Pressure points: China’s air and maritime coercion
New research from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveals a range of nations are increasingly willing to challenge China’s excessive claims in the South China Sea than they were previously.
The analysis, detailed in Pressure points—a world first online resource tracking the activity and behaviour of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the South China Sea and beyond.
The website highlights almost a dozen recent incidents of unsafe military behaviour by China against countries including the United States, Australia, Canada, the Philippines, the Netherlands and others, and finds these unsafe incidents have ramped up in recent years, after first beginning in 2021.
The research also analyses the Chinese military’s use of air and maritime coercion to enforce Beijing’s excessive claims and advance China’s security and defence interests in the Indo-Pacific.
As outlined on the website, the PLA employs a variety of risky and dangerous tactics to try to deter others from operating in areas of the South China Sea and East China Sea, including through the release of flares, the use of lasers, sonar bursts and other dangerous manoeuvres.
Through a detailed examination of which countries do or don’t use their military forces to challenge China’s excessive claims, the research also finds that not all countries are regularly publicising the challenges they are engaged in.
While the US, Canada, France and the United Kingdom regularly publicise their challenges, Australia, Japan and New Zealand are among the countries that do not.
The project also provides governments, as well as regional and global militaries, with policy recommendations to help push back against China’s ambitions to reshape the regional order.
These focus on enhancing transparency through regular public statements to reinforce the importance of their military actions, building and strengthening networks between like-minded countries and demonstrating perseverance.
This new ASPI project fills an information gap regarding the PLA’s regional activity, and through greater data-driven transparency the project aims to deepen and inform public discourse on important defence and security issues.
It provides the public with a reliable and accurate account of the PLA’s regional activity by highlighting and analysing open-source data, military imagery and satellite footage and official statements. Future expansions of the work will occur in 2025-26.
James Curran is wrong: ASPI is and will remain independent
James Curran gets a number of things wrong in his column on the Varghese Review and the work of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Above all, ASPI did not “work hand in glove with the Morrison government on how to play China as an issue in Australian domestic politics”. This is a baseless accusation, for which Curran provides zero evidence. One can only assume the intention is to make ASPI a political target in the aftermath of the review’s release. ASPI is a non-partisan institute that shouldn’t be painted as working or aligning with any side of politics.
Curran further alleges that ASPI has “strayed” from its founding charter, regarding itself as an “ideological font” for “calling out and confronting an assertive China”. ASPI is, and will remain, a non-partisan, independent think tank as stipulated in its charter, laid out in 2001.
He then avers that “some of its analysts created an atmosphere in which to question government policy settings on China was deemed unpatriotic”. These allegations are also completely unsubstantiated. Who is he talking about, exactly?
Varghese was indeed right to point out that Australia has failed to nurture academic expertise on China.
The only person at ASPI that Curran mentions by name is the executive director, Justin Bassi. He accuses Bassi of making a “reprehensible” and “juvenile” comparison between the 14 recommendations in former diplomat Peter Varghese’s report and the 14 grievances against the Australian government, aired by the Chinese embassy in 2020.
Bassi simply noted that there was a “grim irony” in the numerical coincidence, as one of the complaints was widely interpreted as a demand to defund ASPI because it has produced research and commentary critical of the Chinese Communist Party. How is this observation in any sense juvenile? Varghese did not recommend closing down ASPI, but he did recommend that direct government funding for ASPI’s office in Washington DC be discontinued, along with other moves designed to tighten government controls over the sector, including a role for ministers in setting research priorities and appointing government observers to ASPI’s board.
The fact that the government has agreed with most of Varghese’s recommendations is worrying in itself, but especially in light of the Chinese government’s long-running campaign to vilify ASPI. Regardless of the government’s or Varghese’s intentions, Beijing might be forgiven for leaping to the conclusion that ASPI has had its wings clipped in the diplomatic and economic cause of stabilisation – a policy that some ASPI analysts (myself included) have legitimately contested.
The fact that the government coincidentally celebrated the full resumption of the live lobster trade with China the same week it released the Varghese review and its official response can only have strengthened such associations, and perhaps even buoyed the belief in Beijing that its economic coercion of Australia was effective, after all. The timing of this statement, at a minimum, showed poor judgment.
ASPI continues to abide by the guidance in its charter that its main purpose is to provide “alternative sources of input to Government decision-making processes on major strategic and defence policy issues”. Also, that it should help to “nourish public debate and understanding”.
ASPI’s research output on China is an important part of what we do, though only one part. As an institution, ASPI is proud of the breadth of its China expertise and language skills, which is unsurpassed among think tanks in Australia. ASPI has also provided an outlet for prominent Australia-based academics to publish policy-relevant research on China. ASPI has contributed significantly to Australia’s stock of China expertise. Just this week, the US designated companies including battery maker CATL as Chinese military companies after years of research from institutions like ASPI about links to the Chinese government and military, and about human rights abuses.
Ministers from around the world seek out ASPI analysts for briefings on our research. Datasets we have built over the past decade as a public good have been used by governments and organisations worldwide.
Blind spot
In his report, Varghese was indeed right to point out that Australia has failed to nurture academic expertise on China. But universities, for their own reasons, have long since abandoned the field in the areas that matter most for Australia’s strategic policy – the external behaviours of China’s Communist Party, through its state security apparatus and the People’s Liberation Army. ASPI will continue to do what it can to nurture the talent required to fill that national blind spot and to publish ground-breaking research in these areas. ASPI’s researchers would collegially welcome a greater investment of resources by other think tanks, universities and the government in this regard.
Curran and others are free to criticise ASPI and other research institutes but should focus on evidence, not innuendo. I, for one, would much prefer to be writing about Australia’s regional security environment, defence capability and military strategy. A glance at the international headlines is sufficient to understand there is an urgent and growing appetite for expert analysis in these areas, to inform the general public, and provide alternative policy inputs for the Australian government.
The implications of emerging changes in land warfare for the focused all-domain defence force
Many elements of 21st-century warfare echo those of the 20th century. The nature of war as a brutal and fundamentally human endeavour has endured despite the introduction of stealth aircraft, precision missiles, drones, satellites and cyber capabilities to contemporary battlefields. Making sense of this context is just one of many challenges confronting the Australian Army and how it best contributes to the joint force.
This report is an analysis of emergent features of contemporary warfare coupled with a range of lessons learned from the history of war relevant to developing solutions for how land forces might contribute to the all-domain ADF. The author’s analysis is proffered in good faith for the sake of further discussion and contest of ideas.
The first section of this report explores the effects of emerging technologies and social circumstances on warfare and how armed forces might adapt. The second section examines the implications of the features of contemporary battlefields for the Army’s role in the focused ADF. The third section explores the implications of the tendency for wars to go on much longer than the belligerents would like. The fourth section explores the often-overlooked role of land forces in deterrence. The fifth and final section makes note of the challenges surrounding the logistics of ADF land warfare in a maritime environment and discusses the relative merits of heavier land forces in the Indo-Pacific.