discourse: he spoke of the legitimacy of CCP rule. Never before has the CCP leadership openly raised and even questioned the legitimacy of its own rule. Moreover, Wang actually set out to explain the legitimacy of CCP’s long one-party rule in China, which he pointed out to be the key distinguishing characteristic of Chinese politics. The legitimacy of CCP rule, Wang explained, is based on the ‘endorsement of the people’ and the ‘choice made by the people.’ He elaborated that the CCP depends on the people being satisfied and happy.

Through his comments, Wang was trying to imply that the anti-corruption effort was much more than a short-term expedient for the new leadership to win favor from the public or to establish political authority through factional or interest-groups-related struggles—just some of the hypotheses offered by outside observers for the push. He pointed out that anti-corruption isn’t a political campaign or movement—Mao’s Cultural Revolution taught the CCP that campaigns and movements eventually cease to exist. Anti-corruption, this time, will ‘always be on the road’, and ‘there is only a beginning, never an end’.

Those remarks, together with the invocation of the all-important concept of CCP legitimacy, suggest that Wang is seeing anti-corruption as a long-term strategy to maintain and enhance the legitimacy of CCP rule in China; it’s not just a temporary device for consolidating the rule of the new Xi leadership. Such an explanation would refute many existing hypotheses about anti-corruption. According to this view, what’s at stake in anti-corruption is nothing less than the legitimacy and survival of the CCP as the sole ruling party in China—something much more significant than the survival of the current Xi leadership, which, after all, has an implicit two-term limit of 10 years.

But is that explanation credible? Wang struck many of us in attendance at the meeting as a deeply impressive political leader and as an intellectual. His remarks on the many issues of dissatisfaction the Chinese people have with CCP rule left the impression that the current generation of CCP leaders face significant governance challenges in China. He spoke of the difficulties and complexities of CCP rule in today’s ‘extraordinary difficulty’ period, and he even said that the new leadership hasn’t taken rest for a single day since it took office.

His legitimacy-based explanation of the anti-corruption strategy would be readily comprehensible to a Western audience. The term ‘legitimacy’—Wang used the Chinese translation of hefaxing—is, after all, of Western origin. The difference between Wang’s narrative and many existing explanations for the anti-corruption effort comes down to the timeline: one takes a short-term tactical perspective, the other a long-term strategic view. While many Western analyses focus on the short-term interest maximization and political survival of the new Xi leadership, Wang takes a strategic view geared toward the long-term legitimacy of CCP rule beyond the expediencies of the current leadership.

A second, and final, instalment will look at CCP rule and legitimacy in the context of the party’s new ‘four comprehensives’ governing strategy advanced early this year.

Australia’s Defence Minster Kevin Andrews was in India this week, where he met with his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar as well as Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj. Andrews contributed an op-ed to The Hindu and delivered a speech to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (excerpted here). It was in the Q&A session of his address to IDSA that the Defence Minister raised the possibility of the Quad 2.0, which made the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald this morning (and is likely to have been well-received in India—at least in Modi’s office).

Yesterday saw China celebrate its role in the WWII defeat of Japan 70 years ago. As expected, Beijing put on a massive display of military muscle, with 12,000 troops goosestepping through Tiananmen Square alongside a veritable heft of tanks, choppers, drones and missiles. Head over to The Atlantic to check out photos of the parade. Chinese President Xi Jinping took the occasion to announce that military personnel would be cut by 300,000. Over at CSIS Anthony Cordesman and Steven Colley have released for feedback a draft of their 600+ page study on Chinese strategy and military modernisation, which you can access here.

IHS has this week estimated that China’s defence budget would swell to approximately US$260 billion in 2020, which is around double the amount spent by Beijing in 2010. The analysis comes as Japan’s Ministry of Defense requests its biggest defence budget yet, which if approved in December would mark the fourth increase in as many years. Both can be taken as signs that the temperature continues to rise in the Asia–Pacific.

The UK Ministry of Defence is currently soliciting options for their surface fleet of the future. The push is being led by Starpoint, a tech-focused procurement group in the MoD, under the title ‘Dreadnought 2050’—a nod to the UK’s 1906 battleship that completely disrupted naval warfare by outclassing all vessels then in the field.

US President Barack Obama this week secured enough votes to prevent a veto of his nuclear deal with Iran, effectively ensuring that it will pass Congress. While a DefenseOne survey found that only 26% of serving US military and civilian government employees think the deal is good for America, Michael Krepon of Arms Control Wonk thinks the deal is about as good as the US is going to get right now. CSIS’s Jon B. Alterman is thinking beyond the deal.

Bookmark this one for the weekend: A few days back, Brookings published William McCants’ longform piece charting the life and transformation of the man who now goes by the name of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIL’s self-proclaimed Caliph. The essay is accompanied by a range of photos, videos, maps and recordings. Beyond that commendable effort, two pieces on the Islamic State caught our eye this week. A piece in The New Yorker looks at life after ISIS, drawing particularly on the experience of some former foreign fighters in Europe; and War on the Rocks asks which devil we need to dance with in order to deal effectively with ISIL.

And what is it about ISIL and Twitter? Beyond the erudite think tank contributions to our understanding of ISIL’s social media strategy, there’s a different, lighter side to the various online efforts to counter the group: first, the conversation between a BuzzFeed journo and an Australian official running the @Fight_DAESH Twitter account; second, a run-down on ISIS-chan, the kawaii anime character waging a meme-and-melon war on ISIL; and finally, @ISIS_karoke, which attaches well-known song lyrics to photos of jihadists. Of course, any effort to counter the potent #catsofjihad hashtag should be commended.

Podcast

With China’s weakening economy bringing more bad news for financial markets across the world this, Colm Quinn and Matt Goodman discuss China’s role in the global economy and its relationship with the US.

Videos

Brandon Valeriano, author of the new book Cyber War versus Cyber Realities, recently skyped-in to Robert Farley’s Foreign Entanglements program over at BloggingHeads.tv. The pair discussed deterrence, resiliency, restraint and the psychology of overhyped cyber fears.

Last weekend marked the 10th anniversary since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Vox speaks to some survivors about their experience, and the ABC has a striking set of now-and-then photographs.

20 years ago tomorrow, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton gave her famously forceful ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights’ speech in China, against the advice of some in the White House and many in Beijing. Watch it here.

Finally, Donald Trump on ‘China’ (h/t Daniel).

Events

Canberra: What’s there to learn from Australia’s efforts to support peace through the Pacific Islands? Head to the ANU’s College of Asia and The Pacific to find out, as Associate Professor Bob Breen examines our interventions between 1980 and 2006.                       

Melbourne: This Tuesday, the University of Melbourne will host Sir David King, the UK Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change, to discuss a recent report out of Cambridge which recommended climate risks be assessed in the same way as risks to national security, public health or financial stability. See here to access the report, and here to register for the event.

Sydney: The NSW branch of the Australian Institute of International Affairs will soon host Carlyle A. Thayer for a discussion on the implications of China’s land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea. Mark your calendars for 15 September.

The rise of ISIS allied with the seemingly inevitable mass migration caused by climate change is confronting Australia’s military and intelligence leaders with a devilish conundrum. No one yet has a plan to meet the approaching tumult but one thing is certain: in solving the dilemma the role of our Special Forces will be increasingly central to our future defence and security.

These conclusions were borne upon me during the two years of research and writing that produced my Warrior Elite, the history of our Special Forces incorporating our intelligence agencies just published by Hachette. It involved scores of interviews with the planners behind the political scenes who develop our defence policy.

In the last two decades the military and the intelligence agencies have coalesced into a Special Forces cohort unlike anything that preceded it. And it incorporates an ever increasing proportion of our defence preparedness. The planners know that the technological genie is out of the bottle. Today, an SAS squadron, for example, has at its command a firepower exceeding a WWII battalion. An extraordinary research effort in 47 military and civilian facilities in the US and others in Europe, Japan and China is producing an astonishing array of protective battle suits, advanced weaponry, communications, telemetry and real time HQ support and direction. These are either in use now or on the verge of deployment to the Special Forces of most advanced countries, Australia included. They are the instruments of a radical transformation of military strategy and tactics.

As our Commando regiment increases its battlefield capacity, the SAS in close cooperation with ASIS is expanding its capabilities in potential trouble spots in the region, the Middle East and even the African continent. But here the planners run up against a strategic quandary. Both units are closely affiliated with the US. And while this brings substantial technical advantages, in the bigger picture these are offset by strategic liabilities which defence leaders realise they must overcome.

America’s imperial superpower assertions have created serious complications in Australia’s relations with China and arguably affected the development of open-hearted, neighbourly relations with the largely Muslim nations of Indonesia and Malaysia. Both Indonesia and China are themselves deeply vulnerable to ISIS—Indonesia through its 95% Muslim population and corrupt governance; China because of its 160 million Muslims and their alienation from an unyielding single-party government. Both countries are facing much bigger problems than Australia in controlling their internal threat.

Indeed, were it not for Australia’s enthusiastic embrace of the Five-Eyes alliance which has traditionally been directed against China and Indonesia, among others, it would be perfectly possible to envisage a regional arrangement encompassing Australia and its two most populous neighbours in a cooperative Special Operations counterforce to the jihadists.

Then comes the second strand of the conundrum: climate change. Heavy Weather, an ASPI Special Report published in March 2013, warned that global warming:

 ‘has generated little interest in either the ADF or the Defence Department, [yet] climate change is transforming the conventional roles of security forces. As a threat multiplier, it has the potential to generate and exacerbate destabilising conditions that could reshape the regional security environment.’

That now seems inevitable. And the planners are aware that our response must involve international alliances with the great forces who would underwrite—with force if necessary—the right of nations like Australia to decide (in John Howard’s immortal phrase) ‘who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

When climate change produces uncontrolled mass migration—the forerunner of which we now see in the Mediterranean—the support and cooperation of regional governments, particularly Indonesia and China, will be essential to any Australian effort to retain its territorial integrity. Yet once again our ‘Five-Eyes’ alliance with the Anglosphere which targets Indonesia and China as potential threats stands as an impediment to the development of the cooperation  and support required.

While the American alliance will no doubt remain in place, it may well be that Australia needs to loosen the ties to its Anglophile past before a genuine regional integration can be secured. An innovative 2014 ASPI/ADF study might well point the way to the future. It proposes the posting of Special Forces liaison officers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines ‘of which Indonesia is the most important’. It recommends increased Special Forces engagement with Southeast Asian nations leading to the establishment of a Special Forces Regional Training Centre in Australia. And in a ground-breaking proposal, it advocates an ‘intensification’ of cooperation with Chinese Special Forces. ‘This would be a confidence-building exercise,’ it says, and would develop through joint humanitarian and military exercises.

In this rearrangement of forces, as our Special Forces add a diplomatic cutting edge to their arsenal, we might well find that our future security—in Paul Keating’s words—is ‘in Asia’ and not ‘from Asia.’

The recent ANU–CSIS paper The ANZUS Alliance in an Ascending Asia is a welcome addition to contemporary thinking on the Australia–US alliance and its prospects over the next couple of decades as China looms ever larger. The even more recent release of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Long-term Macroeconomic Forecasts: Key Trends to 2050 offers a challenging counterpoint to the comfortable policy prescriptions of the ANU–CSIS study.

While it might suit some to dismiss China’s capacity to realise its leadership ambitions, as did the Secretary of PM&C at the Crawford School’s Australian Leadership Forum at the end of June, its growing economic dominance is already affecting the regional strategic balance. And when the relative economic strength of the major global economies is viewed through the lens of demographic change, workforce participation rates, greater capital use efficiency in R&D and adjustments in immigration policies, the mid years of this century look even murkier.

Then there’s the fashionably ignored problem of global warming, which may bring with it significant and adverse security effects, particularly in the riverine deltas and archipelagoes of Asia, with entire communities moving to higher and drier ground. And as the large emerging economies of China and India move away from carbon-intensive energy production, Australia’s relative economic position and associated political throw-weight will decline.

Those combined forces could well stress the alliances that the US already has in place with Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines and Thailand, and may well impact on its alliance with Australia. The ANU–CSIS paper ignores these factors.

The ANU–CSIS paper does, however, provide a useful overview of the ANZUS Treaty, identifying the key political and military developments that have served to support the continuing relevance of the alliance. Curiously, it overlooks what was probably the most profound change to the operation of the alliance— the re-engineering of the operating arrangements at Pine Gap and Nurrungar—which happened on Kim Beazley’s watch as Minister for Defence. Although that was three decades ago, it inaugurated the integrated cooperation paradigm that continues to define the alliance to this day.

The paper correctly acknowledges that the ANZUS alliance, like most defence treaties, was initially threat-based: Australia and New Zealand needed US military assurances if Japan were to rebuild an independent self-defence capability. It doesn’t, however, come to grips with the significance of how the ANZUS alliance has changed since 1951, as shared strategic aims and values have replaced threat as the driving force of the treaty. AUSMIN communiqués since the mid-90s have reflected this fact.

Sadly, what might have worked in the past is no guide to what might work in the future. The paper’s curious language of hubs, spokes, pivots and rebalances suggests a mindset that remains entrenched in the linear strategic concepts of the past. While the US, Australia and New Zealand will continue to coalesce around human, social and political values as the foundation of their long-term strategic relationship, these values are not readily transferable to strategic associations that might be established elsewhere in Asia.

This seems to have escaped the authors of the ANU–CSIS study, especially as they considered the prospective place of both Indonesia and Japan in the evolution of Australian and US strategic interests in Asia. The idea that Indonesia and/or Japan might in some way replace Australia as the US’s preferred strategic partner is ludicrous. What isn’t ludicrous is the interest that the US (and Australia if it can replace a transaction-based Indonesian relationship with an outcomes-based diplomacy) should have in engaging Indonesia and Japan more constructively in the strategic affairs of Asia.

Australia, Indonesia and Japan each bring quite different strengths and benefits to the US as it seeks to secure and manage its global strategic interests. These strengths and benefits are complementary rather than competitive.

The joint US–Australia approach to the emergence of China as a global strategic power cannot rest on some kind of latter-day containment doctrine, or even a policy of constraining China. Nor are the US and Australia in a position to ‘shape’ China’s expectations or ‘permit’ it to take a larger leadership role.

Our joint ability to condescend extends only so far!

Rather, the US and Australia are well positioned to construct a network of intersecting and differentiated relationships that capitalise on the opportunities now on offer in Asia to strengthen and extend a rules-based strategic architecture that engages China, not corrals it. Our collective aim should be to exploit and leverage complexity and ambiguity rather than engage in a form of linear reductionism that misrepresents multi-dimensional strategic opportunities as competitive binary options.

The ANU–CSIS paper questions whether US–China and Australia–China relations might be diverging, but without recognising that difference isn’t necessarily divergence. While the paper implicitly resolves this artificial dichotomy by proposing a return to first principles—what is the regional and global order we seek, and what are the ways and means we have to achieve and sustain that order—it doesn’t answer those questions.

In Australia’s case, the suggestion that some kind of ‘strategic choice’ between Washington and Beijing is inevitable is just another form of the prisoner’s dilemma. Because the nature and dynamics of Australia’s relationships with the US and China are so different, the management of those relationships is much more a question of ‘both/and’ than of ‘either/or’.

The effect of the ANZUS alliance on the strategic evolution of the Asia–Pacific region will ultimately depend on the skill shown by Washington and Canberra in fostering a rules-based regional security architecture supported by economic and trading arrangements that generate prosperity, build resilience and enhance political and social stability. The ANU–CSIS paper has made a start by identifying some of the problems that need to be addressed. But it also reminds us just how much further our joint policy development needs to go.

Getting China right is a key challenge for Australian foreign policy. It’s not easy to do given  our tendency to scare ourselves witless with overblown assessments of Chinese power.

Foreign observers who know China well puzzle about Australian views of the country. Every foreign policy move is assessed for the apparent distress it might cause in Beijing. An Aussie military exercise with America. Won’t the Chinese see that as a provocation? Our Navy needs submarines. Surely that will enrage the People’s Liberation Army? Academics seriously warn us not to get close to Japan and to reduce US alliance ties because these might not play well in Beijing.

In The Australian on Monday Bob Carr warned that we should only ’emphasise the positive’ about China so as not to rouse the dragon.  That was certainly how Carr played his brief time as Foreign Minister.  His diary recounts how he sought to underplay growing defence cooperation with the US at the 2011 AUSMIN meeting in Perth, precisely out of concern that China might object to Marines in Darwin.

The Chinese are astute enough not to regard a few hundred visiting Marines as a dagger pointed at the heart of the Middle Kingdom. But China isn’t beyond toying with our mistaken view that the world hangs on Australian policy decisions.  So it is that every utterance by ambitious PLA senior colonels or reference in People’s Daily editorials is combed by Australian commentators looking for signs that we may have transgressed some Chinese boundary.

The concern to not poke the dragon produces a form of inverse critique of Australian policy moves. For example, at a time of significantly raised tension between China and Japan in 2014, Beijing unilaterally declared an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea. Julie Bishop sensibly said this hurt Australian and regional interests in freedom of air transit. But it’s the Australian reaction rather than the Chinese action that is said by Carr and others to be the miscalculation.

Similarly Tony Abbott is chided for saying that Australia has no better friend in Asia than Japan. He talks of Japan as an ally, an often used description of close partners rather than implying a formal treaty relationship.  In both cases this is criticised by Australian rather than Chinese observers, not because Abbott’s statements are incorrect—he’s right on both counts—but because they might generate negative reaction in Beijing.

After some years of participating in and leading senior Defence talks with PLA counterparts my observation of dealing with Chinese leaders is that they understand very well Australia has a strong alliance relationship with the US and that it won’t be broken by Beijing’s preference that such ‘Cold War alliances’ wither away.

The Chinese understand that the US strategic presence in Asia has been the basis of post-war stability and therefore of Chinese economic growth.  To the extent China has any interest in defence cooperation with Australia it’s because they think our substantially US-sourced technology and intelligence engagement makes the Australian Defence Force a more valuable partner.

Beijing pragmatically acknowledges the value the US alliance delivers to Australia’s role in the  Asia–Pacific.  But as an opportunistic actor, China won’t hesitate to play up to the instincts of Australian commentators always looking for ways to make Canberra rather than Beijing the problem in regional security.

To be clear on this latter point, it’s Beijing (not Canberra) that is constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea. It’s Beijing (not Canberra) that has built a 3000 metre, military-grade runway on one of these islands, located artillery and sensors there and persists in playing risky games of chicken with the ships and aircraft of other countries transiting the region.

Australia’s foreign policy approach to China should articulate and then hold to our view of Australian strategic interests. That will be respected more by Beijing than emphasising only the positive or turning a blind eye to Chinese actions—like declaring the ADIZ or building artificial islands—which raise regional tensions.

An Australian approach based on arguing for our strategic interests has not yet, and is unlikely to damage bilateral ties with Beijing. On the contrary, it makes us look like a country which is predictable, open and knows its own mind.

Contrast this with New Zealand’s approach. Although John Key has done a lot to return New Zealand closer to the US and Australia as defence partners, Wellington’s public diplomacy studiously tries to balance between Chinese and American interests as though there is no meaningful difference between the two countries. New Zealand’s uncomfortable silence when China declared its ADIZ bought it no extra credit in Beijing, beyond a rather contemptuous view that ‘small countries’ should keep their mouths shut on big strategic matters.

It’s pointless to pretend that Chinese interests in the  Asia–Pacific align to the interests of other countries in the region or indeed globally; that’s what makes the ‘disputes’ in the South China Sea so intractable. ASEAN and other countries including Australia failed to identify that Chinese island construction was rapidly moving the problem from one of international legal positions to a far grittier fight over expanding strategic control.

To have any hope of limiting further Chinese opportunistic attempts to create reality on the ground in the South China Sea and elsewhere, we need to take a hard-eyed assessment of our strategic interests. Preemptive capitulation or false attempts to emphasise the positive won’t help in the tough minded contest for power in the region.