Tag Archive for: ASPI

Could’ve seen it coming: ASPI’s tech tracker had picked up China’s AI strength

It shouldn’t have come as a complete shock.

US tech stocks, especially chipmaker Nvidia, plunged on Monday after news that the small China-based company DeepSeek had achieved a dramatic and reportedly inexpensive advance in artificial intelligence. But the step forward for China’s AI industry was in fact foreseeable.

It was foreseeable from ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker, which was launched in early 2023 and which in its latest update monitors high-impact research (measured as the 10 percent most highly cited publications) over two decades across 64 technologies, including machine learning and natural language processing (NLP).

While high-impact research isn’t the full picture, it is a leading indicator of scientific innovation right at the beginning of the lifecycle of a technology. As we argued in our August 2024 update, scientific innovation needs to be nurtured through every step of the lifecycle, notably through commercialisation for economic gain.

The two-decade Critical Technology Tracker report showed that China’s consistent investments in science and technology were paying off, with steady gains in its global share of high-impact publications in machine learning over the previous two decades. In this ascent, China overtook the United States in their yearly global share of highly cited publications in 2017.

ASPI has shown that between 2019 and 2023, 36.5 percent of high impact research in this field was published by Chinese institutions, compared with 15.4 percent by the United States. In NLP, the race is tighter, with the US’s and China’s global share of publications neck-and-neck in the same five-year period, at 24.8 percent and 24.1 percent, respectively.

ASPI’s research has also shown that, of the world-leading institutions in machine-learning research, the top five were in China. Tsinghua University, the alma mater of several key researchers behind the latest DeepSeek model, ranked second. ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker also ranks Tsinghua University third in research in natural-language processing, behind only Google and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Chinese technology firms have been increasingly tapping into the growing pool of indigenous talent. Last year, DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, emphasised that the core research team was ‘all local’ and included no one who had trained or done extensive work abroad—though some members did have work experience in foreign operations inside China, such as Microsoft Research Asia. The Financial Times reports that Liang formed his AI company by combining an excellent team of chips experts with the best talent from a hedge fund he had co-founded.

AI is just the latest technology in which we have seen Chinese companies challenge the established dominance held by US or European companies. Solar cells, electric vehicles and smartphones are all technologies in which Western companies held and lost early advantages. ASPI’s data shows that China has in fact surpassed the US in cutting-edge research for 57 out of 64 technology areas; 2016 was an inflection point.

The global AI industry is still weighted in favour of the US in share of pioneering tech companies. But as DeepSeek’s announcement emphasises, US and other Western countries should have no great confidence in keeping their leads. In fact, any confidence should be called out as complacency.

So, the Trump administration’s commitment to making America great again in technologies is certainly welcomed. The big example so far is the announcement on 21 January of the US AI infrastructure joint venture Stargate, into which US$500 billion ($800 billion) is to be invested.

DeepSeek’s release makes it clear that now is not the time for half-measures or wishful thinking. Bold decisions, strategic foresight and a willingness to lean in to the AI race is vital to maintaining a competitive edge, and not just by the US.

ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker is clear in another regard: that we should be ready for similar advances by China in other technological domains. Let’s hope that DeepSeek really is the wakeup call needed and likeminded countries now take the action needed to avoid being shocked again—not just in AI, but in all critical technologies.

ASPI is and will remain independent

James Curran gets a number of things wrong in his Australian Financial Review 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?

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 such as 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.

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.

Varghese review will undermine think tank independence

For China watchers, there’s a grim irony contained in the 14 principles that former senior official Peter Varghese recommends in his long-awaited review into national security think tanks, released last week.

Fourteen was also the number of grievances the Chinese embassy notoriously unveiled in 2020 and that Beijing expected to be addressed if diplomatic relations were to improve – the 10th of which was defunding the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Beijing hasn’t quite got its way through the recommendations of Varghese, who is now chancellor of the University of Queensland. But the embassy’s champagne stocks may be a little depleted once its officials have measured his list against their own.

Beyond the impact on ASPI itself, there is a deeper danger in the principles, accepted by the Albanese government: the push to exercise more control over think tanks and to dampen the contestability that researchers provide.

ASPI was set up in 2001 precisely to contest the advice that the Howard government was receiving from the Department of Defence. We have since grown into a broader national security think tank that looks at modern threats ranging from cyber and disinformation to authoritarian abuses of power in places such as China’s Xinjiang.

We are recognised globally for our groundbreaking work on China—none of which is convenient to the government’s narrative of diplomatic stability with Beijing. The idea that the security issues ASPI has pursued independently—and often well ahead of national and global trends—may in future be given the thumbs up or down by ministers and bureaucrats is deeply unsettling. Yet the Varghese report recommends this command-and-control approach.

After delivering the 50-page report, Varghese then wrote an op-ed in The Australian at the weekend responding to the responses to his report. This is ironic given his report’s criticism of ‘op-ed overreach’. The problem with Varghese’s insistence that we all just need a Bex and a good lie-down is that a veritable chasm exists between his rhetoric expressing support for think tank independence and the actions he’s actually recommending.

First, think tanks would have to bid against one another for operational funding. That sounds superficially appealing, but if two institutes are competing for a grant and one has been nicer to the sitting government, who is better placed? Not all think tanks will resist self-censorship when they know fearless critiques may jeopardise future funding.

Second, ministers and their departments would set priorities for research, meaning anything that didn’t match the government’s agenda or was sensitive could be discouraged.

If an organisation wanted to look at China’s political and hybrid warfare, or the rapid and opaque modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army, this might not go ahead if it didn’t suit the government. The government’s response here went further than Varghese by adding ministers, not just department heads, as gatekeepers.

Third, the government will require government officials to sit on think tank councils, making them at least an observer during think tanks’ internal deliberations and perhaps even a voice to influence meetings. Again, the government’s response went further than Varghese’s recommendations.

This is inconsistent with the many other organisations that receive federal funding.

And while Varghese points out some entities already have government officials on their boards, he leaves unanswered his own question of whether they have had independence compromised. The answer is yes, a government official sitting on a non-government board likely has impact, including to censor criticism.

Fourth, specific federally funded research projects would be ‘co-designed’ by bureaucrats, potentially putting guardrails on the researchers’ instincts.

The government gives grant money to the arts but nobody expects a bureaucrat to stand over the artists telling them how to stage a performance of Hamlet or do an interpretative dance.

Finally, there is the shutting of support for ASPI’s Washington office. Here, Varghese appears simply not to understand the role of think tanks’ overseas offices—saying it’s a problem ‘having ASPI freelance’. Freelance is a synonym of independence and, to be clear, we are independent and not there to push the views of the government of the day.

We are there to foster debate on issues that are important to Australia and its people, such as Indo-Pacific security and global rules. This has long-term value.

ASPI is known and respected across the political aisle in Washington for its nonpartisan and hard-hitting work, with many in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, including incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio, citing our research numerous times.

So it makes zero sense that the Australian government would narrow rather than expand Australia’s options for engaging with Washington when the US is moving into a new Trump administration that will bring challenges for the Australian bureaucracy.

Varghese himself acknowledges that the kind of contestability ASPI was established to provide is essential and refers to our research as ‘groundbreaking’. Regrettably he also refers to our China research—on human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Beijing’s interference in Australia and other countries—as controversial. Let’s face it, it was controversial only in the sense that Beijing didn’t like it.

Some of this review’s recommendations are reasonable and welcome, but the problems at its heart represent an abandonment of principles that successive governments for more than 20 years have recognised and respected.

Still, ASPI believes in our mission to pour sunlight on security threats to Australia and to help improve understanding—whether among policymakers or the public—of the steps needed to keep ourselves safe. We will continue to build on our proud legacy—because this work has never been more vital.