When Xu Yanjun travelled to Belgium in April 2018, he wasn’t there as a tourist but as an officer of China’s Ministry of State Security. Xu had been lured to Belgium by US authorities who then extradited him and are now prosecuting him on charges of economic espionage.

This was a remarkable case for a number of reasons. It was the first-ever arrest of a Chinese intelligence officer—and not simply an agent or asset—by the United States. And the indictment mentioned Xu’s accomplice, a senior executive at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. This man worked with Xu to lure American jet engine experts to China, and then recruit them.

Xu’s partnership with this university in Nanjing reveals the tip of the iceberg in terms of links between China’s universities and its defence and security establishment. In 2018, ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre published Picking flowers, making honey, a report that laid out the Chinese military’s extensive presence within foreign universities, to which more than 2,500 of its scientists have been sent as visiting scholars or students.

Now, the China Defence Universities Tracker website records in unprecedented detail how more and more Chinese universities are becoming integrated with China’s military apparatus, security agencies and nuclear weapons program. This has serious implications for governments and universities in how they approach research collaboration with China.

Picking flowers, making honey described a problem; the China Defence Universities Tracker aims to be part of the solution. While Australia’s universities generally have systems in place to manage collaboration, vet visiting scholars and ensure research integrity, they aren’t working. Media reporting and scholarly research have uncovered numerous cases of universities working with companies implicated in human rights abuses or with the Chinese military and its proxies.

The newly released Guidelines to counter foreign interference in the Australian university sector are a valuable tool for universities to revisit and hopefully revise these systems. But efforts to manage collaboration will only be successful if they seek out and incorporate the kinds of information included in the tracker.

Built by an international team of China analysts, including Alex Joske, Charlie Lyons Jones, Elsa Kania, Samantha Hoffman and Audrey Fritz, the tracker is a book-length database on over 160 civilian universities, military institutions, police and intelligence academies, and defence conglomerates. It identified nearly 200 defence laboratories and 400 specific fields of research designated by the Chinese government as ‘disciplines with defence characteristics’ across nearly 100 civilian universities.

It also records the Ministry of Public Security’s growing university partnerships on surveillance technologies amid the disappearance of an estimated 1.5 million Muslim ethnic minorities into Xinjiang’s camps. On the basis of these and other findings, it sorts universities into risk categories.

Research for the tracker has found that China’s defence system historically relied on a group of seven leading universities known as the ‘Seven Sons of National Defence’ to train defence scientists and push forward the cutting edge of defence technology. These universities, such as Beihang University and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, are still dominant, sending a third of their graduates to the defence sector. Defence research spending by just one of them, Harbin Institute of Technology, nearly matches the Australian government’s spending on defence technology research.

But the Chinese Communist Party’s policy of military–civil fusion has been drawing more universities into China’s defence innovation system. Now, at least 61 universities have been supervised by China’s defence industry agency, in addition to the Seven Sons of National Defence.

A broader measure—the number of universities awarded clearances to participate in classified research—brings us to more than 150 universities. For example, Tsinghua University, known as ‘China’s MIT’, hosts at least eight defence labs, one of which works on air-to-air missiles. Its internet servers have been linked to cyberattacks around the world, including against Tibetan dissident communities. In 2013, 40 PhD students at Tsinghua were sponsored by China’s nuclear weapons program and required to work for it after graduation.

China’s state-owned defence conglomerates have also been described in the tracker. These manufacturers of guns, missiles, jets, warships and radars jointly supervise at least nine Chinese universities, funding them, running laboratories with them, and playing a role in their management. They have also increased their overseas presence since 2012.

Our research has found at least 14 joint labs or partnerships these conglomerates have established with universities in the UK, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Australia. These joint labs host Chinese missile and military aviation experts and—in the case of the University of Technology Sydney’s partnership—have been linked to surveillance systems.

How can Australia grapple with the deepening of our research collaboration with China at the same time as the Chinese Communist Party cultivates so-called universities with defence characteristics? The government, universities and individual researchers all have important roles to play here. It will be important for the government to revise and enforce relevant legislation and to continue working with universities to develop responses that protect university autonomy and academic freedom.

But, ultimately, only by recognising the problem and understanding where their systems have fallen short can universities prepare themselves for the future.

The post mortems on Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s US visit and speech in Chicago on Chinese state trade distortions didn’t wait for the trip to finish. We’ve had the line from opposition leader Anthony Albanese that the big issue was that the speech was delivered in the US. And another from the Chinese Communist Party paper the China Daily that ‘Australia still needs to fine tune its perceptions of China’, which was echoed by some strident visiting Chinese university folk.

We’ve even seen a repackaging of the much loved ‘Australia needs to reset its relationship with Beijing by changing the tone and language’ mantra. It now appears to be necessary for a new reason—because, apparently, Australia has joined the US–China trade war.

The visit had its hokey moments and lots of Trumpian theatrics, certainly. It was an important demonstration that the Australia–US relationship is deep and as much an economic as a strategic one. But the big outcome of the trip is a further articulation of Australia’s emerging China policy.

On the Albanese call: there are two tests for any Australian prime minister speaking on a critical issue like China policy. The first is whether the same speech could have been given anywhere—in Beijing, Canberra, Delhi, Brussels, Jakarta, Port Moresby, Washington or Rockhampton. This one could have.

To focus on its being delivered in the US as an indicator of Australia’s alignment in the trade war is superficial and tactically political. Before rushing to such a judgement, it’s worth actually reading the speech, because Morrison did not endorse US President Donald Trump’s deficit-focused trade war. Instead, he called for international action on underlying issues. The more important question is whether Morrison will be consistent if and when he visits Beijing.

That brings us to the substance. Morrison’s speech sketched out the changes to China’s economy since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The case is well founded and consistent, with analysis from organisations like the OECD and the European Commission, as well as reports of the US Trade Representative. It also aligns with the views of almost all G20 leaders and finance ministers, and sits well with APEC’s unreleased communiqué of 2018 that all leaders agreed to except Chinese President Xi Jinping.

It’s based on some simple big things. Since 2001, the combination of China’s new wealth, the leadership’s prioritisation of trade and high-end economic development, and a comprehensive set of structural policies—including intellectual property theft at scale, forced intellectual property transfers, state subsidies and market protections—has distorted world trade to the disadvantage of many economies that engage with China’s. That’s because their own firms have been put at a competitive disadvantage by the Chinese state’s policies and practices.

China’s fabulous growth in recent decades has been enabled by other economies, including Australia’s, engaging with it on these terms. However, now China’s wealth, and its use of that wealth in its distorted international economic engagement, is a global problem that must be addressed.

It has resulted, for example, in Chinese ‘national champions’—like Huawei—using their home market protections and advantages to compete against firms that haven’t been given these state-derived boosts when bidding for work—such as building others’ national 5G networks.

The fact that per capita GDP in China is still well below that of other countries possessing large, highly developed economies like much of China’s is as much about how Xi and previous leaders have used China’s new wealth. They have chosen not to spread it broadly, but instead created a large middle class and a sizeable luxury class of ultra-wealthy individuals—the China Daily boasted last October that China had produced the most billionaires globally in 2017. Those decisions have resulted in a two-track economy: the developed bit is deeply engaged with the international economy, and the undeveloped portion is lagging behind.

Priority has also been given to increasing the capacity of the Chinese state’s internal security forces to confront and control their own citizens, and strengthening China’s external military, cyber, space and intelligence power.

Xi’s three signature programs—the Belt and Road Initiative, ‘Made in China 2025’ and military–civil fusion—continue his focus on growing strategic, technological and economic power to be used by the state. At the same time, the BRI will attempt to spread the economic largesse from China’s highly developed coastal regions inland along its spines, although not at the expense of internal security or the People’s Liberation Army.

The visiting Chinese university team, accompanied by embassy minders, reacted to Morrison’s Chicago speech by claiming Australia is the pioneer of a global anti-China campaign.

That statement contains a truth hidden in an obscuration: there is a global anti-China campaign—but it’s being led by Xi, not Australia.

Former CCP leaders, from Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, were subtle enough to grow China’s economic and state power quietly and well. Xi, by contrast, is a man in a hurry, and since 2012 he has switched the national agenda to a much more aggressive, assertive and confident use of China’s newly built military, economic, technological and cyber power in pursuit of his ‘China Dream’ of a Sino-centred world.

Think of the military’s takeover under Xi of chunks of the South China Sea. And of the Chinese state’s aggressive cyber hacking, including into Australia’s parliament and our three major political parties. And of its large-scale foreign interference in other countries’ politics. And of the steps it has taken to establish military bases and a presence beyond the PLA’s first overseas base in Djibouti—for example, in Cambodia.

Xi is also galvanising international opposition over his increasingly repressive use of state security forces and technology against China’s own people. Xinjiang and Hong Kong are two obvious examples.

As Isaac Newton told us, for every action there’s a reaction. Xi’s actions have been the catalyst for a broad and growing international reaction to Chinese structural economic policies and practices and the Chinese state’s use of its power domestically and internationally. Again, 5G and Huawei are a prime example; the Indian, Japanese and EU nations’ considerations about their various national networks are being informed by this reaction. Who can tell what strategic adjustments are being urged on Xi or what pressures are developing within the CCP leadership?

Regardless, this is bad news, obviously, for China and the world. But it also means that Australia is not alone in needing to manage this new kind of China. Morrison is in good company with the directions he set out in Chicago.

For the future, he will need to continue to centre his public policy engagement with Australians and with every other leader as he has to date—on Australia’s national interests.

That will become increasingly important if Albanese continues with his Chicago sound bite about Morrison’s China policy being an endorsement of the US in the Trump–Xi trade dispute. It’s more likely that Albanese is smart enough to see that any tactical political advantage to him from driving a bipartisan divide into Australia’s China policy isn’t worth the damage it would do to our national interests.

And he’ll have to get past shadow defence minister Richard Marles’s odd line that ‘ultimately, we have made a decision to engage. We made that decision back in 1972. We continue with that decision now’—as if we are somehow powerless to adjust how we engage in the face of the fundamental changes that have occurred since 1972 in China’s power and the way the CCP uses it.

Albanese has a ready solution to hand here, given his Labor colleague Penny Wong’s speech on the international economy, China and the US. As with Morrison’s speech, the shadow foreign minister’s remarks align pretty closely with the broader concerns expressed by G20 leaders, the OECD and the EU and so provide a continued basis for bipartisanship on this crucial set of issues.

All the handwringing from pro-CCP advocates about Australia needing to reset the relationship—which seems to involve apologising for and reversing decisions made in our national interest—needs to be seen in this broader context. No prime minister should apologise for acting in Australia’s national interests. And no political leader should fall into the trap of characterising tension in the relationship as attributable to the ‘vibe’ of Australian language rather than the facts of Chinese state actions.

There’s also the comforting and practical observation that fears of Xi’s state taking large punitive economic actions against Australia have simply not materialised, because our trade relationship with Beijing is one of interdependence. In fact, our two-way trade relationship has continued to grow and is now worth some $215 billion. The Chinese economy needs our resources and services, arguably even more at a time of growing economic challenges.

The Chicago speech put Australia’s approach to Chinese economic policies and actions right in the middle of the crystallising consensus in OECD and G20 nations. Australia is similarly in good company in pushing back on Chinese state conduct in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. None of this will make it any easier to deal with Xi’s strategic, technological and economic agenda, but it’s a good place to be.

Beyond economics, the prime minister and the opposition are both yet to craft a clear approach to domestic China policy. The Gladys Liu affair shows the problems in seeking to distill the diverse Australian Chinese communities of 1.2 million people into a single individual. And the government has yet to articulate a way to empower these diverse voices, so that public debate on China is informed by more than the ‘curated garden’ of groups and voices the Chinese embassy and its consulates manage.

Morrison also has yet to confront intrusive Chinese state interference—either by attributing the hacks on the parliament and political parties to the Chinese Ministry of State Security now that Australian agencies will have done the forensic work to allow this, or through prosecution when presented with the first case of an individual with undisclosed financial links to Beijing under Australia’s new foreign influence transparency scheme.

Unless those around Xi convince him to change course, the hard times for many states engaging with his China, for the 1.4 billion people living under party rule, and for Xi and the CCP in return, are yet to come. Australia has at least begun to build a framework for this new difficult era.

Trade minister Simon Birmingham on Sunday weighed into the debate over Andrew Hastie’s warning about China rise. Birmingham said colleagues should ask themselves two questions before speaking out on ‘sensitive foreign policy matters’.

These were: ‘Is the making of those comments in a public way necessary? And is it helpful to Australia’s national interest?’

On a narrow view, the warning by Hastie—the chair of the powerful Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security—about Australia not being alive enough to the dangers of an ever-more-powerful China was not ‘necessary’; nor was it particularly helpful to a government trying to manage a relationship that gets more complicated all the time.

But the idea that backbenchers shouldn’t voice considered views on such a major long-term issue for this country shows a certain contempt for parliamentary democracy.

Birmingham, speaking on the ABC, said: ‘There are a range of ways in which any of us can contribute and we can do that with direct discussion with ministers and with leadership in backbench committees and other ways’.

Decoded, the message to the backbench was: Boys and girls, when in public just follow the talking points we give you.

Amid the noisy chatter and clatter of our current politics, serious foreign policy discussions among politicians are relatively rare.

But the broad community debate grows ever stronger about China and its implications for Australia—including the now-great power’s trajectory, our dependence on it economically, its reach into this country (including through investment and our educational institutions), and how we juggle our respective relationships with it and the United States.

New Liberal backbencher Dave Sharma entered the China debate at the weekend, with a robust thread of nearly a dozen tweets, in support of Hastie.

A former senior diplomat, Sharma is more steeped in foreign policy than most on the frontbench.

‘Hastie is right to ring the bell on this issue, and to warn that our greatest vulnerability lies in our thinking, which is Panglossian at times’, he wrote.

Significantly, Sharma also supported Hastie’s comparison with France’s failure to comprehend properly the rise of Germany before World War II.

‘In WW2, we failed to realise early enough that German ambitions could not be accommodated. National Socialist Germany was not a status quo power, but we mistook it as such, or deceived ourselves that it was’, Sharma wrote.

Hastie’s reference to Germany had been sharply condemned on Friday by Senate leader Mathias Cormann, who said it was ‘a clumsy and inappropriate analogy.’

But Hastie was verballed over his invoking of Germany. He wasn’t saying the Chinese and Nazi regimes were the same—he was talking about the underestimation of the threats they posed to other countries.

Hastie could have drawn another parallel—with the failure of countries in the 1930s to fully appreciate the looming threat from Japan.

Sharma noted that rising powers inevitably cause convulsions—‘the challenge is to accommodate a rising power if it is sufficiently status quo in nature that it can be accommodated. This was the thesis with China for much of the early 2000s’, Sharma wrote.

‘But if the rising power is revisionist in nature, and cannot be accommodated within the existing order—because it fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of that order—then the future becomes much tougher’.

Given it was clear China’s ideological direction and ambition had become ‘far more pronounced’ under its current leadership, ‘our strategy and thinking need to reflect this shift, which is basically Hastie’s point—that we need to remove the blinkers from our eyes, recognise reality for what it is, and act accordingly’, Sharma said.

‘This does not mean we should not be pursuing a constructive and positive relationship with China—we should be. Nor does it compel us to make a “choice”. But we need to be honest with ourselves about the challenges of managing this relationship and what might lie ahead.’

Of course, Australian government policy in the past few years has been reacting to what has been seen as a heightening Chinese threat—even while the government has often been unwilling to admit as much.

The Pacific ‘step-up’ is all about China. So was the legislation, enacted by the Turnbull government, against foreign interference. The exclusion of Huawei from the 5G network was an unequivocal message. Australia’s intensified efforts to counter the cybersecurity threat have China front of mind.

The Chinese predictably reacted with annoyance to Hastie’s comments. But they are much more attuned to the actions Australia has taken and continues to take—measures which have been and are in the national interest. That’s the basic reason why Australia–China relations are strained.

The government’s trying to shut down backbench contributions to this debate is less a matter of the ‘national interest’ than an exercise of attempted control of its MPs in its own interest.

In fact, it might be counterproductive for the national interest, which may require the Australian public to acquire a much better understanding than they have now of what could be increasingly difficult times and decisions in the years to come.

Concerns were widely expressed this week about a Chinese intelligence-gathering ship loitering off eastern Australia to spy on our biggest defence exercise. This is one of many cases where Prime Minister Scott Morrison will have to make hard decisions about when to assert Australia’s interests against a determined China promoting its own agenda.

A new cold war with China is playing out in all but name. Australia will be at the front line of much of this because we will increasingly be tested by the United States’ asking, ‘Are you with us?’, while China asks, ‘Are you against us?’

All the indications are Morrison understands that our worsening strategic situation will force Australia into an even closer military alliance with the US.

When the prime minister takes up President Donald Trump’s invitation to visit the White House, he will do so confident that the alliance relationship is strong, but with a clear understanding that more will need to be done to counter Chinese influence in the region.

In all likelihood, that will mean considering an increase in defence spending beyond the current target of 2% of GDP and doing even more to build Australia’s military presence in the region.

The old Australian strategy of trying to balance between these forces won’t work for much longer because China’s increasingly aggressive international behaviour is starkly at odds with our long-term security interests.

Three little-noticed recent developments serve to highlight a headlong slide towards a new cold war between the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership on the one hand and the rest of the Asia–Pacific and, frankly, all democracies on the other hand.

Each incident shows how Beijing positions itself for tactical advantage. Although China’s leaders often talk about the need for countries to pursue ‘win–win’ cooperation, Beijing is intent on manoeuvring to win advantage for itself at the expense of its neighbours.

As Defence Minister Linda Reynolds said in a carefully worded speech in London this week, ‘The longer we leave it unchecked, the bolder they become.’ Reynolds didn’t name China, but she didn’t need to when describing ‘countries prepared to flout the rules-based order’. These days, even a British audience understands that China presents the biggest strategic threat to global stability.

So, to the recent incidents, the latest in a long succession of deliberate Chinese actions to assert its power regionally and globally.

First, in Beijing, China’s Defence Minister Wei Fenghe hosted the ‘Fourth Forum for Senior Defense Officials from Caribbean and South Pacific Countries’. It’s difficult to comprehend how China could identify important defence interests in either location, but Wei was reported as saying that China wanted to deepen military exchanges and cooperation with Caribbean and Pacific island countries ‘under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative’.

So much for the claim made by Beijing’s backers in Australia that the BRI is a harmless vehicle for infrastructure investment. It’s clear in Chinese strategic thinking that the BRI is a means to assert influence. Where commercial ports might cement an economic relationship, Beijing’s aspiration will be to build military ties, seeking access and engagement.

This helps to explain China’s interests in establishing a military base on Vanuatu and also why ostensibly independent Chinese businesses have pressing interests to build ports and airports in commercially unviable locations everywhere from Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island to French Polynesia in the Pacific and from the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa.

China will continue looking for opportunities to establish military bases in the Pacific, which will greatly complicate Australian and American defence planning. That is precisely why the CCP wants such a facility; it’s not about delivering Wei’s confected list of cooperation in ‘anti-terrorism, peacekeeping and disaster relief’.

The second incident took place last weekend. According to the Vanuatu Daily Post, six individuals of ethnic Chinese origin were detained in Port Vila by Chinese law enforcement officials working incognito, held on the premises of a Chinese-owned company and then extradited from the country without any legal process on a chartered Chinese aircraft.

There are precedents, including in Fiji, where the Chinese state has abducted individuals who may have broken Chinese laws to face legal proceedings in China. The latest case in Vanuatu is particularly disturbing because it reportedly happened with the tacit support of some senior politicians but outside of any national legal framework.

The Vanuatu Daily Post editorialised: ‘Our development partners—who claim to stand for an international rules based order—should remind Vanuatu what those rules are … Vanuatu is not China. But today, it’s looking more like it than ever before.’

What is clear is that sovereign interests in small developing countries will do nothing to stop Beijing from acting as it wishes, often openly contemptuous of local politicians, officials and laws.

The third development happened at the beginning of July when China’s transport ministry, warning of ‘probable or imminent’ threats, raised security requirements to the highest level under the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code for Chinese ships transiting through the Strait of Malacca between Singapore and Indonesia.

The announcement surprised observers because the area has been stable, with lower levels of piracy than have been seen in years. No other country has raised threat levels for ships transiting the strait.

It’s possible the Chinese decision reflected concern about recent attacks on shipping near the Strait of Hormuz. But that’s half a world away and a different strategic story. More likely the decision to raise threat levels over the Malacca Strait is another step in China consolidating its control over the South China Sea.

In May 2018, China installed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles on the three island facilities it has constructed in the South China Sea and, simultaneously with the Malacca Strait threat-level increase, Beijing held a major naval exercise in the region, firing a live anti-ship missile.

China has worked at great speed to strengthen its military hold over the South China Sea and to demonstrate its domination with exercises and frequent visits of combat aircraft. In 2012 President Xi Jinping created the ‘Central Maritime Rights Protection Leading Small Group’—the forum, personally chaired by Xi, where top CCP elites make policy for the South China Sea.

If Beijing wanted to, it could quite easily ‘close’ international access to air and sea space in the South China Sea to demonstrate its military control. What better way to do that than in response to an improbable threat assessment which claims that Chinese shipping faces unspecified threats in the nearby Strait of Malacca?

These developments are examples of what Reynolds said in London are ‘options for pursuing strategic ends just below the threshold of traditional armed conflict—what some experts like to call grey-zone tactics or hybrid warfare’.

There’s a general recognition in Canberra that, as Morrison said before the G20 meeting, ‘The balance between strategic engagement and strategic competition in the US–China relationship has shifted.’ What is perhaps tougher to publicly acknowledge is that Australia’s interests are equally affected.

The Chinese state’s policies are deliberately designed to undermine Australian interests in the Pacific while strengthening Beijing’s own hand. This is precisely the ‘zero-sum game’ Chinese diplomats accuse Washington of playing against them.

While Malcolm Turnbull took initial steps to lift Australia’s profile and presence in the Pacific islands, it’s Morrison’s decision to embrace a ‘Pacific step-up’ strategy that creates the basis for pushing back against China’s ‘we win, you lose’ approach.

An Australian military joint taskforce involving the supply ship HMAS Sirius will operate throughout the Pacific during July making port calls and ‘cementing our relationships’. Hopefully a softer Australian strategy emphasising a ‘like-minded approach’ with the island states will reduce local temptations to succumb to the attractions of well-funded Chinese engagement.

Amid the gathering strategic storm clouds, the urgent policy challenge for Australia is to apply some clear thinking to how we manage relations with China and with the United States. We are not a neutral bystander in a cold war that pits authoritarianism against the international rule of law.

First, it’s time for the federal government to prevent the states and territories and even local governments from electing to sign up to the BRI through memorandums of understanding as Victoria did last year. The BRI is designed to advance Beijing’s strategic objectives and on that basis it is incompatible with Australian interests.

Second, we should reject the calls from organisations like the think tank China Matters, which recently argued for Australia to ‘do our utmost to be an integrating force for the PRC in our region’ at the same time as claiming that ‘our interests are not always going to align with the interests of the United States’.

While that latter point may be true, it should be clear that a generation of enthusiastic attempts to make Australia economically dependent on China has done nothing to change Beijing’s strategic behaviour. Now the task is to make sure that economic dependence won’t compromise our ability to promote Australia’s national security.

It is idle to pretend as the China Matters organisation does that a new cold war isn’t playing out in the region. No one really wanted this outcome. The hope was that China would emerge as a more open and liberal-minded power as it got wealthier, but the opposite has happened. If a new cold war is our future, Australia must move quickly to stake out our position as an influential player in the region with a voice to be listened to in Washington and Beijing.