ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has launched the Understanding Global Disinformation and Information Operations website alongside this companion paper. The site provides a visual breakdown of the publically-available data from state-linked information operations on social media. ASPI’s Information Operations and Disinformation team has analysed each of the data sets in Twitter’s Information Operations archive to provide a longitudinal analysis of how each state’s willingness, capability and intent has evolved over time. Our analysis demonstrates that there is a proliferation of state actors willing to deploy information operations targeting their own domestic populations, as well as those of their adversaries. We find that Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and Venezuela are the most prolific perpetrators. By making these complex data sets available in accessible form ASPI is broadening meaningful engagement on the challenge of state actor information operations and disinformation campaigns for policymakers, civil society and the international research community
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/14221110/infoops_snap.png4501350nathanhttps://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/10130806/ASPI-Logo.pngnathan2022-03-30 06:00:002024-12-14 22:13:26Understanding Global Disinformation and Information Operations: Insights from ASPI’s new analytic website
Guidance on implementation for Member States of ASEAN
Foreword
Global digital growth is continuing to fundamentally transform the lives of people, businesses and institutions, bringing people out of poverty, increasing wider prosperity, welfare and enabling new ways for governments and citizens to engage with each other. It is also creating a more connected world and supporting globalisation with greater access to free markets, democratic systems, prosperity and innovation.
But as we become more reliant on cyberspace, malicious cyber activity has grown in intensity, complexity and severity over recent years, with rising incidents of cybercrime and hostile states targeting critical national infrastructure, democratic institutions, business and media. There is too much at risk to allow cyberspace to become a lawless world and we need to continue to work together to identify the rules of the road in how international law applies to state behaviour in cyberspace just as it does to activities in other domains.
The 11 norms, as part of the UN framework of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace, is a way to help develop those rules of the road and the UK, as part of our outreach, is committed to supporting partners across all continents be better able to both implement the norms but also be better empowered to join in the international debate in the UN.
This ASPI programme has provided an insight into meaningful measures being put in place across ASEAN to deliver the norms, showcasing the region as trailblazing good practice and policies. Sharing and communicating these is in itself a confidence building measure and the examples shared in this report will have an impact across the global debate.
The UK, as a responsible democratic cyber power is proud to have supported this report and we look forward to future activity in the ASEAN region and globally to help shape the future frontiers of an open and stable international order in cyberspace.
– Will Middleton, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, UK
Advances in cyber and critical technology underpin our future prosperity but they also have the potential to harm national and economic security interests and undermine democratic values and principles. The countries that can harness the current wave of innovation while mitigating its risks will gain significant economic, political and security advantages and will be at the forefront of 21st century leadership.
As states increasingly exert power and influence in cyberspace, it is important that there are clear rules in place. In other words, cyberspace is not the Wild West, all countries have agreed that existing international law applies in cyberspace and all countries have endorsed UN norms of responsible state behaviour.
The Plan of Action to Implement the ASEAN Australia Strategic Partnership 2020–2024 details our joint commitment to an open, secure, stable, accessible and peaceful ICT environment. Australia will continue to work closely with our ASEAN partners to deepen understanding and implementation of longstanding agreements of international law and norms in cyberspace.
This report, produced by APSI in partnership with Australia’s Cyber and Critical Technology Cooperation Program and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, is the result of a multi-year cyber-capacity building program focused on supporting the effective implementation of UN norms throughout ASEAN.
These 11 norms lay the groundwork for collective expectations for state behaviour in cyberspace. They are the bedrock on which regional and bilateral agreements around state behaviour in cyberspace are built and create a mutually reinforcing set of agreements and expectations.
Australia is grateful for ASPI’s tireless work on this important cyber-capacity building project helping to kickstart the process of understand and actioning the norms and behaviours which are central to an open, free, safe and secure cyberspace.
– Dr Tobias Feakin, Ambassador for Cyber Affairs and Critical Technology, Australia
Introduction
This document is the result of a multi-year cyber capacity-building program by ASPI in partnership with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Cyber and Critical Technology Cooperation Program). Through the project, the partners sought to support member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with the implementation of the United Nations (UN) norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. The content of this publication is primarily based on experiences, inputs and outputs from activities run under this program.
What are norms?
Norms in international affairs are generally defined as ‘a collective expectation for the proper behaviour of actors with a given identity’.
Norms are norms for the following reasons:
They are widely shared and agreed among a large group of states; norms exist only because we all believe they exist and apply.
They exert a moral attractiveness for states to conform to norms; states prefer to be seen to endorse, follow and promote norms, and to be responsible members of the international community.
They assign specific duties and obligations, albeit non-legal, for specific actors; most norms in cyberspace are regulative in character at the national level, as they recommend that states prescribe, prohibit or permit certain activities.
They are dynamic; they develop as expectations and opinions in society about what’s responsible and acceptable change over time.
People, organisations and states will—from time to time—contest or violate norms; this doesn’t mean that a norm does not exist as long as the norm remains accepted by a large and influential enough community, and the violator is held to account.
Source: Based on Martha Finnemore, Cybersecurity and the concept of norms, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 30 November 2017, pp. 1–2.
The UN norms were first agreed by a UN group of governmental experts in 2015. The group’s report was subsequently endorsed by consensus at the UN General Assembly in 2015 through resolution 70/237. It called on all member states ‘to be guided in their use of ICTs’ by the 2015 report. The focus on the operationalisation and implementation of the UN norms was also front and centre in the 2019–2021 round of UN First Committee negotiations. The report of the OEWG recommended that states ‘further support the implementation and development of norms’. The 2021 UNGGE report offers an additional layer of understanding to help governments with their implementation.
In 2018, the ASEAN leaders expressed a commitment to operationalise the UN norms as a core element in ASEAN’s approach to promoting regional stability in cyberspace. That same year, the ASEAN ministers responsible for cybersecurity subscribed in principle to the norms. At the 2019 ASEAN Ministerial Conference on Cybersecurity, they agreed to establish a working committee to develop a framework for implementation.
Participants reaffirmed the importance of a rules-based cyberspace as an enabler of economic progress and betterment of living standards,and agreed in-principle that international law, voluntary and non-binding norms of State behaviour, and practical confidence building measures are essential for stability and predictability in cyberspace.
– Chairman’s statement of the third ASEAN Ministerial Conference on Cybersecurity, 2018.
In compiling this document, ASPI intends to contribute to the ongoing UN and ASEAN working groups, and offer participants region-specific perspectives based on real and observed examples of good practice. The information was gathered through various regional workshops and training activities that took place between 2019 and 2021, and supplemented with open-source research.
This document consists of two main parts:
An explanation of the norms implementation process.
Practical guidance on implementation with examples from the ASEAN region.
Each government is responsible for its own pathway to implementation and for informing other states of its efforts. Expectations of national and regional implementation will alter as states start to focus on local implementation and as understanding of the norms’ meaning grows.
This document should help kickstart that process of understanding and actioning. It should be considered a living document that supports a gradually maturing regional approach.
This document will help policymakers and state officials answer questions such as:
What examples can governments consider to demonstrate their efforts in implementing the UN norms?
How can a state demonstrate that it is implementing and following the UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace?
Where can a state find advice, assistance and support to advance further implementation efforts?
PART A – THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS EXPLAINED
Part A: the implementation process explained
In this first part of the document, the process for implementation of the UN cyber norms is explained. It starts with a clarification of the concept of international norms, how the cyber norms work and what practical steps make up an implementation effort. Examples of mechanisms and tools to demonstrate implementation efforts are also provided. At the end, we elaborate on the reasons why states would want to make an effort to implement the UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.
Full text of the UN cyber norms
Consistent with the purposes of the United Nations, including to maintain international peace and security, States should cooperate in developing and applying measures to increase stability and security in the use of ICTs and to prevent ICT practices that are acknowledged to be harmful or that may pose threats to international peace and security;
In case of ICT incidents, States should consider all relevant information, including the larger context of the event, the challenges of attribution in the ICT environment and the nature and extent of the consequences;
States should not knowingly allow their territory to be used for internationally wrongful acts using ICTs;
States should consider how best to cooperate to exchange information, assist each other, prosecute terrorist and criminal use of ICTs and implement other cooperative measures to address such threats. States may need to consider whether new measures need to be developed in this respect;
States, in ensuring the secure use of ICTs, should respect Human Rights Council resolutions 20/8 and 26/13 on the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet, as well as General Assembly resolutions 68/167 and 69/166 on the right to privacy in the digital age, to guarantee full respect for human rights, including the right to freedom of expression;
A State should not conduct or knowingly support ICT activity contrary to its obligations under international law that intentionally damages critical infrastructure or otherwise impairs the use and operation of critical infrastructure to provide services to the public;
States should take appropriate measures to protect their critical infrastructure from ICT threats, taking into account General Assembly resolution 58/199 on the creation of a global culture of cybersecurity and the protection of critical information infrastructures, and other relevant resolutions;
States should respond to appropriate requests for assistance by another State whose critical infrastructure is subject to malicious ICT acts. States should also respond to appropriate requests to mitigate malicious ICT activity aimed at the critical infrastructure of another State emanating from their territory, taking into account due regard for sovereignty;
States should take reasonable steps to ensure the integrity of the supply chain so that end users can have confidence in the security of ICT products. States should seek to prevent the proliferation of malicious ICT tools and techniques and the use of harmful hidden functions;
States should encourage responsible reporting of ICT vulnerabilities and share associated information on available remedies to such vulnerabilities to limit and possibly eliminate potential threats to ICTs and ICTdependent infrastructure;
States should not conduct or knowingly support activity to harm the information systems of the authorized emergency response teams (sometimes known as computer emergency response teams or cybersecurity incident response teams) of another State. A State should not use authorized emergency response teams to engage in malicious international activity.
What are the UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace?
The UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace (Figure 1) are 11 voluntary and non-binding rules that describe what states should and should not be doing in cyberspace.
Figure 1: The UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace
The content of the 11 norms reflects the expectations that the broader international community has of each state and regional organisation.1 They express a common opinion of what is considered to be responsible behaviour by states. Naturally, this collective opinion of what is responsible and what is irresponsible behaviour develops over time as understanding of cybersecurity deepens, incidents occur, and more governments contribute to the process.
The purposes of the norms as reflected in UNGA Resolution 70/237 are to reduce risks to international peace and security, and to contribute to conflict prevention.2 They have been crafted to deal with state-to-state actions that could potentially carry the highest risks to international peace and security and the welfare of citizens.
Norms in international affairs are political agreements. They do not infringe on a state’s sovereignty or impose legal obligations on states.3 In fact, the norms provide a common basis for a state to design strategic direction, develop capabilities and execute actions in a responsible manner.
The UN norms process
International efforts to establish norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace concentrate around the work of two groups: the UNGGE and the OEWG.
The first UN group of governmental experts convened between 2004 and 2005, and a sixth round of negotiations concluded in 2021. Four rounds concluded with consensus reports, in 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2021. The OEWG was first established in 2019, and a second round has commenced in 2021 for a period of five years.
The UNGGE and OEWG are predominantly intergovernmental negotiation processes with—at times—opportunities for consultations with non-government organisations and civil society. Those consultations have, however, a non-official character.
The UN cyber groups
UN Group of Governmental Experts (UNGGE) on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security
UN Group of Governmental Experts (UNGGE) on Advancing responsible state behaviour in cyberspace in the context of international security
2019-21
UN Open-ended working group (UN OEWG) on developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security
2019-21 ֍ 2021-25
Member states of ASEAN have been participating in all the meetings of the UNGGE and the OEWG that have convened since 2004. Figure 5 shows ASEAN member states’ participation in the UNGGE and OEWG since 2004. Stars indicate a country’s membership of the UNGGE, and its active participation in the OEWG as determined by written submissions or oral statements.
Figure 5: ASEAN member states’ participation in UN norms processes 2004-2021.
Notes: * Although Brunei has not participated in the UNGGE or the OEWG, it did offer a national views document in 2017; it was the first ASEAN member state to do so. # Although Vietnam did not offer written submissions or made any statements, representatives formally attended OEWG meetings in New York.
In parallel to the UN-facilitated intergovernmental negotiation processes, various multistakeholder and other government-led initiatives have formed too. Examples include:
Cyber Tech Accord: a commitment of 150+ companies to work together and follow a set of principles that seeks to protect and empower users and customers
Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace: a multistakeholder commitment to work together to reduce risks to the stability of cyberspace and to build up confidence, capacity and trust
Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of ICTs: a proposal by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s six member countries for an international code of conduct
World Wide Web Foundation Contract for the Web: an internet community-led initiative to advance principles of accessibility, affordability, availability and rights-based principles of respect for human rights and privacy for all in the operations of the internet.
What do norms do?
Norms typically codify existing state practice. The UN norms, as introduced in UNGA Resolution 70/237, set the standards of what the international community considers responsible on the basis of observed behaviour by state actors in the past and currently. With these agreed norms, activities and intentions of states can be subjected to assessments. States can be complimented on their response to an incident, or national practices can be heralded as global good practice. Also, states can be reprimanded if they haven’t done enough to prevent an incident, or if they have used cyber capabilities in an irresponsible manner.
In practice, governments will use international norms, such the UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace, in three ways:
To serve as a point of reference to reassure other states of their good intentions and to demonstrate that they are constructive members of the international community.
To serve as a point of reference to guide national cybersecurity policy and national cybersecurity investments.
To serve as a point of reference to hold other actors responsible for behaviour that is not in line with the UN norms for responsible state behaviour.
Governments that embrace the UN norms and can report on their efforts contribute to predictability, trust and confidence in cyberspace.
How do norms work?
The implementation of internationally agreed political agreements is always challenging. As they have been crafted through an intergovernmental negotiation process, their language and terminology can be ambiguous. For that reason and in the absence of an overall blueprint, it is important that states find their own way and form their own view and approach to embracing the UN’s normative framework.
Figure 2: The four components that make up the UN framework of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.
The 11 norms should be seen in their entirety and not as a ‘pick-and-choose’ menu. It is important that governments review their efforts in a comprehensive manner covering aspects that touch on issues of national (cyber)security, security of ICTs as well as on constructive inter-state relations.
Furthermore, governments need to keep in mind that the 11 norms are part of a broader framework that also includes the recognition that international law applies to state conduct in cyberspace, a set of confidence-building measures and a commitment to coordinated capacity building.4 Together, those four components make up the UN framework of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace (Figure 2).
In general, the more states show commitment to the norms and actively engage in their implementation, the more robust the norms become and the more compelling the call for compliance becomes.
What does the implementation of international norms involve?
States can demonstrate their implementation of international norms of behaviour in various ways (see figure 3). Typically, implementation occurs at three different levels: at the level of political endorsement, national laws and policies, and actions on the ground (Figure 3).
First, political endorsement can be demonstrated, for example, through voting in favour of relevant resolutions at the UN General Assembly, by subscribing to ASEAN leaders’ statements and by (prime) ministerial statements.
Second, states can integrate or internalise norms (explicitly or implicitly) in national legal frameworks, strategies and national policies.
Third, a state can demonstrate implementation by referring to its government practices in the form of its institutional capabilities, doctrine and procedures, and actions. Those practices can offer de facto evidence of a state’s effort to follow norms of responsible behaviour, as they demonstrate an ability and willingness to act.
Implementation of international norms of responsible state behaviour
Figure 3: A framework for the implementation of norms. Source: The author.
Responsibility for the implementation of the UN norms rests with governments. In practice, however, meaningful implementation will rely on individual governments’ ability and willingness to consult and collaborate with industry, civil society organisations, the internet technical community and academia, and on governments’ ability to ensure a whole-of-government approach.
Meaningful implementation requires the involvement of multiple stakeholders and a whole-of-government approach.
For the purpose of including views, expertise and capabilities of non-government stakeholders, mechanisms such as a national action plan or a national road map are proven methods that help build a national or whole-of-economy approach to cybersecurity.
A National Action Plan is an effective method to form an integrated approach to implementation.
What’s a trajectory for the implementation of norms?
Building a national approach to cybersecurity let alone the implementation of the UN norms is neither straightforward nor instant. Typically, stakeholders go through a step-by-step process of gradually increasing their understanding, maturity and comfort with the topic (see figure 4).
A first step is to build awareness across the government of its international responsibilities. This could be achieved through a dedicated training program or awareness campaign on the UN norms.
This should lay the foundation for a cross-governmental recognition that the government is committed to the UN’s normative approach and is willing to be guided by it in its national and international cybersecurity activities.
What follows could be an assessment of where the country stands in its implementation efforts. Such a baseline assessment could be done by a third party or through a whole-of-government mapping process. Figure 4: A step-by-step process towards implementation.
The outcome of the baseline assessment will inform the government of its strengths and areas for improvement.
This could then lead to domestic investments in particular areas of cybersecurity, to requesting assistance from the global cyber capacity-building community, or to offers of expertise to others.
At the end of these steps, one can presume a state to be implementing the UN norms commensurate with its own means and capabilities.
The implementation of norms is a dynamic process that evolves as a country’s maturity in cybersecurity grows over time. At the same time, it’s unlikely that any state will ever reach a state of ‘full implementation’, just as no state will ever be 100% cybersecure.
How can governments demonstrate implementation?
For the purpose of the UN norms (to reduce risks to international peace and security, and to contribute to conflict prevention), it is critical that states demonstrate what they’re doing and what they intend to do. Therefore, documenting and reporting are critical in implementation.
There are several ways for states to make their views, achievements and known capacity shortfalls known.
1. Reporting through the UN Secretary-General
On regular occasions, the UN Secretary-General invites member states to share their views and assessments (see figure 6). Governments can share their ‘general appreciation of the issues of information security; efforts taken at the national level to strengthen information security and promote international cooperation in this field; the content of concepts such as the application of international law; and possible measures that could be taken by the international community to strengthen information security at the global level’.
Figure 6: UN member states’ views and assessments
2. Submissions through UN working groups
As part of the ongoing OEWG process, member states are encouraged to provide written submissions or statements to the working group. The statements are shared by the UN Secretariat to other member states, the chair(s) and non-government stakeholders. States are also encouraged to participate in a UN-facilitated survey of their national efforts and experiences.
3. ASEAN Regional Forum
The ARF’s semi-annual Inter-Sessional Meeting on ICT Security offers participants an opportunity to exchange their views on the regional and global ICT landscape and their efforts and initiatives. For the ARF’s annual security outlook, member countries are asked to submit a contribution that includes a section for ‘cyber/ICT security’.
4. Recognition by third party/ies
A state can engage third-party organisations to perform an external assessment and prepare a report. This could be done through a capacity-building relationship, such as ASPI’s national norms implementation reports (see figure 7). ASEAN member states can also make use of their academic and think-tank organisations such as those represented in ASEAN–ISIS and the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP).
Figure 7: ASPI national norms implementation reports
Why would states make an effort to implement the UN cyber norms?
There are a few reasons why states would make the effort to implement international norms, such as the UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.
Cyber resilience. By following the recommendations from the norms and through acts of implementation, States are effectively strengthening their national cybersecurity maturity. Therefore, implementation of the norms is directly contributing to a nation’s ability to protect against malicious cyber activity, reduce exposure to risks and vulnerabilities in ICTs, and respond to malicious ICT activity.
International credibility. Most states want to be, and be seen as, responsible members of the international community. Showing demonstrable support for norms of responsible behaviour adds to a country’s international and regional credibility. Domestically, the implementation of international norms helps governments provide direction to their national cybersecurity policy and developments.
Contribute to norm-setting. The effective demonstration of implementation allows states to shape the common opinion of what is and what is not considered responsible behaviour of states and ensure that international expectations align with the local and regional context.
Reassurance, accountability and transparency. In a situation in which a large enough group of states can show demonstrable implementation of the UN norms, each within its own means and capabilities and within its national and regional context, a global environment is created in which states can be reassured of each other’s willingness and ability to prevent unnecessary tensions and unintended conflict. Altogether, this adds to the accountability and transparency of state activities in cyberspace.
PART B – PRACTICAL GUIDANCE ON IMPLEMENTATION, WITH EXAMPLES FROM THE ASEAN REGION
To read part B, please download the full report here.
ASPI’s Bart Hogeveen provides a brief overview of the project.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge contributions by officials and participants working with the governments of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Our particular appreciation goes to:
the Department of Foreign Affairs, Department of ICT, Office of the President and the National Security Council, the Philippines
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Badan Siber dan Sandi Negara, Indonesia
the Ministry of Information and Communications, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Diplomatic Academy Vietnam, Vietnam
the National Cybersecurity Agency, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and CyberSecurity Malaysia, Malaysia
In addition, the author is indebted to contributions from Dr Fitriani, Ms Farlina Said, Dr Moonyati Yetid, Mr Eugene Tan, Mr Ben Ang and the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise and support from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and their embassies and high commissions in Southeast Asia.
This publication is the output of a project funded by the UK Government and the Australian Government (Cyber and Critical Technology Cooperation Program). More information can be found at https://www.aspi.org.au/cybernorms. The views expressed in this work are not necessarily those of the UK or Australian governments or of the participating governments. The author is responsible for its content, any views expressed or mistakes.
What is ASPI?
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute was formed in 2001 as an independent, non‑partisan think tank. Its core aim is to provide the Australian Government with fresh ideas on Australia’s defence, security and strategic policy choices. ASPI is responsible for informing the public on a range of strategic issues, generating new thinking for government and harnessing strategic thinking internationally.
ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) is a leading voice in global debates on cyber, emerging and critical technologies and issues related to information and foreign interference and focuses on the impacts those issues have on broader strategic policy. The centre has a growing mixture of expertise and skills and teams of researchers who concentrate on policy, technical analysis, information operations and disinformation, critical and emerging technologies, cyber capacity building, satellite analysis, surveillance and China-related issues. The ICPC informs public debate in the Indo-Pacific region and supports public policy development by producing original, empirical, data-driven research. The ICPC enriches regional debates by collaborating with research institutes from around the world and by bringing leading global experts to Australia, including through fellowships. To develop capability in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region, the ICPC has a capacity-building team that conducts workshops, training programs and large-scale exercises for the public and private sectors.
Important disclaimer
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.
This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, micro-copying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher. Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.
First published February 2022.
Funding support for this publication was provided by the UK and Australian governments.
UN General Assembly, Group of Government Experts on Developments in the field of ICTs in the context of international security, A/70/174, 22 July 2015, paragraph 10. ↩︎
UN General Assembly, Group of Government Experts on Advancing responsible state behaviour in cyberspace in the context of international security, A/76/135, 14 July 2021, paragraph 15; UN General Assembly, Open-ended working group on developments in the field of ICTs in the context of international security, A/75/816, 18 March 2021, paragraph 24. ↩︎
UN General Assembly, Group of Government Experts on Developments in the field of ICTs in the context of international security, A/70/174, 22 July 2015, paragraphs 26-28. ↩︎
It is important to distinguish between ‘norms of responsible state behaviour’ (that is, the UN norms) and what are called ‘norms of international law’. In this document, the term ‘norms’ refers only to the former. ↩︎
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/14143838/CYBER-NORMS.png5051524nathanhttps://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/10130806/ASPI-Logo.pngnathan2022-03-22 06:00:002025-03-14 14:39:48The UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace
This brief report explores the challenge of producing policy-relevant China research and analysis. Policy-relevant research is defined as work that drives action, affects decision-making, or both. It’s the kind of research think tanks seek to do, bridging the gap between academia and civil servants who work on policy.
This paper focuses on two key findings:
There’s a distinction between conducting policy-relevant research and the process of disseminating it in a way that will effectively shape and influence the policy process in particular places by particular policy- and decision-makers. In practice, the difference between the two isn’t always clearly understood and perhaps not clearly taught.
There’s limited training that prepares the China analytical community to deal with the challenges of producing policy-relevant research under conditions of restricted access to China. Researchers require more support in navigating the research environment and filling skill-set gaps.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/14223233/China-research-and-analysis_banner-Feb22.jpg4501350nathanhttps://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/10130806/ASPI-Logo.pngnathan2022-02-28 06:00:002024-12-14 22:34:46Producing policy-relevant China research and analysis in an era of strategic competition
Domestic telecommunications companies assist law enforcement by the lawful interception of otherwise private communications when presented with a valid warrant.
This has been a powerful tool to combat crime. In the 2019–20 financial year, for example, 3,677 new warrants for telecommunications interception were issued, and information gained through interception warrants was used in 2,685 arrests, 5,219 prosecutions and 2,652 convictions. That was in the context of 43,189 custodial sentences in the same year.
But law enforcement and security officials assert that the usefulness of ‘exceptional access’, as it’s called in this paper, has declined over time as strong encryption has become increasingly common.
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Director-General Michael Burgess has stated that encryption ‘damages intelligence coverage’ in 97% of ASIO’s priority counter-intelligence cases.
The problem of increasingly powerful encryption degrading the usefulness of exceptional access is often referred to as ‘going dark’.
The Australian Government has committed to the reform of Australia’s electronic surveillance legislative framework.5 Although its discussion paper mentions encryption only in passing,6 we can expect that encryption and going dark will be a topic of debate as reform is considered. This paper contributes to that debate by examining how firms that provide digital communications services can provide assistance to law enforcement even as strong encryption is increasingly common.
Although exceptional access is primarily concerned with evidence collection, it may be better in some cases to focus on crime prevention, when it comes to achieving society’s broader aim of safety and security. This may be especially true for serious offences that cause significant harms to individuals, such as child exploitation and terrorism.
Accordingly, in this paper I divide assistance to law enforcement into two broad types:
Building communications services so that criminal harm and abuse that occur on the service can be detected and addressed, or doesn’t even occur in the first place. Examples of harms that might be avoided include cyberbullying or child exploitation that occur online.
Assisting law enforcement with exceptional access for crimes that are unrelated to the communications service. Examples of such crimes might include an encrypted messaging service being used to organise drug smuggling or corruption.
I start by exploring the justification for exceptional access and then examine how encryption has affected assistance to law enforcement, as well as the differences between transport encryption and end-to-end (E2E) encryption and the implications those differences have for law enforcement.
I examine encryption trends and discuss the costs and benefits of exceptional access schemes.
I then examine some of the approaches that can be used by service providers to provide these two different forms of assistance as E2E encryption becomes increasingly common. I also summarise some of the advantages and disadvantages of those different approaches.
A number of initiatives seek to embed safety and security into the design, development and deployment of services. They encourage industry to take a proactive and preventive approach to user safety and seek to balance and effectively manage privacy, safety and security requirements. Those initiatives have relatively few big-picture privacy or security drawbacks, but there are many issues on which there isn’t yet consensus on how to design platforms safely. Such initiatives may also need extensive resources for employee trust and safety teams.
Providing law enforcement access to E2E encrypted systems is very challenging. Proposals that allow access bring with them some potentially significant risks that exceptional access mechanisms will be abused by malicious actors.
Watch the launch webinar here.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/14221637/IP58-End-to-End-Encryption_banner.jpg4501350nathanhttps://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/10130806/ASPI-Logo.pngnathan2022-02-23 06:00:002025-03-06 17:02:07The future of assistance to law enforcement in an end-to-end encrypted world
Opportunities for Australia–India cooperation to support the region in the post-Covid-19 context
What’s the problem?
Covid-19 and the subsequent public-health responses have disrupted social and economic lives across the globe. Fiscal support measures may have alleviated the initial fallout in some places, but one of the bigger shocks has been the accelerated adoption and integration of and reliance on digital technologies. While this is a positive contribution towards digital development, it has also accentuated the already large gap between those able to adopt digital technologies and those without sufficient means to do so.
For the many fragile democracies in the Indo-Pacific, this is creating conditions that could undermine democratic resilience. A central question for these democratic governments is how to drive accelerating digital transformation and ICT-enabled growth towards poverty reduction, sustainable economic growth and building social cohesion while maintaining resilience to cybersecurity threats.
Southeast Asians are exceptional consumers of online goods and services. The region is also home to a growing number of technology start-ups, and governments are pushing this ‘drive for digital’ through ambitious national strategies. Despite those positives, digital growth within the region and within individual economies is uneven.
Human capital is a central driver of poverty reduction, sustainable growth and social cohesion,1 but, in Southeast Asia, digital literacy and skills are lagging behind usage and infrastructure. The adoption of technology is progressing, but problems of affordability, connectivity and coverage remain. There’s a limit to the growth trajectory due to weak demand from micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) that don’t have the means, skills or opportunities to adopt or integrate digital technologies.
This is particularly affecting the livelihoods of non-metropolitan communities, women, MSMEs and those whose jobs may be affected by the introduction of technology and automation.
The digital divide and rising inequality are now the everyday bromides of earnest policymakers. But the phrases have become policy cliches, stripped of meaning, with no sense of the underlying dynamics at play, making the prospects for any viable solutions slim. The Covid-19 pandemic has offered a harsh look at the role of the digital divide in driving inequality and the unedifying future that lies ahead as major technological advances compound and permanently entrench inequality. — Huong Le Thu, ‘Investing in Southeast Asia’s tech future’, in The Sydney Dialogue: playbook, 20212
Since the outbreak of Covid-19 in early 2020, digital adoption has further accelerated and driven greater demand for online services in retail, education and health. However, the pandemic has also contributed to the further widening of pre-existing digital divides. Women have been disproportionately affected, as many are employed in the informal and ‘gig economy’ sectors, which were hit hard by lockdowns. The pandemic has also further exposed more users to cybersecurity and online safety risks in an environment in which practices of cyber hygiene are generally poor.
As a result, the region is now faced with a dual transformation challenge: how can we stimulate further digital development while ensuring that future growth is inclusive?
What’s the solution?
This report recommends Australia and India leverage their bilateral partnership in cyber and critical technologies to support inclusive digital development in Southeast Asia, and strengthen the foundations of Southeast Asia’s digital economy.
The governments of Australia and India should take a more coordinated approach to their digital engagements with Southeast Asian countries, and further consider establishing a Joint Working Group on Digital Engagement to bring together like-minded partners.
Given that India and Australia face digital development challenges that are similar to Southeast Asia, an Australia-India spearheaded cooperation should be approached through a troika-type collaboration with Southeast Asian partners. This collaboration should look to address the region’s digital skills shortage, improve cyber resilience and contribute to digital public infrastructure. This requires a multi-stakeholder effort involving governments, the private sector, civil society and the technical community.
A priority area for additional support are efforts that enhance the digital knowledge and digital business skills of the Southeast Asian workforce. International initiatives should seek to augment or connect with existing local digital skilling programs. Specific areas of focus for Australia and India could include support to female digital entrepreneurship, and improvement of access to online courses and training to upskill MSMEs.
To improve cyber resilience operationally, Australia and India could strengthen and deepen relationships with Southeast Asia’s national cybersecurity agencies and national Computer Emergency Response Teams by exploring ways to share collective resources, expertise and experiences more effectively and more widely across each country’s economic sectors and non-metro areas.
At a strategic level, through the Australia-India Joint Working Group on Cyber Security Cooperation, the two countries could consider the possibility of sharing strategic assessments of the regional cyber threat landscape with Southeast Asian partners.
Finally, India and Australia should explore regional marketplaces for digital public goods and infrastructure which could offer further business incentives to digital, technology and cybersecurity communities in Australia, India and Southeast Asia.
Introduction
Southeast Asia is home to one of the world’s fastest growing markets of internet users. Pre-pandemic, there was enormous optimism about the growth of Southeast Asia’s digital economy. Estimates from 2019 showed a trajectory that would triple its US$100 billion internet economy by 2025.3 During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the region’s internet economy gained more traction, and even achieved double-figure growth in Vietnam and Indonesia.4
Today, the region continues to struggle with new and more contagious variants of the virus, as the majority of the region’s population remains unvaccinated.5 Economic hardship, overburdened health systems and, in some cases, repressive public-order responses are posing challenges to political stability and societal resilience. As a consequence, when combined with the effects of climate change, there’s uncertainty about the long-term economic and social effects and the shape and speed of economic recovery.
Digital technologies6 are playing an integral part not just for contact tracing or getting public-health messages out into the community but also as a driving force for post-pandemic economic recovery. For years, governments in Southeast Asia have been pursuing ambitious digital transformation agendas that have laid a foundation for their emerging digital economies. In a post-Covid world, international partnerships of governments, industry and civil society organisations, such as between India, Australia and Southeast Asia, could form a key element in the region’s digital economic recovery and help set digital standards and norms.
Focusing on Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, which are some of the region’s largest and emerging technology-enabled economies, this report explores what efforts can be made by an Australia–India collaboration to support Southeast Asia’s digital capacity and resilience in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. Collaboration between Australia and India in the area of cyber and critical technology is an emerging partnership that brings opportunities for strengthening both countries’ digital cooperation with Southeast Asian partners.
What are the digital economy, digital transformation and Industry 4.0?
There’s no agreed definition or framework that defines the digital economy. Different frameworks highlight, to varying degrees, macro policy foundations (such as competition, trade, governance), digital enablers (infrastructure, platform policies, skills, finance) and sectoral transformation (such as ICT applications in key economic sectors such as public services).7
Digital economy frameworks rarely consider the whole digital ecosystem and its interaction with the rest of the economy. The Asian Development Bank, for instance, has introduced the term ‘core digital economy’,8 which it defines as the contribution to GDP of any economic transaction involving both digital products and digital industries. In this report, we also consider wider aspects within the digital economy, including gender and inclusion.
Digital transformation refers to the process of moving from analogue to digital processes, integrating technology into working processes and, in its most advanced stages, doing so under the guidance of a strategy.
Industry 4.0 or the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ (4IR) refers to the application in industry of the convergence of physical and digital technologies. This can include artificial intelligence, machine learning, ‘internet of things’ (IoT) devices, advanced robotics, augmented reality, cloud computing, big data and analytics, and 3D printing.
The first section of the report reviews the enablers and attendant challenges of Southeast Asia’s digital economy, such as the supply of infrastructure, demand for digital services and general uptake of technology by individuals and businesses. In addition, it looks at intersecting policy issues that enable, support and sustain digital transformation, such as inclusivity; skills and talent; online security and safety; and regulations and governance. It then touches upon the region’s adoption of advanced technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) that could equally be enablers of the region’s next leap in digital transformation.
The second section offers an overview of the pandemic’s effects on Southeast Asia’s digital landscape. Although there’s been continued investment into digital infrastructure, it shows there are fundamental weaknesses in the rate of digital growth within MSMEs.
The third section looks at a troika type of collaboration between India, Southeast Asia and Australia. As the digital development challenges faced by Southeast Asia are equally relevant to Australia and India, we provide a selection of relevant skills, expertise and flagship programs that India and Australia could contribute to the region in a common effort to adapt to a digital future that’s free, open and secure.
Finally, this report concludes with a set of policy recommendations for Australia and India on areas in which they could extend meaningful and targeted support to Southeast Asia’s digital economic recovery.
Download Report
This report continues with chapters on;
The state of digital Southeast Asia in 2021
The impact of Covid-19 on Southeast Asia’s digital landscape
India-Australia and cyber and technology cooperation in Southeast Asia
ASPI and ORF would thank all of those who peer reviewed drafts of this report, including Arindrajit Basu and Akshay Mathur, for their valuable feedback. We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of Baani Grewal, Samyak Leekha, Antara Vats, Ariel Bogle, Karly Winkler and Albert Zhang to this report. We are also grateful to the individuals consulted across government, industry and academia, including participants at the Southeast Asia Internet Governance Forum and the ASPI-ORF-hosted Track 1.5 Dialogue on Digital Southeast Asia that helped to shape and focus this report.
This report was commissioned by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). The work of ASPI ICPC wouldn’t be possible without the support of our partners and sponsors across governments, industry and civil society.
A draft of this report was shared with DFAT and valuable comments were incorporated, but, as with all our research, ASPI remains fully independent in the editorial judgements and policy recommendations made by our authors.
About the Observer Research Foundation
ORF seeks to lead and aid policy thinking towards building a strong and prosperous India in a fair and equitable world. It sees India as a country poised to play a leading role in the knowledge age—a role in which it shall be increasingly called upon to proactively ideate in order to shape global conversations, even as India sets course along its own trajectory of long-term sustainable growth. ORF helps discover and inform India’s choices. It carries Indian voices and ideas to forums shaping global debates. It provides non-partisan, independent, well-researched analyses and inputs to diverse decision-makers in governments, business communities and academia and to civil society around the world. Our mandate is to conduct in-depth research, provide inclusive platforms and invest in tomorrow’s thought leaders today. ORF’s website is at https://www.orfonline.org/.
What is ASPI?
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute was formed in 2001 as an independent, non‑partisan think tank. Its core aim is to provide the Australian Government with fresh ideas on Australia’s defence, security and strategic policy choices. ASPI is responsible for informing the public on a range of strategic issues, generating new thinking for government and harnessing strategic thinking internationally. ASPI’s sources of funding are identified in our annual report, online at www.aspi.org.au and in the acknowledgements section of individual publications. ASPI remains independent in the content of the research and in all editorial judgements.
ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) is a leading voice in global debates on cyber, emerging and critical technologies, issues related to information and foreign interference and focuses on the impact these issues have on broader strategic policy. The centre has a growing mixture of expertise and skills with teams of researchers who concentrate on policy, technical analysis, information operations and disinformation, critical and emerging technologies, cyber capacity building, satellite analysis, surveillance and China-related issues.
The ICPC informs public debate in the Indo-Pacific region and supports public policy development by producing original, empirical, data-driven research. The ICPC enriches regional debates by collaborating with research institutes from around the world and by bringing leading global experts to Australia, including through fellowships. To develop capability in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region, the ICPC has a capacity building team that conducts workshops, training programs and large-scale exercises for the public and private sectors.
We would like to thank all of those who support and contribute to the ICPC with their time, intellect and passion for the topics we work on. If you would like to support the work of the centre please contact: icpc@aspi.org.au
Important disclaimer
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.
This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers. Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.
First published February 2022. ISSN 2209-9689 (online). ISSN 2209-9670 (print). Cover image: Wes Mountain.
Funding Statement: Funding support for this publication was provided by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
World Bank, The Human Capital Index 2020 update: human capital in the time of COVID-19, World Bank, Washington DC, 2020, online. ↩︎
Huong Le Thu, ‘Investing in Southeast Asia’s tech future’, in: Fergus Hanson, Danielle Cave, Madeleine Nyst (eds), The Sydney Dialogue: playbook, ASPI, Canberra, 19 November 2021, online. ↩︎
Google, Temasek, Bain & Company, e-Conomy SEA 2019, 2019, online; Cybersecurity in ASEAN: an urgent call to action, AT Kearney, 2018, online. ↩︎
‘Share of people vaccinated against COVID-19, Jan 18, 2022’, Our World in Data, 2022, online. ↩︎
‘Digital technologies’ refers to the electronic tools, systems, devices and resources that generate, store or process data. Their use requires a level of understanding of how information and communication technologies work and a degree of skill to engage with and create technology applications. ↩︎
Nagy K Hanna, ‘Assessing the digital economy: aims, frameworks, pilots, results, and lessons’, Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2020, 9(16), online. ↩︎
Asian Development Bank (ADB), Capturing the digital economy: a proposed measurement framework and its applications—a special supplement to Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2021, ADB, Manila, August 2021, online. ↩︎
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/14153918/pb57-DigitalSEAsia_banner.jpg8231588nathanhttps://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/10130806/ASPI-Logo.pngnathan2022-02-10 06:00:002025-03-14 15:44:17Digital Southeast Asia
In line with previous Agenda for Change publications from 2016 and 2019, this piece is being released in anticipation of a federal election as a guide for the next government within its first months and over the full term. Our 2022 agenda acknowledges that an economically prosperous and socially cohesive Australia is a secure and resilient Australia.
ASPI’s Agenda for change 2019: strategic choices for the next government did, to a great extent, imagine a number of those challenges, including in Peter Jennings’ chapter on ‘The big strategic issues’. But a lot has changed since 2019. It was hard to imagine the dislocating impacts of the Black Summer fires, Covid-19 in 2020 and then the Delta and Omicron strains in 2021, trade coercion from an increasingly hostile China, or the increasingly uncertain security environment.
Fast forward to today and that also applies to the policies and programs we need to position us in a more uncertain and increasingly dangerous world.
Our Agenda for change 2022 acknowledges that what might have served us well in the past won’t serve us well in this world of disruption. In response, our authors propose a smaller number of big ideas to address the big challenges of today and the future. Under the themes of getting our house in order and Australia looking outward, Agenda for change 2022 focuses on addressing the strategic issues from 2021 and beyond.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/12220446/AgendaForChange2022-banner.jpg4501350nathanhttps://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/10130806/ASPI-Logo.pngnathan2022-02-02 06:00:002025-03-06 15:15:30Agenda for change 2022: Shaping a different future for our nation
This report analyses two Chinese state-linked networks seeking to influence discourse about Xinjiang across platforms including Twitter and YouTube. This activity targeted the Chinese-speaking diaspora as well as international audiences, sharing content in a variety of languages.
Both networks attempted to shape international perceptions about Xinjiang, among other themes. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denies committing human rights abuses in the region and has mounted multifaceted and multiplatform information campaigns to deny accusations of forced labour, mass detention, surveillance, sterilisation, cultural erasure and alleged genocide in the region. Those efforts have included using Western social media platforms to both push back against and undermine media reports, research and Uyghurs’ testimony about Xinjiang, as well as to promote alternative narratives.
In the datasets we examined, inauthentic and potentially automated accounts using a variety of image and video content shared content aimed at rebutting the evidence of human rights violations against the Uyghur population. Likewise, content was shared using fake Uyghur accounts and other shell accounts promoting video ‘testimonials’ from Uyghurs talking about their happy lives in China.
Our analysis includes two datasets removed by Twitter:
Dataset 1: ‘Xinjiang Online’ (CNHU) consisted of 2,046 accounts and 31,269 tweets.
Dataset 2: ‘Changyu Culture’ (CNCC) consisted of 112 accounts and 35,924 tweets.
The networks showed indications of being linked by theme and tactics; however, neither achieved significant organic engagement on Twitter overall—although there was notable interaction with the accounts of CCP diplomats. There were signs of old accounts being repurposed, whether purchased or stolen, and little attempt to craft authentic personas.
Twitter has attributed both datasets to the Chinese government, the latter dataset is specifically linked to a company called Changyu Culture, which is connected to the Xinjiang provincial government. This attribution was uncovered by ASPI ICPC in the report Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: the CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms.
Key takeaways
Different strands of CCP online and offline information operations now interweave to create an increasingly coordinated propaganda ecosystem made up of CCP officials, state and regional media assets, outsourced influence-for-hire operators, social media influencers and covert information operations.
The involvement of the CCP’s regional government in Xinjiang in international-facing disinformation suggests that internal party incentive structures are driving devolved strands of information operations activity.
The CCP deploys online disinformation campaigns to distract from international criticisms of its policies and to attempt to reframe concepts such as human rights. It aligns the timing of those campaigns to take advantage of moments of strategic opportunity in the information domain.
Notable features of these datasets include:
Flooding the zone: While the networks didn’t attract significant organic engagement, the volume of material shared could potentially aim to ‘bury’ critical content on platforms such as YouTube.
Multiple languages: There was use of English and other non-Chinese languages to target audiences in other countries, beyond the Chinese diaspora.
Promotion of ‘testimonials’ from Uyghurs: Both datasets, but particularly CNCC, shared video of Uyghurs discussing their ‘happy’ lives in Xinjiang and rebutting allegations of human rights abuses. Some of those videos have been linked to a production company connected to the Xinjiang provincial government.
Promotion of Western social media influencer content: The CNHU network retweeted and shared content from social media influencers that favoured CCP narratives on Xinjiang, including interviews between influencers and state media journalists.
Interaction between network accounts and the accounts of CCP officials: While the networks didn’t attract much organic engagement overall, there were some notable interactions with diplomats and state officials. For example, 48% of all retweets by the CNHU network were of CCP state media and diplomatic accounts.
Cross-platform activity: Both networks shared video from YouTube and Douyin (the Chinese mainland version of TikTok), including tourism content about Xinjiang, as well as links to state media articles.
Self-referential content creation: The networks promoted state media articles, tweets and other content featuring material created as part of influence operations, including Uyghur ‘testimonial’ videos. Similarly, tweets and content featuring foreign journalists and officials discussing Xinjiang were promoted as ‘organic’, but in some cases were likely to have been created as part of curated state-backed tours of the region.
Repurposed spam accounts: Accounts in the CNCC dataset tweeted about Korean television dramas as well as sharing spam and porn material before tweeting Xinjiang content.
Potential use of automation: Accounts in both datasets showed signs of automation, including coordinated posting activity, the use of four letter codes (in the CNHU dataset) and misused hashtag symbols (in the CNCC dataset).
Persistent account building: ASPI ICPC independently identified additional accounts on Twitter and YouTube that exhibited similar behaviours to those in the two datasets, suggesting that accounts continue to be built across platforms as others are suspended.
The Chinese party-state and influence campaigns
The Chinese party-state continues to experiment with approaches to shape online political discourse, particularly on those topics that have the potential to disrupt its strategic objectives. International criticism of systematic abuses of human rights in the Xinjiang region is a topic about which the CCP is acutely sensitive.
In the first half of 2020, ASPI ICPC analysis of large-scale information operations linked to the Chinese state found a shift of focus towards US domestic issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd (predominantly targeting Chinese-language audiences). This was the first marker of a shift in tactics since Twitter’s initial attribution of on-platform information operations to the Chinese state in 2019. The party-state’s online information operations were moving on from predominantly internal concerns and transitioning to assert the perception of moral equivalence between the CCP’s domestic policies in Xinjiang and human rights issues in democratic states, particularly the US. We see that effort to reframe international debate about human rights continuing in these most recent datasets. This shift also highlighted that CCP information operations deployed on US social media platforms could be increasingly entrepreneurial and agile in shifting focus to take advantage of strategic opportunities in the information domain.
The previous datasets that Twitter has released publicly through its information operations archive focused on a range of topics of broad interest to the CCP: the Hong Kong protests; the Taiwanese presidential election; the party-state’s Covid-19 recovery and vaccine diplomacy; and exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui and his relationship with former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. The datasets that we examine in this report are more specifically focused on the situation in Xinjiang and on attempts to showcase health and economic benefits of CCP policies to the Uyghur population and other minority groups in the region while overlooking and denying evidence of mass abuse. In both datasets, the emblematic #StopXinjiangRumors hashtag features prominently.
Traits in the data suggest that this operation may have been run at a more local level, including:
the amplification of regional news media, as well as Chinese state media outlets
the involvement of the Xinjiang-based company Changyu Culture and its relationship with the provincial government, which ASPI previously identified in Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: the CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms by linking social media channels to the company, and the company to a Xinjiang regional government contract
an ongoing attempt to communicate through the appropriation of Uyghur voices
the use of ready-made porn and Korean soap opera fan account networks on Twitter that were likely to have been compromised, purchased or otherwise acquired, and then repurposed.
The CCP is a complex system, and directives from its elite set the direction for the party organs and underlings to follow. Propaganda serves to mobilise and steer elements within the party structure, as well as to calibrate the tone of domestic and international messaging. The party’s own incentive structures may be a factor that helps us understand the potential regional origins of the propaganda effort that we analyse in this report, and have identified previously. The China Media Project notes, for example, that local party officials are assessed on the basis of their contribution to this international communication work. It’s a contribution to building Beijing’s ‘discourse power’ as well as showing obedience to Xi Jinping’s directions.
The data displays features of the online ecosystem that the party has been building to expand its international influence. The networks that we analysed engaged consistently with Chinese state media as well as with a number of stalwart pro-CCP influencers. One strand of activity within the data continues attempts to discredit the BBC that ASPI and Recorded Future have previously reported on, but the real focus of this campaign is an effort to reframe political discourse about the concept of human rights in Xinjiang.
The CNHU dataset, in particular, offers a series of rebuttals to international critiques of CCP policy in Xinjiang. As we’ve noted, the network was active on issues related to health, such as life expectancy and population growth. CCP policies in the region are framed as counterterrorism responses as a way of attempting to legitimise actions, while negative information and testimonies of abuse are simply denied or not reported. The accounts also seek to promote benefits from CCP policies in Xinjiang, such as offering education and vocational training. The BBC and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—the former having published reports about human rights abuses in the region, and the latter having criticised the party’s policies in the region—feature in the data in negative terms. This external focus on the BBC and Pompeo serves to reframe online discussion of Xinjiang and distract from the evidence of systematic abuse. For the CCP, both entities are sources of external threat, against which the party must mobilise.
Methodology
This analysis uses a quantitative analysis of Twitter data as well as qualitative analysis of tweet content.
In addition, it examines independently identified accounts and content on Twitter, YouTube and Douyin, among other platforms, that appear likely to be related to the network.
Both datasets include video media. That content was processed using SightGraph from AddAxis. SightGraph is a suite of artificial-intelligence and machine-learning capabilities for analysing inauthentic networks that disseminate disinformation. For this project, we used SightGraph to extract and autotranslate multilingual transcripts from video content. This facilitated extended phases of machine-learning-driven analysis to draw out ranked, meaningful linguistic data.
Likewise, images were processed using Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory’s PixPlot. PixPlot visualises a large image collection within an interactive WebGL scene. Each image was processed with an Inception convolutional neural network, trained on ImageNet 2012, and projected into a two-dimensional manifold with the UMAP algorithm such that similar images appear proximate to one another.
The combination of image and video analysis provided an overview of the narrative themes emerging from the media content related to the two Twitter datasets.
Twitter has identified the two datasets for quantitative analysis as being interlinked and associated via a combination of technical and behavioural signals. ICPC doesn’t have direct access to that non-public technical data. Twitter hasn’t released the methodology by which this dataset was selected, and the dataset may not represent a complete picture of Chinese state-linked information operations on Twitter.
The Twitter takedown data
This report analyses the content summarised in Table 1.
Table 1: Twitter dataset summaries
In both datasets, most of the tweeting activity seeking to deny human rights abuses in Xinjiang appears to have started around 2020. In the CNHU dataset, accounts appear to have been created for the purpose of disseminating Xinjiang-related material and began tweeting in April 2019 before ramping up activity in January 2021. That spike in activity aligns with the coordinated targeting of efforts to discredit the BBC that ASPI has previously identified. While some accounts in the CNCC dataset may have originally had a commercial utility, they were probably repurposed some time before 19 June 2020 (the date of the first tweet mentioning Xinjiang and Uyghurs in the dataset) and shifted to posting Xinjiang-related content. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave his attention-grabbing anti-CCP speech in July 2020, and criticism of him features significantly in both datasets.
Previous ASPI analysis identified Twitter spambot network activity in December 2019 to amplify articles published by the CCP’s People’s Daily tabloid, the Global Times (figures 1 and 2). The articles that were boosted denied the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and attacked the credibility of individuals such as Mike Pompeo and media organisations such as the New York Times. It isn’t clear whether that network was connected to the CNHU and CNCC datasets, but similar behaviours were identified.
Figure 1: Tweets per month, coloured by tweet language, in CNHU dataset
Figure 2: Tweets per month, coloured by tweet language, in CNCC dataset[fig2]
An overview of the tweet text in both datasets shows that topics such as ‘Xinjiang’, ‘BBC’, ‘Pompeo’ and ‘Uyghur’ were common to both campaigns (Figure 3). While there were some tweets mentioning ‘Hong Kong’, specifically about the Covid-19 response in that region, this report focuses on content targeting Xinjiang-related issues.
Figure 3: Topic summary of tweet text posted between December 2019 and May 2021
In early 2021, the #StopXinjiangRumors hashtag was boosted by both networks. Accounts in the CNHU dataset were the first to use the hashtag, and many accounts potentially mistakenly used double hashtags (‘##StopXinjiangRumors’). Accounts in the CNCC dataset that were batch created in February 2021 appear to have posted tweets using the hashtag and tagged ‘Pompeo’ following the tweets posted by accounts in the CNHU dataset. The use of the hashtags may be coincidental, but the similarity of timing and narratives suggests some degree of coordination. #StopXinjiangRumors continues to be a hashtag on Twitter (as well as YouTube and Facebook).
The rest of this report presents the key insights from the two datasets in detail.
Dataset 1: CNHU
Dataset 1: CNHU – Key points
Nearly one in every two tweets (41%) contained either an image or a video. There were in total 12,400 images and 466 videos in the CNHU dataset.
This video and image content was aimed broadly at pushing back against allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, particularly by presenting video footage of ‘happy’ Uyghurs participating in vocational training in Xinjiang, as well as screenshots of state media and government events promoting this content.
The network promoted phrases commonly used in CCP propaganda about Xinjiang, such as ‘Xinjiang is a wonderful land’ (新疆是个好地方)—the eighth most retweeted hashtag in the CNHU dataset.
In total, 48% (1,308) of all retweets by the network were of CCP state media and diplomatic accounts. The Global Times News account was the most retweeted (287), followed by the account of Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesperson Hua Chunying (华春莹) (108).
While the network shared links to state media, YouTube and Facebook, many videos shared in the CNHU dataset appeared to have originated from Douyin.
The network worked to promote state media. Of all the tweets, 35% had links to external websites—mostly to Chinese state media outlets such as the China Daily, the China Global Television Network (CGTN) and the Global Times.
The network showed potential indicators of automation, including coordinated posting, the appearance of randomised four-letter digit codes in some tweets, and watermarked images.
The network tweeted and shared content in a variety of languages, including using Arabic and French hashtags, suggesting that it was targeting a broad audience.
Dataset 2: CNCC
Dataset 2: CNCC – Key points
The CNCC dataset contained a considerable amount of repurposed spam and porn accounts, as well as content linked to Korean music and television.
While there was a small amount of content about Hong Kong and other issues, most of the non-spam content related to Xinjiang. Much of that content sought to present ‘testimonials’ from Uyghurs talking about their happy lives in China.
Some of this content may be linked to a company called Changyu Culture, which is connected to the Xinjiang provincial government and was funded to create videos depicting Uyghurs as supportive of the Chinese Government’s policies in Xinjiang.
The network had a particular focus on former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: @蓬佩奥 or @‘Pompeo’ appears 438 times in the dataset. Likewise, video content shared by the network referenced Pompeo 386 times.
Download Report & Dataset Analysis
Readers are encouraged to download the report to access the full dataset analysis.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the team at Twitter for advanced access to the two data sets analysed in this report, Fergus Hanson and Michael Shoebridge for review comments, and AddAxis for assistance applying AI in the analysis. ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre receives funding from a variety of sources, including sponsorship, research and project support from governments, industry and civil society. No specific funding was received to fund the production of this report.
What is ASPI?
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute was formed in 2001 as an independent, non‑partisan think tank. Its core aim is to provide the Australian Government with fresh ideas on Australia’s defence, security and strategic policy choices. ASPI is responsible for informing the public on a range of strategic issues, generating new thinking for government and harnessing strategic thinking internationally. ASPI’s sources of funding are identified in our annual report, online at www.aspi.org.au and in the acknowledgements section of individual publications. ASPI remains independent in the content of the research and in all editorial judgements.
ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) is a leading voice in global debates on cyber, emerging and critical technologies, issues related to information and foreign interference and focuses on the impact these issues have on broader strategic policy. The centre has a growing mixture of expertise and skills with teams of researchers who concentrate on policy, technical analysis, information operations and disinformation, critical and emerging technologies, cyber capacity building, satellite analysis, surveillance and China-related issues.
The ICPC informs public debate in the Indo-Pacific region and supports public policy development by producing original, empirical, data-driven research. The ICPC enriches regional debates by collaborating with research institutes from around the world and by bringing leading global experts to Australia, including through fellowships. To develop capability in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region, the ICPC has a capacity building team that conducts workshops, training programs and large-scale exercises for the public and private sectors. We would like to thank all of those who support and contribute to the ICPC with their time, intellect and passion for the topics we work on. If you would like to support the work of the centre please contact: icpc@aspi.org.au.
Important disclaimer
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.
This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers. Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.
First published December 2021. ISSN 2209-9689 (online). ISSN 2209-9670 (print).
Cover image: Illustration by Wes Mountain. ASPI ICPC and Wes Mountain allow this image to be republished under the Creative Commons. License Attribution-Share Alike. Users of the image should use the following sentence for image attribution: ‘Illustration by Wes Mountain, commissioned by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre.’
Funding Statement: No specific funding was received to fund production of this report.
Building an evidence base for an informed critical technologies strategy
Kitsch Liao, Dr Samantha Hoffman and Karly Winkler, with Baani Grewal, Cheryl Yu, Saki Kikuchi, Tilla Hoja, Matthew Page and Jackson Schultz.
What’s the problem?
Technology policy formulation has recently gained a renewed importance for governments in the era of strategic competition, but contextual understanding and expertise in deciding where to focus efforts are lacking. As a result, decision-makers might not understand their own national strengths and weaknesses. It’s difficult to judge whether a country’s R&D outputs, no matter how advanced, and its development of production capacity, no matter how significant, align with the country’s intended strategic objectives or can be used effectively to achieve them.
The ability to measure the relative strengths and weaknesses of a country by weighing specific strategic objectives against technical achievements is of paramount importance for countries.
This is especially true as nations seek to resolve supply-chain resilience problems underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s rejection of the Quad’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific, willingness to use economic coercion and the resulting strategic competition, call further attention to multiple technology sectors’ heavy reliance on a single source. A solution must be found that can exploit synergy across multiple technology sectors among collaborating countries while ensuring supply-chain resilience.
What’s the solution?
Governments’ ability to ensure that strategic objectives pertaining to critical technologies are both well articulated and achievable, and researchers’ and industry’s ability to collaborate in meeting those objectives, would be greatly enabled by the development of an objective and repeatable methodology for measuring technical achievements against clearly defined strategic goals for the critical technology sector. The most pressing challenge should be a relatively straightforward one to resolve: standardise metadata about national objectives and R&D efforts to enable business analysis.
The Quad Critical and Emerging Technology Working Group is an important step towards building collaboration in the research, development and production of critical technologies among like-minded governments. While in nascent stages, the group is gathering momentum and working towards addressing the September 2021 objective to monitor trends in critical and emerging technologies for cooperation, with an initial focus on biotechnology. We recommend as follows:
Conduct detailed analysis to understand current and emerging gaps in critical and emerging technologies, starting with biotechnology, among like-minded countries.
Develop a partnership between like-minded countries with advanced technological capabilities to deliver a secure technology supply chain for critical tech. This should include a commitment to a set of core principles for technology development and delivery, including ‘baking in’ democratic principles to the technology and agreeing to share any civilian advances on market terms and refrain from coercion.
Establish a Quad or Quad Plus critical technologies fund to which participating states pledge investment funds that are then disbursed to address current and emerging critical technologies gaps.
Introduction to the Benchmarking Critical Technologies Project
Benchmarking Critical Technologies is a pilot project at ASPI ICPC that examines the development of a handful of critical technologies in the context of strategic partnership and strategic competition.
‘Critical technologies’ broadly refers to strategically important technology areas.1 Australia, for example, defines ‘critical technology’ as ‘technology that can significantly enhance or pose risks to Australia’s national interests, including our prosperity, social cohesion and national security’.2 For this pilot study, we focus on the biotechnology and energy technology sectors in China and in the Quad— the quadrilateral Indo-Pacific diplomatic network consisting of Australia, India, Japan and the US.
This project will be expanded over the course of 2022 to include more technology areas and countries.
During the Quad Leaders’ Summit in March 2021, the Quad Critical and Emerging Technology Working Group was announced. The communiqué from the summit said that the working group was intended to ‘ensure the way in which technology is designed, developed, governed and used is shaped by the Quad countries’ shared values and respect for universal human rights’.3 The communiqué didn’t directly name China, but China was clearly implied in its pledge to recommit to ‘promoting the free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law and undaunted by coercion, to bolster security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and beyond’.4
It’s clear that China is the key strategic competitor that the Quad countries are hedging against. They’re technology and manufacturing powerhouses with strong geopolitical influence in the region, which makes the competition both more important and more difficult. As the Quad works to develop capabilities in a range of critical sectors, the Quad members will need to also understand how to leverage each other’s strengths and overcome collective weaknesses to guarantee supply-chain resilience, among other strategic objectives.5 They will also need to triangulate the effects of each nation’s digital enmeshment in Chinese supply chains and the net effects of that in particular sectors.
There’s a lack of empirical data to ground decision-makers’ advice on everything from capability gaps to priority investment areas. This project is an attempt to begin to bring additional empirical data to the decision-making process. Our intent is to offer improved clarity on each country’s strengths and weaknesses in each critical technology. After consultation with the Australian Government, we decided to focus on hydrogen energy and solar photovoltaic (solar PV) technologies from the energy sector, and genetic engineering and vaccines and medical countermeasures in the biotechnology sector.
The broader technology areas that these specific technologies sit within are of clear strategic importance. The Quad Leaders’ Summit communiqué established that biotechnology would be the starting point for the Critical and Emerging Technology Working Group’s collaboration. It also highlighted, in the context of the recent COP26 conference, that the Quad would coordinate to ‘establish responsible and resilient clean-energy supply chains’.6
To assess national capabilities, we measured each country’s R&D and infrastructure development efforts using patent and patent impact data and academic impact data, and compared those results against the country’s technology-specific policy goals. For patents, we collected two measures for each critical technology: the quantity and quality of the patents. IP Australia provided ASPI ICPC with patent data to analyse the quantity of patents for each critical technology. Additionally, using the commercial product PatentSight developed by LexisNexis, we assessed patent quality with the Patent Asset Index (PAI).7 The tool assesses patent quality across various measures in the overall ecosystem of a technology field. Those measures are technology relevance (TR), indicating how much future patents in the field depended upon the patent; market coverage (MC), indicating how much of the global market the patent offers protection of; and competitive impact (CI), the aggregate of TR and MC indicating the economic value of the patent. The aggregate economic value of all patents in the field then constitutes the field’s PAI. For academic impact factors, we used the CiteScore (CS) methodology for measuring impact factors embedded within Elsevier’s Scopus commercial database product.
We also drew on background interviews with industry specialists and senior officials in relevant government departments. Budget data was more challenging to collect, normalise and assess.
Consequently, it isn’t treated as a separate metric, but included with general policy analysis. (For more on our methodology, see the Appendix.)
We recognise that both the policies and technologies on which we base our assessments are evolving. Technology development doesn’t always move in a linear trajectory, and current capabilities aren’t the only indicator of future outcomes. Moreover, the strategic interests and desired policy outcomes one country seeks might not align simply or easily with those of another. Therefore, it isn’t possible to directly compare countries against each other. Rather than arbitrarily rating each country’s progress against the others, we’ve rated each country’s progress in achieving the strategic objectives that it has outlined for each technology area (Figure 1). The progress indicator’s location should be interpreted as being dynamic, given that both policies and technologies will evolve.
Figure 1: Rating scale—country progress in meeting national policy objectives
Rating scale legend
Some high-level policy objectives specific to the technology area have been set, but there’s little evidence of efforts making progress towards meeting those objectives.
Despite the articulation of some policy objectives pertaining to the technology area, those are still relatively unclear. The country’s R&D and production capabilities don’t appear to be sufficient to contribute to realising the country’s stated policy objectives.
There’s some evidence that the country is developing actionable policy in the technology area. There’s clear progress in the country’s ability to contribute to the R&D of the technology, or production capacity. It isn’t clear, however, whether this progress aligns with the country’s stated policy objectives.
There’s evidence that stated policy objectives, research and investment are beginning to translate into aligning capabilities.
There’s strong evidence that stated policy objectives, research and investment have already translated into aligning capabilities.
Source: Image produced by ASPI.
Overall assessment
Quantity doesn’t mean quality, at least in terms of the way patents and research shift global knowledge and capabilities in the overall ecosystem of a technology field. Our findings on patent impact—measured by how often a patent is cited or purchased—highlighted that China, with the highest number of patent applications filed, didn’t have a correspondingly high impact factor. Australia and India, and to a lesser extent Japan, filed far fewer patents, but those few patents had impact more on par with US patents, which were high in both number and impact. One patent can significantly influence the evolution of a technology; others might incrementally advance knowledge or create offshoot fields. Impact factors in these types of analysis can be an objective measure for determining scientific advances or commercial success but aren’t necessarily useful in indicating whether national capabilities support policy objectives. If the point of benchmarking critical technologies capabilities at a national level is to understand what makes a country capable of meeting national policy objectives, competitive in a strategic competition and well placed to work with like-minded partners, then the ability of individual researchers or organisations to advance a technology field doesn’t tell us how competitive a country is in translating concepts to capabilities that align with its strategic objectives. For example, ASPI ICPC believes that in China, the disproportionately large number of patents filed internally is most likely attributable to companies patenting specific applications of technology. In the Quad, countries such as Australia and India have been more impactful for a fewer number of patent applications filed and research papers significantly advance the field.
Success in connecting policy objectives to outcomes isn’t yet entirely measurable. Our comparison of national policies pertaining to each critical technology we research shows that China, followed by the US, tends to have more clarity about what it seeks to achieve by investing in R&D and production capabilities, and following that up with actions that will achieve those objectives. India, Japan and Australia don’t lack policy development or innovative capacity, but we believe they have been less effective at connecting concepts to capability. This assessment is no doubt at least partially because the development of policy objectives postdates most of our data.
Metrics don’t explain the context in which innovation is taking place, including incentive structures, and how that affects a country’s ability to meet specific objectives. In China, the incentive structure is designed so that researchers are working to meet specific policy objectives. In fact, companies closely collaborate with the state in technical standards development. According to the revised 2017 Standardisation Law,8 the Standardisation Administration of China (an agency under the State Administration for Market Regulation) is required to oversee standards initiation and implementation, and in practice technical committees for standards setting under the Standardisation Administration tend to consist of both companies and research institutes. We believe the knock-on effect of the incentive structure in China is that the R&D base is disadvantaged, while companies and researchers focus on implementing specific applications of technology that meet policy needs. China’s National Patent Development Strategy (2011–2020) was designed as a ‘long-term and comprehensive plan to use the patent system and patent resources to enhance the country’s core competitiveness’.9 The strategy document prioritises ‘encourag[ing] and supporting[ing] enterprises to upgrade the core technologies and key technologies with patent rights in China’s advantageous fields to national and international standards’.10 We believe companies are seeking to achieve those objectives by owning the market first, and patents support that approach. They’re adding economic value by increasing the quantity of applications, and owning the market comes before efforts to refine the product. Many PRC-originated technologies are being exported globally (see ASPI ICPC’s Mapping China’s Tech Giants project), no matter what the overall quality of the product in comparison to competitors, and that proliferation is probably achieving some market power and incumbency. It’s a cumulative and individual challenge for the Quad nations to move more rapidly from concept to capability in order to avoid the PRC leading in meeting strategic objectives with that technology
Download
Readers are warmly encouraged to download the full report to access the detailed sector by sector analysis.
The Patent Search Strategy used in the formulation of the report is available for review here.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the assistance we have received from IP Australia, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, and numerous interviewees and peer reviewers in policy and industry roles across the Quad.
Thank you to ASPI ICPC researcher Albert Zhang for assistance. We are grateful for the valuable comments and assistance provided by Fergus Hanson, Michael Shoebridge and Jocelinn Kang.
This project was supported through a $150,000 grant from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
What is ASPI?
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute was formed in 2001 as an independent, non‑partisan think tank. Its core aim is to provide the Australian Government with fresh ideas on Australia’s defence, security and strategic policy choices. ASPI is responsible for informing the public on a range of strategic issues, generating new thinking for government and harnessing strategic thinking internationally.
ASPI’s sources of funding are identified in our annual report, online at www.aspi.org.au and in the acknowledgements section of individual publications. ASPI remains independent in the content of the research and in all editorial judgements.
ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) is a leading voice in global debates on cyber, emerging and critical technologies, issues related to information and foreign interference and focuses on the impact these issues have on broader strategic policy. The centre has a growing mixture of expertise and skills with teams of researchers who concentrate on policy, technical analysis, information operations and disinformation, critical and emerging technologies, cyber capacity building, satellite analysis, surveillance and China-related issues.
The ICPC informs public debate in the Indo-Pacific region and supports public policy development by producing original, empirical, data-driven research. The ICPC enriches regional debates by collaborating with research institutes from around the world and by bringing leading global experts to Australia, including through fellowships. To develop capability in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region, the ICPC has a capacity building team that conducts workshops, training programs and large-scale exercises for the public and private sectors.
We would like to thank all of those who support and contribute to the ICPC with their time, intellect and passion for the topics we work on. If you would like to support the work of the centre please contact: icpc@aspi.org.au
Important disclaimer
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.
This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers. Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.
First published November 2021. ISSN 2209-9689 (online). ISSN 2209-9670 (print). Cover image: Leslie Sharpe.
Funding Statement: Funding support for this publication was provided by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
‘What is a “critical technology”?’, in ‘Appendix A: National Critical Technologies List’, Clinton White House archives, online. ↩︎
Marise Payne, ‘Launch of the International Cyber and Critical Technology Engagement Strategy’, speech, 21 April 2021, online. ↩︎
Scott Morrison, ‘Quad Leaders’ Summit communique’, 24 September 2021, online. ↩︎
See, for instance, the Biden administration’s memorandum, ‘Multi-agency research and development priorities for the FY 2023 Budget’, August 2021, online; and the former Trump administration’s October 2020 list of critical and emerging technologies, online. ↩︎
For a more comprehensive definition and explanation of the methodology behind the Patent Asset Index, consult the product website, online. ↩︎
Standardisation Law of the People’s Republic of China, Standardisation Administration of China, 23 March 2018, online. The Standardisation Law was revised and adopted at a meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in November 2017 and came into force on 1 January 2018. ↩︎
‘National Patent Development Strategy (2011–2020)’ [‘全国专利事业发展战略(2011—2020年)’], China National Intellectual Property Administration, 18 November 2010, online. ↩︎
‘National Patent Development Strategy (2011–2020)’. ↩︎
This report provides a primer on the roots of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) within China’s policy system, and sheds light on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) intentions to use cyberspace as a tool for shaping discourse domestically and internationally.
The report details the position of the Cyberspace Administration of China in China’s propaganda system. Considering its origins in the former Party Office of External Propaganda, the authors argue that ‘countries that lack comprehensive cyber regulations should err on the side of caution when engaging with the CCP on ideas for establishing an international cyber co-governance strategy.’
By assessing the CCP’s strategy of becoming a ‘cyber superpower’, its principle of ‘internet sovereignty’, and its concept of ‘community of common destiny for cyberspace’, this report seeks to address how the CCP is working to build a consensus on the future of who will set the rules, norms and values of the internet.
The report also examines the World Internet Conference – a ‘platform through which the CCP promotes its ideas on internet sovereignty and global governance’ – and its links to the CAC.
Translated versions of this report are also available in Indonesian, Malaysian, Thai, and Vietnamese. The translation of these reports has been supported by the U.S. State Department.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/14214444/Chinas-cyber-vision_banner.png4501350nathanhttps://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/10130806/ASPI-Logo.pngnathan2021-11-24 06:00:002024-12-14 21:48:04China’s cyber vision: How the Cyberspace Administration of China is building a new consensus on global internet governance
Since the mass internment of Uyghurs and other indigenous groups1 in China was first reported in 2017, there is now a rich body of literature documenting recent human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.2 However, there is little knowledge of the actual perpetrators inside China’s vast and opaque party-state system, and responsibility is often broadly attributed to the Chinese Communist Party,3 Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo,4 or President Xi Jinping himself.5
For accountability, it is necessary to investigate how China’s campaign against the Uyghurs has been implemented and which offices and individuals have played a leading part. The current knowledge gap has exposed international companies and organisations to inadvertent engagement with Chinese officials who have facilitated the atrocities in Xinjiang. It has also prevented foreign governments from making targeted policy responses.
Finally, it is essential to carry out such an investigation now. Amid debate internationally about whether the recent events in Xinjiang constitute genocide,6 Chinese officials are actively scrubbing relevant evidence and seeking to silence those who speak out.7
Figure 1: A ‘resist infiltration, snatch the two-faced’ mass oath for school teachers in Hotan Prefecture in 2017. Many women are visibly crying.
Source: ‘Ten thousand teachers in Hotan Prefecture take part in ‘speak up and brandish the sword’ mass oath in Keriye County’ [和田地区万名教师集体发 声亮剑宣讲宣誓大会在于田举行], Keriye County official WeChat account [于田零距离], 16 June 2017, online.
What’s the solution?
This project maps and analyses the governance mechanisms employed by the Chinese party-state in Xinjiang from 2014 to 2021 within the context of the region’s ongoing human rights crisis. To that end, the authors have located and scrutinised thousands of Chinese-language sources,8 including leaked police records9 and government budget documents never before published. This archive of sources is made publicly available for the use of others.
For policymakers, this report will provide an evidence base to inform policy responses including possible sanctions. For the general public and anyone whose interests are linked to Xinjiang and China more broadly, this project can inform risk analysis and ethical considerations.
Finally, a detailed understanding of Xinjiang’s governance structures and processes and their relationship to wider national policies can contribute to a more concrete understanding of the Chinese party-state and its volatility.
Figure 2: American brand Nike was implicated in Xinjiang’s coercive labour transfer schemes. Uyghurs transferred from Xinjiang receive Chinese language and indoctrination classes at Nike’s contractor Taekwang factory in Qingdao, Shandong, around June 2019.
Source: ‘Municipal United Front Work Department conducts Mandarin training at Qingdao Taekwang “Pomegranate Seed” Night School’ [市委统战部’石榴 籽’夜校 走进青岛泰光举办普通话培训班], Laixi United Front official WeChat account [莱西统一战线], 1 July 2019, online.
Executive Summary
The project consists of two parts.
An interactive organisational chart of some 170 administrative entities that have participated in Xinjiang’s governance since 2014. The chart includes a brief profile of each party, government, military, paramilitary and hybrid entity at different bureaucratic layers, and more.10
This report, which highlights the governance techniques and bureaucratic structures that have operationalised the Chinese party-state’s most recent campaigns against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
The report is structured as follows.
Section 1: Background
This section is an introduction to the 2014 Counterterrorism Campaign and the 2017 Re-education Campaign in Xinjiang, which represent a top-down response to the perceived radicalisation of Uyghur society and a systematic effort to transform Xinjiang and its indigenous inhabitants.
Section 2: The return of mass campaigns
The crackdown against the Uyghurs has a striking resemblance to Mao-era political campaigns. ASPI can reveal that, in addition to mass internment and coercive labour assignments, Xinjiang residents are also compelled to participate in acts of political theatre, such as mass show trials, public denunciation sessions, loyalty pledges, sermon-like ‘propaganda lectures’, and chants for Xi Jinping’s good health. In doing so, they’re mobilised to attack shadowy enemies hiding among the people: the so-called ‘three evil forces’ and ‘two-faced people’.
Despite widespread recognition that mass political campaigns are ‘costly and burdensome’, in the words of Xi Jinping, the party-state has again resorted to them in Xinjiang. This section analyses the party-state’s reflexive compulsion for campaigns, and campaign-style governance, which is an intrinsic feature of the Chinese political system that’s often overlooked in the current English-language literature.
Section 3: Hegemony at the grassroots
ASPI researchers have gained rare and in-depth insights into Xinjiang’s local governance after analysing thousands of pages of leaked police files. This section focuses on the case of one Uyghur family in Ürümqi. Like at least 1.8 million other Uyghurs, Anayit Abliz, then 18, was caught using a file-sharing app in 2017. He was interned in a re-education camp and eventually ‘sentenced’ by his Neighbourhood Committee—a nominally service-oriented voluntary organisation responsible for local party control.
While he was detained, officials from the Neighbourhood Committee visited his family members six times in a single week, scrutinizing the family’s behaviours and observing whether they were emotionally stable.
Draconian control measures are typical of mass political campaigns, including those in Xinjiang.
During the crackdown against the Uyghurs, authorities implemented five key policies (including the ‘Trinity’ mechanism, which is first reported by ASPI here) that led to the unprecedented penetration of the party-state system into the daily lives of Xinjiang residents. Those policies gave Xinjiang’s neighbourhood and village officials exceptional power to police residents’ movements and emotions, resulting in the disturbing situation in which a Uyghur teenager’s social media posts about finding life hopeless were deemed a threat to stability and triggered police action.
Xinjiang’s community-based control mechanisms are part of a national push to enhance grassroots governance, which seeks to mobilise the masses to help stamp out dissent and instability and to increase the party’s domination in the lowest reaches of society.
Section 4: The party’s knife handle
Many Uyghurs become suspects after being flagged by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), which is a ‘system of systems’ where officials communicate and millions of investigations are assigned for local follow-up.
ASPI can reveal that the IJOP11 is managed by Xinjiang’s Political and Legal Affairs Commission (PLAC) through a powerful new organ called the Counterterrorism and Stability Maintenance Command,12 which is a product of the Re-education Campaign. One source states that a local branch of the command monitors the re-education camps remotely.
The PLAC is a party organ that oversees China’s law-and-order system, which is responsible for Xinjiang’s mass detention system. The PLAC’s influence tends to grow during times of mass campaigns, and the budget and responsibilities of the Xinjiang PLAC have expanded significantly in recent years— despite efforts by Xi Jinping to abate its status nationally. Two other factors may have contributed to the PLAC’s predominance in Xinjiang: its control over powerful surveillance technologies employed during the two campaigns, and a 2010 governance model in Ürümqi called ‘the big PLAC’, which was masterminded by Zhu Hailun, who is considered by some to be the architect of the re-education camp system.
Section 5: Weaponising the law
Law enforcement in Xinjiang is hasty, harsh and frequently arbitrary. Senior officials have promulgated new laws and regulations that contradict existing ones in order to accomplish the goals and targets of the campaigns; on the ground, local officers openly boast about acting outside normal legal processes, and their voices are sometimes amplified by state media. ASPI has found evidence that some neighbourhood officials in Ürümqi threatened to detain whole families in an attempt to forcefully evict them from the area.
Many Uyghurs have been detained for cultural or religious expressions, but police records reveal that low-level officials have also interned Xinjiang residents for appearing to be ‘dissatisfied with society’ or lacking a fixed address or stable income. In one case, Uyghur man Ekrem Imin was detained because his ‘neighbourhood police officer was trying to fill quotas’. As reported by Ürümqi police, he then contracted hepatitis B (which went untreated) as well as syphilis inside Xinjiang’s, and China’s biggest detention facility.13 This raises further questions about the conditions inside Xinjiang’s re-education facilities.
Efforts to weaponise the law in Xinjiang mirror wider legal reforms under Xi Jinping, where previous ideals about procedural accountability and judicial independence have been cast aside and the law is now openly used to tighten the party’s grip over society and eliminate social opposition.
Section 6: The frontline commanders
County party secretaries are the most senior officials at the local level in China, and their role is crucial to the regime’s survival, according to Xi Jinping. In Xinjiang, they oversee the day-to-day operations of the two campaigns. Researchers at ASPI have compiled a dataset of Xinjiang’s county party secretaries over the past seven years and found that the vast majority of these ‘frontline commanders’ are Han.
At the time of writing (September 2021), not a single county party secretary in Xinjiang is Uyghur, which speaks to the erasure of once-promised ethnic self-rule, and to deeply entrenched racism at the heart of the Han-dominated party-state system.
This section profiles three of the most celebrated county party secretaries in Xinjiang. Yao Ning, a darling of the Chinese media for his elite academic background at Tsinghua and Harvard universities.
Claiming absolute loyalty to the party-state from a young age, Yao now sits at the top of a chain of command over nine newly built or expanded detention facilities in Maralbeshi County.14 He has struggled with mounting pressure and the death of a close colleague due to exhaustion, but finds solace in quotes by both Mao and Xi.
Yang Fasen, who pioneered new governance tools during the campaigns, was recently promoted to vice governor of Xinjiang. His innovative propaganda templates—that the authorities dubbed the ‘Bay County Experience’—were copied by other counties in Xinjiang during the Counterterrorism Campaign. During a 2015 speech in front of Xi Jinping in Beijing, Yang claimed that subjecting undereducated Uyghur youth to labour reform (a practice that became commonplace later in the Re-education Campaign) can improve social stability.
Both Yao Ning and Yang Fasen are from the majority ethnic group in China, the Han. The third profile is of Obulqasim Mettursun, a Uyghur official, who like most Uyghurs serve in a deputy position under a Han overseer. He went viral after penning an open letter pleading with fellow Uyghurs to ‘wake up’ and actively participate in the party-state’s stability maintenance efforts. He represents an ideologically captured and dependent class of Uyghur officials committed to serving the party in largely ceremonial roles.
Section 7: ‘There is no department that doesn’t have something to do with stability’
During Xinjiang’s two campaigns, few offices or officials can escape the political responsibility of ‘stability maintenance’ work. At times, repressive policies have been carried out by the most innocent-sounding, obscure government agencies, such as the Forestry Bureau, which looked after Kashgar City’s re-education camp accounts for a year.
The final section highlights the astounding number of offices involved in key aspects of the Chinese party-state’s crackdown in Xinjiang: propaganda, re-education, at-home surveillance and indoctrination, forced labour and population control. Extra emphasis has been placed on propaganda as it has been the least reported aspect of the two campaigns, albeit highly important.
In Xinjiang, re-education work not only occurs in so-called ‘vocational education and training centres’, but is also front and centre in everyday life, as the party-state seeks to alter how people act and speak. Through more than seven years of intense propaganda work, Uyghurs and other indigenous groups now find themselves being assigned fictional Han relatives, and being taught how to dress and maintain their homes;15 their courtyards are ‘modernised’ and ‘beautified’16 while their ancient tombs and mosques are destroyed.17
Section 8: Conclusion
Xinjiang’s bureaucratic inner workings reflect a wider pattern of authoritarian rule in China. In fact, some governance techniques used in Xinjiang during the two campaigns were conceived elsewhere, and Xinjiang’s ‘stability maintenance’ tools are increasingly replicated by other Chinese provinces and regions including Hong Kong. Further research should be conducted on campaign-style governance in China in general, and its policy implications. Further studies on the cycle of collective trauma through China’s recurring campaigns may also be timely, taking into consideration that many senior Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping and Zhu Hailun, claimed that their personal experiences of being ‘re-educated’ through hard labour have been transformative.
Appendixes
ASPI researchers have curated three appendixes of key Xinjiang officials who have served in party, government, military, or paramilitary roles at the regional, prefecture and county levels from 2014 to 2021. In the sixth section of this report, the frontline commanders, the authors used the third appendix — the names and basic information about Xinjiang’s more than 440 county party secretaries over the last seven years — to generate data for analysis and visualisation. The appendixes have not been published but we will consider requests to access this research.
The authors would like to thank researchers Emile Dirks, Aston Kwok, Kate Wong, Nyrola Elima, Nathan Ruser and Kelsey Munro for their invaluable contributions to this project, and Fergus Hanson and Danielle Cave for their guidance and support.
Thank you to peer reviewers who provided excellent feedback, including Darren Byler, Timothy Grose, Sam Tynen, Samantha Hoffman, Peter Mattis, Michael Shoebridge and Edward Schwarck. Thank you also to Yael Grauer, who shared access to the Ürümqi Police Records. The opinions and analysis presented in this report are those of the authors alone, who are also responsible for any errors or omissions. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office provided ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) with a grant of A$116,770 for this project, of which this report is a key output. Other components of the project can be found at the Xinjiang Data Project website: https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/. Additional research costs were covered from ASPI ICPC’s mixed revenue base—which spans governments, industry and civil society. This project would not have been possible without 2020–21 funding from the US State Department, which supports the Xinjiang Data Project.
What is ASPI?
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute was formed in 2001 as an independent, non‑partisan think tank. Its core aim is to provide the Australian Government with fresh ideas on Australia’s defence, security and strategic policy choices. ASPI is responsible for informing the public on a range of strategic issues, generating new thinking for government and harnessing strategic thinking internationally. ASPI’s sources of funding are identified in our annual report, online at www.aspi.org.au and in the acknowledgements section of individual publications. ASPI remains independent in the content of the research and in all editorial judgements.
ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) is a leading voice in global debates on cyber, emerging and critical technologies, issues related to information and foreign interference and focuses on the impact these issues have on broader strategic policy. The centre has a growing mixture of expertise and skills with teams of researchers who concentrate on policy, technical analysis, information operations and disinformation, critical and emerging technologies, cyber capacity building, satellite analysis, surveillance and China-related issues. The ICPC informs public debate in the Indo-Pacific region and supports public policy development by producing original, empirical, data-driven research. The ICPC enriches regional debates by collaborating with research institutes from around the world and by bringing leading global experts to Australia, including through fellowships. To develop capability in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region, the ICPC has a capacity building team that conducts workshops, training programs and large-scale exercises for the public and private sectors. We would like to thank all of those who support and contribute to the ICPC with their time, intellect and passion for the topics we work on. If you would like to support the work of the centre please contact: icpc@aspi.org.au
Important disclaimer
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.
This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers. Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.
First published October 2021. ISSN 2209-9689 (online). ISSN 2209-9670 (print)
.
Funding Statement: This project was in part funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.
The Chinese party-state officially recognises 56 minzu (民族) groups in China: a single Han majority and 55 numerically much smaller groups that currently make up nearly 9% of China’s population. The term minzu is deeply polysemic and notoriously difficult to translate. Depending on the context of its use, the term can connote concepts similar to ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘people’ and ‘ethnicity’ in English. Party officials initially used the English term ‘nationality’ to render the term into English. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party gradually pivoted away from nationality, preferring the term ‘ethnic minorities’ for the non-Han groups and reserving the term ‘nation’ for the collective identity and name of the ‘Chinese nation-race’ (中华民族). See James Leibold, ‘The minzu net: China’s fragmented national form,’ Nations and Nationalism, 2016, 22(3):425–428. While party officials reject any assertion of indigeneity in China, Harvard historian Mark Elliott argues that China’s non-Han peoples are better thought of as indigenous communities rather than as ‘ethnic minorities’, which is a term widely used to refer to migrant populations in places such Canada or Australia, as these groups ‘continue to live on lands to which they have reasonably strong ancestral claims; in their encounter with the majority Other, all of them assume the status of “natives” vis-a-vis the representatives of a central (often formerly colonial or quasi-colonial) government from the outside; and all of them find themselves in positions of relative weakness as a result of an asymmetrical power structure, often the consequence of technological inferiority.’ Mark Elliott, ‘The case of the missing indigene: debate over a “second- generation” ethnic policy’, The China Journal, 2015, 73:207, online. Throughout this report and our website, we’ve used the terms ‘indigenous’, ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘nationality’ interchangeably to gloss the term minzu, depending on the context. When we refer to the Uyghurs generically, we’re also referring to other Turkic communities in Xinjiang: the Kazakhs, Tajiks, Kyrgyzs and Uzbeks who have also been targeted in China’s crackdown in Xinjiang. ↩︎
For two online repositories of this now vast literature see The Xinjiang Data Project, ASPI, Canberra, online, and The Xinjiang Documentation Project, University of British Columbia, online. ↩︎
‘China: Crimes against humanity in Xinjiang: Mass detention, torture, cultural persecution of Uyghurs, other Turkic Muslims’, Human Rights Watch, 19 April 2021, online; Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Myunghee Lee, Emir Yazici, ‘Counterterrorism and preventive repression: China’s changing strategy in Xinjiang’, International Security, Winter 2019–20, 44(3), online. ↩︎
‘“Eradicating ideological viruses”—China’s campaign of repression against Xinjiang’s Muslims’, Human Rights Watch, 9 September 2018, online; Chun Hang Wong, ‘China’s hard edge: the leader of Beijing’s Muslim crackdown gains influence’, The Wall Street Journal, 7 April 2019, online; Adrian Zenz, James Leibold, ‘Chen Quanguo: The strongman behind Beijing’s securitization strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang’, China Brief, 21 September 2017, 17(12), online. ↩︎
James Leibold, ‘The spectre of insecurity: the CCP’s mass internment strategy in Xinjiang’, China Leadership Monitor, 1 March 2019, online; Austin Ramzy, Chris Buckley, ‘“Absolutely no mercy”: Leaked files expose how China organised mass detentions of Muslims’, The New York Times, 16 November 2019, online; Adrian Zenz, ‘Evidence of the Chinese central government’s knowledge of and involvement in Xinjiang’s re-education internment campaign’, China Brief, 14 September 2021, online. ↩︎
Martin S Flaherty, ‘Repression by any other name: Xinjiang and the genocide debate’, The Diplomat, 3 August 2021, online; James Leibold, ‘Beyond Xinjiang: Xi Jinping’s ethnic crackdown’, The Diplomat, 1 May 2021, online; Joanne Smith Finley, ‘Why scholars and activists increasingly fear a Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2021, 23(3):348–370. ↩︎
Lily Kuo, Gerry Shih, ‘China researchers face abuse, sanctions as Beijing looks to silence critics’, Washington Post, 7 April 2021, online; ‘China scrubs evidence of Xinjiang clampdown amid “genocide” debate’, The Washington Post, 17 March 2021, online; Rebecca Wright, Ivan Watson, ‘She tweeted from Sweden about the plight of her Uyghur cousin. In Xinjiang, the authorities were watching’, CNN, 17 December 2020, online. ↩︎
These sources include English and Chinese-language academic papers, local media reports and official party and state documents. ↩︎
The Ürümqi Police Records were provided to ASPI by journalist Yael Grauer, who wrote for The Intercept about the database, and has since left the outlet. See Yael Grauer, ‘Revealed: Massive Chinese police database’, The Intercept, 29 January 2021, online. ↩︎
It also walks the viewer through the offices involved in several key aspects of the crackdown against Uyghurs: propaganda, re-education, Fanghuiju, forced labour and population control. The chart isn’t meant to be a comprehensive picture of the vast Chinese bureaucracy but rather an illustrative snapshot of the different levels of the Chinese bureaucracy that played an active role in designing, coordinating or implementing the party’s policies in Xinjiang, from the central level in Beijing to the villages and neighbourhoods in Xinjiang. ↩︎
Counterterrorism and Stability Maintenance Command [反恐维稳指挥部]. ↩︎
This case was first publicised by the Xinjiang Victims Database (@shaitbiz), ‘Some months ago, XJ officials told visiting journalists that the Dabancheng facility in Ürümqi was never a camp [Tweet]’, Twitter, 27 August 2019, online. The Associated Press reported that the detention centre was the largest in the world. See Dake Kang, ‘Room for 10,000: Inside China’s largest detention center’, The Associated Press, 1 December 2018, online. ↩︎
See the map and dataset at The Xinjiang Data Project, ASPI, Canberra, online. ↩︎
‘“Home School” Initiative enters village households, “beautifying” the lives of villagers’ [“家庭学校”进农户活动让村民生活“靓”起来], Qingfeng Net [清风网], 20 November 2019, online. ↩︎
Timothy A. Grose, ‘If you don’t know how, just learn’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 06 July 2020, online. ↩︎
Nathan Ruser, ‘Cultural erasure: Tracing the destruction of Uyghur and Islamic spaces in Xinjiang’, ASPI, Canberra, 24 September 2020, online. ↩︎
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/18123506/pb51-repression_banner-scaled.jpg15392560nathanhttps://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/10130806/ASPI-Logo.pngnathan2021-10-19 06:00:002025-03-18 12:36:53The architecture of repression
d practice. Also, states can be reprimanded if they haven’t done enough to prevent an incident, or if they have used cyber capabilities in an irresponsible manner.
