Tag Archive for: CCP

Whatever the CCP says, regimes don’t have the rights of nations

All nation states have a right to defend themselves. But do regimes enjoy an equal right to self-defence? Is the security of a particular party-in-power a fundamental right of nations? The Chinese government is asking us to answer in the affirmative. Australians need to say no.

As a governing regime, the Chinese Communist Party claims many of the prerogatives of a nation state. This includes a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force—Max Weber’s classic definition of a state.

As the world adjusts to the rise of China, its leaders want us to make way for the CCP’s triumphal arrival as the regime that made it all possible. This includes recognition of the party’s right to self-preservation on par with the rights of nations.

The United Nations Charter affirms the sovereign equality of member states, including their right to preserve their territorial integrity and political independence, free from force or coercion, and to resist external interference in their domestic jurisdictions.

Nothing in the UN Charter or associated documents, however, commits member nations to recognising the same rights for regimes. This places authoritarian regimes such as the CCP at a geopolitical disadvantage in seeking international recognition commensurate with their wealth, power and prestige.

Regime competition runs on a different track to international geopolitical competition, Yale scholar Nicholas Bequelin recently observed in Foreign Policy. The liberal rules-based order of the postwar period lends greater legitimacy to democratic states than to autocratic ones. This hampers the CCP’s search for recognition as a particularistic regime with security interests that serve not only the country but the party and its desire for self-preservation. The motives driving China’s adversarial relationship with the United States, Bequelin concludes, ‘are to be found in the imperatives of regime competition rather than in pure geopolitical calculations.’

The quest for regime security does not end with a geopolitical victory here or there. No authoritarian regime can rest easy until the world beyond itself is rendered safe for the pre-emptive defence of regime security. So current great-power competition is not just a matter of ideological competition within a stable geopolitical system; it involves reframing the system to treat regime security and national security with equal legitimacy.

CCP leaders are moving to reduce their relative disadvantage by altering the terms of international engagement. One of Beijing’s goals in its commitment to new international groupings is to insert commitments to the equal rights of regimes into public declarations. For example, the BRICS security agenda is taking shape around CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative (GSI), which equates regime security with national security. The 16th BRICS summit concluded on 24 October last year with the release of its Kazan Declaration a security document that had strong similarities the GSI, which was first spelled out by Xi at the 2022 Boao Forum.

Key phrases in the Kazan Declaration clearly align with the principles of the GSI. One of these is the acknowledgement of the equality of the ‘legitimate and reasonable security concerns’ of all countries. The phrase appears anodyne, but it is lifted directly from Xi’s GSI, where its significance is clear from context.

Beijing initially deployed this phrase to justify Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, based on the allegedly ‘legitimate and reasonable security concern’ that an independent Ukraine posed a security threat to Russia. China could offer similar justifications for its claims over Taiwan and adjacent Japanese territories or its contested maritime claims in the South China Sea.

That’s just the start. In current Chinese usage, the term ‘legitimate and reasonable security concerns’ refers not only to conventional security issues to do with territory and sovereignty, nor even to non-traditional security concerns around climate, energy, water, pandemics and the like. It also includes the CCP’s concerns around its own security, which it equates with the national and international security interests of China. What is to be preserved here is the power and standing of the party.

Concern for regime security has long featured in CCP foreign policy thinking, but the international implications of this concern have only fully emerged under Xi. This began with a heightened focus on regime security at home. Starting in 2014, Xi transformed Beijing’s approach to internal security by drafting a National Security Framework which, as analyst Sheena Chestnut Greitens points out, is China’s first-ever national security strategy.

The Xi administration also introduced tough new security laws, systematically purging and restructuring the national security system and working to perfect a massive ‘sentinel state’ apparatus capable of preserving the power and status of the party indefinitely. Now, Greitens argues, Xi is applying China’s domestic security framework to foreign policy with a view to reshaping the regional and global security order, ensuring the party’s domestic grip remains as secure abroad as it is on home soil.

It follows that ‘legitimate and reasonable security concerns’ refers, among other things, to the security interests of the CCP regime and the overlapping cluster of security initiatives that flow from party concerns. These initiatives include silencing dissent outside its borders through transnational repression and forcing national governments into line through economic coercion.

This security setting led the party’s official representatives to issue guidelines to Australia’s federal government—the Fourteen Grievances—about what can and cannot be said about the CCP in Australian media and by think tanks and government. Even after relations stabilised, party authorities tracked individuals and communities in Australia by activating surveillance systems initially designed to secure the party’s grip on China.

Recognising regime security as a right of nations would essentially legitimise economic coercion, transnational repression, censorship and covert interference of this kind.

As rights of authoritarian parties are unrecognised in international norms and institutions, elevating the security concerns of a Leninist political party to the level of nation states is no easy matter. But, as Xi reminds us, prevailing norms and institutions are up for grabs in times of ‘great changes unseen in a century.’ Democratic states need to preserve the equal sovereignty of nations, as distinct from regimes.

Bookshelf: ‘Vampire state: The rise and fall of the Chinese economy’

After three decades of record-breaking growth, at about the same time as Xi Jinping rose to power in 2012, China’s economy started the long decline to its current state of stagnation. The Chinese Communist Party would like us to believe that the country’s massive problems are under control and that the economy can easily be kickstarted. But few analysts are convinced.

Ian Williams was a long-time foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News and NBC, based in Moscow, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Beijing, and has written extensively about China. In his latest book, Vampire State: The rise and fall of the Chinese economy, he takes a particularly tough view, suggesting that China’s economic miracle was just a mirage all along.

As Williams sees it, China’s economic reforms were half-hearted from day one and designed first and foremost to ensure that the CCP would remain in power. The West expected economic reform to be followed by political reform and US president Bill Clinton even used this argument with Congress to justify China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. But political change was never on the CCP’s agenda. Rather, China’s ‘socialist market economy’ was intended to bend economics and business to the party’s will and keep the CCP firmly in the driver’s seat.

With China’s economy now in deep trouble, Williams argues that the party-state is the problem rather than the solution. Like a vampire, the party-driven control structures are draining the life-blood out of the economy. Not satisfied to control the country’s huge state-owned enterprises, in recent years the CCP has tightened its centralised mechanisms and expanded its presence into the boardrooms of private companies.

Williams’s analysis starts from the domestic economy, where an enormous property bubble has deprived local governments of income from the sale of land rights, creating huge industrial surpluses and driving youth unemployment up and consumer prices down.

With limited options for addressing this deflationary spiral, China has resorted to exporting its problems. Casting a wide net, Williams reviews the global reach of China’s economic operators, from the expansive infrastructure lending of state-owned policy banks throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America to Chinese racketeers in the border regions of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand.

For all Beijing’s talk of borrower-friendly policies and no-strings-attached lending, China is an unforgiving creditor. When its massive infrastructure projects run into trouble, it prefers providing rescue loans that tighten its control over the assets it has created to writing down debt, squeezing the poorest borrowers in the process.

Williams takes a particularly dim view of China’s business and investment environment, citing numerous examples of a business-unfriendly public sector, biased legal system and unreliable private partners. The fine line between the voluntary transfer of know-how and technological theft is a major danger zone. Many foreign investors have been trapped into ‘voluntarily’ handing over business secrets only to find themselves edged out by their Chinese partners. Investors have also learned the hard way that the Chinese court system rarely works in their favour.

Overseas cooperation between China’s public sector and its state-owned and private enterprises is exceptionally tight, whether in trade policy, research and development, the ‘borrowing’ of technology or development of human resources. The Chinese army, for example, describes sending scientists to study in Britain as ‘picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China’.

Williams has researched his book thoroughly, travelling the length and breadth of China to study local-level problems first-hand. He also visited countries throughout Asia and elsewhere impacted by China’s economic policies. His research included wide-ranging interviews, from the foreign minister of Lithuania and other government leaders, business executives and human rights activists to the manager of a massage parlour operating on the border between Laos and Thailand.

Can China bounce back, or is the miracle over? According to Williams, Xi is not able to implement the reforms needed to get the economy back on track simply because they would threaten the CCP’s grip on power. As a result, the Party is ‘frozen in the headlights’. The cautious balance between stimulating the economy and ensuring stability struck this month by the National People’s Congress is consistent with this diagnosis.

Williams analyses China with his eyes wide open. His refreshing book is a must read for anyone dealing with China’s economy, from public sector trade negotiators to private businesspeople and investors.

In case we forgot, Typhoon attacks remind us of China’s cyber capability—and intent

Australians need to understand the cyber threat from China.

US President Donald Trump described the launch of Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot, DeepSeek, as a wake-up call for the US tech industry. The Australian government moved quickly to ban DeepSeek from government devices.

This came just weeks after the Biden administration stunningly admitted on its way out of office that Chinese Communist Party hackers were targeting not just political and military systems but also civilian networks such as water and health. The hackers could shut down US ports, power grids and other critical infrastructure.

These incidents remind us that China has the intent, and increasingly the capability, to seriously challenge US and Western technology advantage. Australia will be an obvious target if regional tensions continue to rise. It must be well-prepared.

As ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker highlights, China’s advances in critical technologies have been foreseeable for some time. US and Western confidence is manifesting as complacency.

DeepSeek has emerged as a cheap, open-source AI rival to the seemingly indomitable US models. It could enable Chinese technology to become enmeshed in global systems, perhaps even in critical infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Chinese hackers have stealthily embedded themselves in US critical infrastructure, potentially enabling sabotage, or the coercive threat of sabotage, to extract something Beijing wants. The two main perpetrators of these operations are Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon. The Chinese government backs both.

Salt Typhoon’s infiltration of at least nine US telecom networks has enabled CCP-sponsored hackers to geolocate individuals and record phone calls, directly threatening personal privacy and national security. This devastating counterintelligence failure includes the identification of individuals that US agencies suspect are agents working for China. It also enables CCP surveillance and coercion of US nationals and Chinese dissidents.

If anything, Volt Typhoon poses a greater threat, with covert access to critical infrastructure networks. Each reinforces the dangers of the other.

Some US officials involved in the investigation have said the hack is so severe, and the networks so compromised, that the United States may never be sure the intruders have been fully rooted out.

Both operations demonstrate sophisticated stealth. In particular, Volt Typhoon’s technique of living off the land—in which they sit at length in the systems, using its own resources—made detection harder. It could gain outwardly legitimate access without the requirement for malware. This reveals an intent to map and maintain access to critical systems, not for immediate destruction, but for whenever best serves Beijing’s interests. In this sense, it can be seen as a precursor to war.

The focus on critical infrastructure underscores how malicious cyber operations can undermine national resilience during peacetime and crises and sow doubt on a government’s ability to safeguard the people. Through these operations, adversaries could influence a target country’s decisions as leaders avoid taking any action that might provoke a disruption or sabotage.

Australia’s intelligence agencies are aware of these risks. Australia’s director-general of security, Mike Burgess, warned in his 2024 annual threat assessment that ‘the most immediate, low cost and potentially high-impact vector for sabotage [by foreign adversaries] is cyber’. This was reinforced in his 2025 assessment when he declared that ‘foreign regimes are expected to become more determined to, and more capable of, pre-positioning cyber access vectors they can exploit in the future.’ He warned that we’re getting closer to the threshold for ‘high-impact sabotage’.

The Australian Signals Directorate has been improving preparedness and resilience. It has helped Australian organisations to defend themselves and mitigate prepositioning and living-off-the-land techniques. ASD has also been building offensive capabilities needed to impose costs on attackers.

We must avoid the traps China sets as it seeks global information dominance. First, we can’t be complacent. It’s unsafe to assume that the US and its allies will remain decisively better than China, and that we can counter whatever Beijing can do. Second, we must reject the viewpoint that ‘everyone spies so it would be hypocritical to condemn China’, as it is a false moral equivalence. Third, we must avoid arguing that there isn’t present threat just because Beijing doesn’t have the intent to go to war today. This wishful thinking is a dangerous mistake. If we fall into these traps, we present Beijing with more time and render ourselves incapable of advancing our interests.

Chinese capabilities are strong and growing, and the way they are being used by the CCP demonstrates clear malign intent. This should be pushing elected governments to take the protective action and prepare for future cyber operations.

The reluctance to see the threats in the information domain as equal to traditional threats is a decades-old mistake that must be corrected. We need to minimise our dependence on China for technology.

China is on course for a prolonged recession

The risk of China spiralling into an unprecedentedly prolonged recession is increasing.

Its economy is experiencing deflation, with the price level falling for a second consecutive year in 2024, according to recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China. It’s on track for the longest period of economy-wide price declines since the 1960s.

Coupled with the collapse of the property sector, a looming trade war with the United States and demographic and debt overhang challenges, much of the Chinese public has lost confidence in the economy and its leadership.

The country has the ingredients for a recession, and not a short one. It has spent too much on investment and needs to turn to consumption as a source of demand, but people are unwilling to spend. They have long had high savings rates, and now deflation is further discouraging spending. So do falling property values, ageing of the population and excessive corporate and government debt.

Getting out of such a recession will be hard, because of the challenge of restoring confidence and getting households and businesses to spend more. Since local government debt is high, expanding public expenditure to stoke demand would worsen economic imbalances.

Current deflation is a result of the Chinese government’s long-standing adherence to the China model, which consists of extensive state control and ownership of resources, limited free-market activity, and authoritarian CCP leadership. The model fuelled both the country’s economic miracle and its most intractable problem: a structural imbalance between investment and domestic consumption.

To sustain fast growth and cushion economic downturns, China has long relied mainly on investment in infrastructure, property and manufacturing. Household consumption is seriously constrained through unfair policies and a discriminatory social security system. These include strictly limited rights to move for work, weak human rights protections and relatively low benefits for migrant workers.

In the 30 years to 2012, investment gradually rose from 32 percent to 46 percent of GDP, while the share of final consumption declined from 66.6 percent to 51.1 percent. The high rate of investment financed necessary infrastructure upgrades and modernised China’s production technology, helping the country become a global manufacturing powerhouse. However, over time, high rates of investment led to severe overcapacity in key industrial sectors, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.

Under Xi Jinping’s leadership since 2012, the government has persisted with an export-oriented policy. In 2023, investment accounted for 41.1 percent of nominal GDP (versus a global average of 24 percent), with consumption representing 56 percent (versus a global average of 76 percent). China’s trade surplus in 2024 reached a record US$992 billion. This may displease Donald Trump who may choose to implement trade barriers that could further destabilise the Chinese economy.

Xi has failed to progressively institute a welfare state to create the confidence needed for boosting household consumption. He believes welfarism encourages laziness. So, amid ongoing economic and political uncertainty, families have long prioritised cutting expenses and increasing savings, which has further depressed domestic consumption.

In the second quarter of 2024, the central bank’s income confidence index registered 45.6 percent, down 4.4 percentage points from the first quarter of 2022, when the government imposed strict controls against Covid-19. China’s household savings rate surged to 55 percent in 2024, up 11.2 percentage points from 2023 and the highest level since 1952.

Xi has made it clear that he intends to stay the course, and is doubling down on state economic control. China has shifted away from market liberalisation, reverting to state-led development and industrial policy. The private sector has lost out. The share of private enterprises among China’s largest listed companies declined sharply over three years, from 55 percent in mid-2021 to 33 percent in mid-2024. China’s foreign direct investment dropped 27.1 percent in 2024, following an 8.0 percent decline in 2023.

The rapid ageing of China’s population will make it difficult to boost domestic consumption and rein in ballooning debt over the next decade.  The pension system is at risk of running dry by 2035, further exacerbating structural imbalances that policymakers have vowed to address.

With never-ending anti-corruption and ‘strictly governing the Party’ campaigns, Xi has taken China back to a personal dictatorship after decades of institutionalised collective leadership. Under the centralised one-man rule, any efforts by local governments and officials to break the rigid political system risk severe punishment.

More and more laws and regulations have been enacted to surveil the population, driving up social costs. Reformers and advocates of greater freedom of thought and expression have been silenced under Xi’s crackdown on human rights. The political reforms in the Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras, which unleashed economic dynamism and spurred innovation, have come to a halt or even regressed.

The government’s stimulus measures have failed to boost economic recovery. Since July 2024, the youth unemployment rate has remained above 17 percent.

The economy might not yet be in recession—meaning contraction in GDP—but it is now growing very slowly by its standards of the past four decades. The government estimates GDP was 5.0 percent higher last year than in 2023, but researchers at Rhodium Group estimate growth was in fact only 2.4 to 2.8 percent.

Bookshelf: The conscience of the CCP, whose death triggered Tiananmen

Hu Yaobang is one of China’s unsung heroes.

Inside China, anyone who can remember the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 will also remember the well-respected Hu. But outside China, we tend to forget that the violently quelled demonstrations were triggered by his death just seven weeks earlier. The popular Hu served as the head of the Chinese Communist Party from 1980 until 1987, when supreme leader Deng Xiaoping removed him from office for his outspoken views.

For many years the CCP stifled discussion about Hu and downplayed his significance, and it was only in 2015, 100 years after his birth, that his image was officially rehabilitated. Biographies in Chinese are readily available, but an English-language biography is long overdue.

In The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s communist reformer, Robert Suettinger reconstructs Hu’s life against the backdrop of China’s tumultuous recent history and the deep divide in the CCP between conservatives and reformists. A long-time scholar of Chinese politics, Suettinger has worked for the US State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, and was director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council under president Bill Clinton.

Hu was born into a poor peasant family in Hunan province and left school at 14 to join the Communist Youth League and Mao Zedong’s revolution. Intellectually gifted and amicable, Hu rose rapidly through the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army and the CCP, spending much of his career handling organisational issues and propaganda. Fifteen years as head of the youth league made him particularly popular among young Chinese.

Early in his career, Hu was an ardent Maoist. But as the chairman’s mistakes piled up during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Hu’s scepticism grew, as did his outspokenness. Mao purged and rehabilitated Hu twice along with several other critics. But between purges, Hu oversaw the rehabilitation of thousands of cadres, which gained him wide support.

Suettinger is at his best detailing the backroom politics within the CCP. To finalise the ouster of Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, in 1980 Deng selected Hu to take over as the titular leader. Initially Hu was CCP chairman and, once that title was abolished, became party general secretary. However, there was never any doubt that real power lay with Deng, who needed Hu’s support to stave off his adversaries.

Suettinger also debunks the notion that Deng was Hu’s mentor. Hu and premier Zhao Ziyang both wanted China to cast off the shackles of Maoism and worked closely with Deng in the early 1980s. But differences soon emerged, particularly between Deng and Hu. Unlike Deng, who was focused on reforming the economy, Hu wanted broader political reform, particularly in the CCP.

Hu’s accommodating approach to student demonstrations in 1986 is often cited as the cause for his ouster. However, Suettinger makes a compelling case that Hu’s efforts to reform the party, abolish lifelong tenure for senior cadres and rejuvenate the party leadership were the real reasons. On several occasions Hu suggested that Deng, who was 82 at the time, should lead by example and retire. For Deng, this was a step too far.

The inner workings of the CCP can be brutal. Once Hu’s fate had been decided, he underwent a gruelling life meeting—a gathering where participants engage in self-criticism—to confess his errors and be criticised by a group of leading cadres. The six tortuous days left Hu broken and humiliated, and he tendered his resignation. He was allowed to retain his politburo seat but was otherwise sidelined and ignored.

Suettinger also shines a light on the origins of China’s economic reforms. The CCP’s central committee plenary in December 1978, when Deng launched the reform and opening of the economy and confirmed his position as the country’s leader, is generally heralded as the turning point. Less well known is the fact that Hu did much of the heavy lifting. He was rewarded with a promotion, but the CCP has subsequently played down his role.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has consolidated his grip on the CCP, stacked the leadership with acolytes and removed term-limits on his own tenure. However, tensions between conservatives and reformists are running high behind the scenes. With the economy in trouble, Xi will need to work hard to secure a fourth term at the 2027 party congress. Suettinger’s analysis of the power play within the CCP offers valuable pointers about how an eventual succession might pan out.

Suettinger spent a decade researching Hu’s life, digging into little-known Chinese archives, memoirs and websites. The result is an authoritative biography that at long last gives Hu the credit he deserves.

Covert CCP social media accounts bolster China’s united front work in Canada

In the first part of this investigation, ASPI identified a subnetwork of Spamouflage accounts targeting Canadian politicians that illustrates the potential scope of the Chinese Communist Party’s malign influence operations in Canada. Some of these accounts were also promoting an article published by Red Maple News (红枫林), an influential Chinese-Canadian online media outlet. The article has laundered personal—and publicly unavailable—information to defame Teacher Li, a pseudonym for a Chinese painter based in Italy who became prominent during the 2022 ‘white paper’ protests for sharing information from Chinese social media platforms on Twitter.

Many of these inauthentic accounts created personas with AI-generated profile images (see Figure 1) or impersonated Hong Kong students in Australia.

Figure 1: Spamouflage accounts amplifying defamatory Teacher Li article from Red Maple News

The article posted by Red Maple News is problematic because it reveals Teacher Li’s real full Chinese name, which he has unsuccessfully tried to hide for security reasons, and other information that likely could have only been sourced from Chinese government records and would not be available to the public. As with some other targeted harassment and disinformation campaigns conducted by the CCP, it also includes personal and intimate details, such as claims that Li had asked his parents for money on WeChat, or allegations that Li was in ‘improper relationships’ (不正当的男女关系), a common propaganda trope used by China’s Ministry of State Security and Ministry of Public Security to harass influential dissidents.

While the article doesn’t necessarily contain disinformation (though it certainly publishes claims without any supporting evidence), it clearly breaches journalistic ethics and lacks transparency. It’s unclear whether Red Maple News produced the article of its accord or was directed to publish it. Nor is it clear who the author is or how they obtained the information contained the story.

Red Maple News is the online news website of the Hongfenglin Media Group, which is registered as the Red Maple Journal Corporation in Canada but also has offices in Beijing, Guizhou and Chengdu in China. According to its website, Red Maple News has content-sharing and cooperation agreements with Russia Today News Agency, a Russian state-controlled media outlet; China News Service, a media outlet formerly run by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office which is now part of the United Front Work Department; and the People’s Daily Overseas, the foreign-facing edition of the CCP Central Committee’s official newspaper.

Red Maple News and its founder, Gu Jianyun, appear to be the target of CCP united front work, which seeks to co-opt, control and install overseas Chinese-language media under the party’s leadership. In 2016, Red Maple News was the only Chinese-language media outlet from Canada invited to cover the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, also known as the ‘two sessions’, which would have raised the profile of the organisation in Canada.

Connections and access to Chinese government officials likely incentivise some of Red Maples News’ editorial policies. In 2022, Gu said in an interview with China News Service that she will continue to promote the integrated development of Chinese media, deliver the voice of China, and tell real and vivid Chinese stories that unfold the beauty of China to the world, which are phrases that Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the CCP, has similarly espoused for China to strengthen its international propaganda.

The case of Red Maple News highlights the difficulty of countering the CCP’s malign influence. As Katherine Mansted, a senior fellow at the Australian National University’s National Security College, writes, the CCP has ‘adopted strategies, organisational structures and tactics which exploit the grey zone between acceptable foreign influence activities and unlawful foreign interference’. In principle, there’s no issue with a news media outlet having content-sharing agreements and close links with the CCP, but it becomes problematic when it is directed or incentivised to spread disinformation or participate in transnational repression that is amplified by coordinated inauthentic accounts on social media.

As Canada reckons with its own approach to countering malign foreign influence, it should build upon Australia’s experience and do more to enhance transparency around the influence of foreign powers. While Australia has passed strong counter-foreign-interference laws that capture the most blatant and egregious cases, China experts Clive Hamilton and Alex Joske have rightly pointed out that Australia’s legislation—and mechanisms such as the foreign influence transparency scheme—miss most forms of CCP influence and interference, which are often subtler.

Canada should also listen to and empower its Canadians of Chinese descent who have firsthand experience and knowledge of the CCP’s malign influence. Canadian politician Michael Chong, who was targeted in an information operation on WeChat in which the Chinese government was most likely involved, has offered sound advice in testimony to the US Congress. He suggests setting up a foreign agent registry, publicly exposing entities working for Beijing’s interests that fund parliamentarians, and implementing stronger laws targeting financial crime and corruption, among other recommendations.

Canada should not go about countering foreign malign influence by itself. The Australian government should signal to the Canadian and Chinese governments that it is willing to support Canada’s sovereignty. For example, Australia’s own efforts to curtail CCP interference resulted in China’s making 14 demands, including rewinding foreign interference legislation. In the case where Canada makes similar decisions and likewise faces economic coercion by the Chinese government, Australia should resume its World Trade Organization case regarding China’s measures imposing anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Australian barley to deter Beijing from future coercive diplomacy.

Australia too has a lot to learn from Canada. For example, the Canadian government is making efforts to respond to and, increasingly, publicly attribute cyber-enabled foreign interference activity targeting Canada and Canadians—an area that the Australian government has long struggled with.

Understanding China’s efforts to undermine partnerships in the Pacific

The Chinese Communist Party is attempting to use the Pacific islands online information environment to undermine Pacific island democracies and relationships with other partners. Some of the CCP’s messaging occurs through routine diplomatic engagement, but there’s also a persistent coordinated effort to influence Pacific island populations by amplifying narratives critical of Western partners. This occurs across a broad spectrum of information channels, including party-state media, articles and statements by CCP officials in local and social media, and official party-state Facebook groups.

However, the CCP’s attempts have so far had limited success in swaying public opinion or generating the desired online response to real-world events. A new ASPI report, released today, examines the level of activity and effectiveness of each of these channels of influence across Pacific island countries. The analysis expands on our previous report on the CCP’s influence on the Solomon Islands online information environment and includes quantitative analysis of social media penetration, online engagement and the effectiveness of the CCP’s messaging through three case studies.

Following the AUKUS partnership announcement in September 2021, the CCP attempted to spread a narrative critical of AUKUS but failed to generate anti-Western sentiment online in the Pacific. Pacific commentary actually shifted towards greater anti-China sentiment and pro-Western sentiment following the CCP’s efforts to influence the regional discourse on AUKUS.

Attempts by party-state media and embassy officials to criticise and negate Western and local concerns over the CCP’s attempts to reach a regional security agreement in early 2022 had little impact on online sentiment. The Pacific online population had a greater proportion of negative responses towards CCP official statements in local media compared to those produced by local Pacific journalists.

And the CCP’s efforts to frame the United States and Australia as colonialist and belligerent in the wake of the Pacific Islands Forum in July 2022 also had little penetration into local reporting of the forum.

Analysis of Facebook posts across Pacific subregions showed a greater ratio of negative commentary towards China in Polynesia compared to Melanesia. Polynesia had eight times as many negative comments as positive towards China, and Melanesia had twice as many negative comments as positive towards China. This indicates a difference between subregions in the way online populations perceive China and CCP engagement in their countries.

Further supporting the findings of our Solomon Islands report, the CCP generated the highest level of engagement through the publication of official statements, opinion pieces and press releases in local media. These publications have greater access to the Pacific islands online population through trusted local media sources and allowed the CCP to spread its message to a wider audience. Other information channels, such as party-state media and embassy Facebook pages, were less effective in generating online engagement.

ASPI has also identified an emerging trend in the use of Pacific voices to support the CCP’s global messaging. Members of several China – Pacific island friendship associations (groups linked to the CCP’s United Front) had contributed to CCP party-state media by providing interviews, comments or published opinion pieces in media outlets such as the Global Times, the People’s Daily and China Daily. Some had also published CCP-aligned content in local Pacific media. So far, these few articles have had limited penetration and impact in the Pacific islands online information environment, but this emerging avenue of influence should continue to be monitored.

Our report refines and improves on our baseline understanding of the CCP’s activities and online influence across the Pacific region. The findings can be used to identify which online information channels are of most concern and more accurately detect shifts in the activity levels or effectiveness of CCP information operations over time or between events. Not all CCP information operation attempts are equally successful, and governments need to better understand which narratives and practices are most effective in order to prioritise efforts in countering the CCP’s false narratives in the region.

Pacific partners—particularly Australia and the US—need to be more active, effective and transparent in communicating how aid delivered to the region is benefiting Pacific island countries and building people-to-people links. Doing so will debunk some of the CCP’s narratives regarding Western support and legitimacy in the region.

The Pacific’s democratic partners also need to increase support to, and enhance partnerships with, Pacific island media outlets and associations in order to build a strong and more resilient media industry that is less vulnerable to disinformation and external influences. Australia’s robust, independent and neutral media institutions should be at the forefront of these partnership-strengthening efforts, especially the ABC, which could be provided with additional funding to play a greater role in training, long-term secondments and hosting regional staff exchanges across the Pacific islands region.

Our report seeks to better understand just one aspect of the CCP’s influence efforts across Pacific island countries, focusing on strategic narrative and information operations targeting the region’s online population. But the CCP’s efforts to undermine democracies and traditional partnerships in the region can also target specific groups, such as political elites, and occur across a wide range of vectors, including infrastructure and security assistance, all of which need greater exploration and analysis.

Editors’ picks for 2022: ‘Beijing’s plan to crush Taiwan under the “wheels of history”’

Originally published 26 September 2022.

The smoke has cleared from China’s military exercises in the Taiwan Strait last month, and the sequence of events highlights some of the realities of the regional security outlook.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on 2 August and from 4 to 7 August, the People’s Liberation Army conducted large-scale military exercises around Taiwan, including missile launches. Following the first round of exercises, further drills were conducted from 8 to 15 August. During that time, on 10 August, the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council released a new white paper, titled The Taiwan question and China’s reunification in the new era. Chinese diplomats immediately began promoting its message around the world, including in Australia.

It is Beijing’s third white paper on the Taiwan issue, after those in 1993 and 2000, and has been in preparation for years. The timing of its release gives visibility to the mechanics of Beijing’s actions towards Taiwan in which an ideologically driven policy process is leveraged by tactical opportunism. While its release would have been anticipated in the lead-up to the Chinese Communist Party’s national congress in October, the specific timing shows how Beijing sought to link policy and military escalation directed at Taiwan to the actions of the US.

There’s a debate about whether the US should have created that tactical opening, but the developments do highlight Beijing’s underlying escalation pathway towards Taiwan. The August exercises in the Taiwan Strait crossed the so-called median line that had represented a nominal commitment to a cross-strait equilibrium. However, since their formal end in mid-August, the PLA Air Force has continued to conduct flights across the line. It is building on the military activity of the past several years and Pelosi’s visit gave an opportunity to step up the PLA presence across the Taiwan Strait and shift the status quo.

This accords with the CCP’s ideological commitment to the unification of Taiwan as the ultimate demonstration of China’s development under its leadership, what party chairman Xi Jinping calls the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’. In the party’s ideological system, which it has described with a distinctive Marxist scientism as the ‘tide of history’, China is always moving forward to this goal. Beijing’s calibrated military escalation serves to validate this ideological belief and the party’s legitimacy.

This highlights the complex risk calculus for conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Given the CCP’s ideological necessities, it was predictable that Beijing would continue its methodical military and diplomatic escalation directed at Taiwan punctuated by opportunistic displays of state and military power. But it’s been simultaneously much more difficult to predict whether Beijing would consider a full-scale invasion and occupation of Taiwan, given the enormous risks and inevitably devastating outcomes.

Escalation and invasion have presented distinct and, in terms of the CCP’s ideological project, even contradictory geopolitical risk regimes. Invasion could be argued to represent a failure of the CCP’s Marxist teleology in the sense that such drastic action shouldn’t be necessary if unification is indeed unfolding in accordance with history’s laws.

The 10 August white paper can be read as an attempt to reconcile these contradictions by building an argument for the unfettered use of state power to achieve unification. It includes a statement of Beijing’s position that Taiwan is Chinese territory, including a reinterpretation of the 1971 UN resolution that recognised Beijing and excluded the ‘representatives of Chiang Kai-shek’. It describes the absolute necessity of unification to realise China’s ‘great rejuvenation’. The white paper also states Beijing’s commitment to ‘peaceful reunification’, but, against the longstanding opposition of the Taiwanese people and the lack of any viable roadmap from Beijing, this claim becomes a pretext to focus on the forces that stand, in the party’s view, against history—separatists and the ‘external forces’—which serves to justify achieving unification through ‘all necessary measures’.

The white paper’s hard message has been promoted by China’s representatives around the world. In Australia, the Chinese ambassador, Xiao Qian, described the chilling prospects of ‘re-educating’ the Taiwanese people and punishing so-called separatists. It was a stark statement of what unification actually means: it would criminalise the people of Taiwan for being Taiwanese, and destroy Taiwanese society as it is today, with shocking connotations for human rights and uncontainable effects on regional security.

At the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi used a new metaphor: ‘Any move to obstruct China’s cause of reunification is bound to be crushed by the wheels of history’. There’s no talk of passively waiting for history’s ‘tide’ to naturally submerge Taiwan.

US President Joe Biden appears to understand these implications in his repeated statements about US military defence of Taiwan premised on Washington’s commitments to Beijing from the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, US support for Taiwan validates the CCP’s ideological position on ‘external forces’, creating a dangerous dynamic in which Washington’s efforts to maintain the status quo are used by Beijing as justification for actions against Taiwan.

It will require policy discipline from the US and its allies to manage this intrinsically escalatory dynamic. The Australian government has so far called for maintaining the status quo but not articulated an argument about what this means (maintaining Taiwan’s de facto sovereignty) and why this is in Australia’s interests. Policy analysis in Australia’s public life tends to see Taiwan as nothing more than a proxy of American power, not as a unique society of 24 million people to which Australia’s interests are directly tied.

As the white paper signals Beijing’s priorities following next month’s national party congress, it shows that Australia has a great deal of policy work to do to develop a properly informed position on Taiwan that is both robust and finessed and supported with domestic political legitimacy.

Will the headwinds facing China force Xi to rethink his plans to take Taiwan?

The US Navy chief recently warned that China could attack Taiwan by 2024. Others argue that an invasion of Taiwan may occur by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. Some, including the Asia Society’s Christopher K. Johnson, feel that President Xi Jinping’s China remains wedded to peaceful reunification or at least a non-kinetic approach using coercion and grey-zone tactics to compel Taiwan to become part of the People’s Republic of China. For Johnson, Xi’s new Politburo Standing Committee is not a war cabinet but a leadership team chosen to navigate the very rough geopolitical and domestic storms ahead.

Since October’s 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan, Japan, the US, Canada, Australia and others have asking themselves what the future holds for Chinese foreign policy under a third term of Xi.

There are at least five observations we can take away from the congress. First, the CCP believes that the strategic competition between the US and China is one between systems that requires a hardening of the party’s political structure at the expense of the Chinese economy.

For a regime that came to power by overthrowing the previous republican system, the CCP has perennial anxiety about insidious foreign forces supporting counter-revolution and regime change, as elaborated in Rush Doshi’s The long game and Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s Haunted by chaos. Regime change and containment are front and centre in the CCP’s understanding of US and allied motivations to not accept a China under Xi as a peer.

Comments by former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo advocating regime change and Taiwanese independence, President Joe Biden’s repeated statements that the US would defend Taiwan if China launched an unprovoked attack, and the growing chorus of countries that explicitly place peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait in their foreign policies have only reinforced Beijing’s concerns.

For Xi, ideology needs to be strengthened at home to ‘safeguard the security of China’s state power, systems and ideology by building up security capabilities in key areas’. For the CCP, ‘political security is a fundamental task’.

Second, the work report Xi presented at the congress highlighted China’s continued commitment to its Russian partner, explicitly stating that ‘no state’s security should come at the expense of another state’. This is code for Beijing’s support for Moscow’s argument that its invasion of Ukraine was a response to NATO expansion that threatened Russia’s ‘core interests’, including its security.

It is consistent with what Michal Bogusz, Jakub Jakobowski and Witold Rodkiewicz of the Centre for Eastern Studies argue in their report The Beijing–Moscow axis. They assert that relations between Moscow and Beijing have never been as close and warm as they are today:

This rapprochement has been produced by three decades of consistent efforts by the political leaderships of Russia and China to strengthen mutual ties and deepen their cooperation in politics, military affairs, economy and ideology. The relationship that has emerged can be called an informal alliance. This alliance is based on the deep conviction shared by the Chinese and Russian ruling elites of the fundamental coincidence of their strategic interests and the ideological proximity between their authoritarian regimes.

Third, China will continue to pivot to the global south in a strategy to address the perceived vulnerability Beijing feels from the economic, technological and legal dominance the US and Western allies enjoy in the global economy. The Belt and Road Initiative is the first arrow in Xi’s quiver to develop and open markets along BRI corridors to selectively disentangle participating states from the US economic hegemony and move them towards economically dependent relationships with China.

China’s ‘dual circulation’ model for economic development is the second. Beijing’s strategy involves boosting domestic consumption while at the same time pivoting the Chinese economy to developing countries.

These economic initiatives are linked to what China calls the democratisation of the international system, an effort prominent Chinese academic Yan Xue Tong explains like this:

China will work hard to shape an ideological environment conducive to its rise and counter Western values. For example, the United States defines democracy and freedom from the perspective of electoral politics and personal expression, while China defines democracy and freedom from the perspective of social security and economic development. Washington should accept these differences of opinion instead of trying to impose its own views on others.

Fourth, the CCP under Xi is enhancing its anti-Western stance by criticising democratic countries’ hegemony. It has shown that it is willing to coordinate with other authoritarian states and states that can be influenced by Chinese money and development aid. A salient example was Beijing’s recruitment of developing countries and a motley crew of countries such as North Korea, Syria and Iran to vote down a motion to discuss a UN report into China’s serious human rights violations in Xinjiang. China similarly brought together BRI members to abstain from a resolution on Russia’s ‘aggression against Ukraine’.

Last, the CCP sees very rough geopolitical and domestic seas ahead. It is challenged by the selective diversification of supply chains, the US CHIPS and Science Act (which aims to strangle Chinese access to top-tier semiconductors and technicians, and choke off China’s access to the future of artificial intelligence), the effects of its self-harming Covid-19 policy, and the increasingly severe demographic pressures on the economy. The CCP leadership wants to reach its 2049 centenary goal of ‘building a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious’.

The strong pressures on the Chinese economy and Xi’s selection of loyalists to key positions suggest that the leadership won’t make a move to invade Taiwan anytime soon. Xi did stress, however, that China would not give up the right to use force to ‘reunify’ with Taiwan, though that’s entirely consistent with previous statements by Xi and Chinese leaders before him.

Taking Taiwan by force would entail significant economic costs, diplomatic isolation and, in all likelihood, a regional conflict. That would derail Xi’s 2049 centenary goal, possibly the most consequential legacy of his leadership.

ASPI explains: The protests rocking China

China is being rocked by the worst civil protests since those that culminated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In this explainer, Daria Impiombato, an analyst at ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, interviews Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, an independent researcher and ASPI senior fellow, about what is happening across the country and what the demonstrations mean for the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. The following is an edited transcript of the interview on our Policy, Guns and Money podcast.

Daria Impiombato: How rare is such a wave of protests in China? Is it fair to say it is the biggest act of civil disobedience since Tiananmen Square?

Vicky Xu: Definitely. We haven’t seen anything like it since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests by the students. What I’m hearing is that even people in China on the ground are saying this is very similar to what happened 30 years ago. It is extremely significant. For me, as someone born and raised in China and who remains very connected to China, it’s unimaginable. I’m so excited about it.

Impiombato: You’ve interviewed a few people on the ground, including a protester for your own podcast, Speaking Till the End. Who are these protesters? Is it mainly young people, students, or is it more of a mix?

Xu: From what I’m hearing, the protesters are mostly young people, mostly university students and some professionals. There are older people, but they are the minority. Women have played an especially strong role. When I’ve asked why are they protesting, why are they risking everything—their lives, their safety, their futures, their careers—to take to the streets and express their anger and frustration about the Chinese Communist Party, they’re literally quoting people from 30 years ago. They’re saying, ‘It’s my duty,’ which is a very famous line from the 1989 Tiananmen protests.

Impiombato: That is quite inspiring, knowing how severe the surveillance apparatus is these days—which brings me to my next question about tactics. How are these protesters even managing to organise and to skirt the overpowering information control within China?

Xu: There have been a number of stages. What essentially inspired this wave of protests was that, before the 20th CCP congress, there was this lone man in Beijing protesting against the Chinese government (people believe his name may be Peng Zaizhou but no one has been able to confirm it). He held up a banner that said the Chinese people need to stop doing so many Covid-19 tests every day, and they need to eat. And he called President Xi Jinping a dictator. So that one-man protest essentially sparked what now seems to be a political movement. Chinese people, especially young people, started sending messages and photos and slogans about that one-man protest to each other via Apple AirDrop.

People know that there’s censorship and people know that the government is watching, but AirDrop is a clever way to share information without using the internet and without leaving any record. The government noticed, and I assume the government gave Apple an ultimatum, because in the end, Apple changed rules for AirDrop in China so that Chinese people could no longer use it as a way of organisation.

Then there is Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, which is useful for organising. This is the same used in Iran and in Hong Kong in 2019. Unfortunately, my understanding is that a lot of these Telegram groups now have been infiltrated by Chinese cops. So now people are also relying on old-fashioned and decentralised methods such as just posting a picture saying, ‘I’m here,’ or grabbing a piece of paper, a sheet of blank paper, standing outside and waiting for others to join.

At Tsinghua University—which is like China’s Harvard—a few days ago there was one young woman who held up a blank sheet of paper and stood outside. And that actually inspired, from what I read, more than 1,000 students to follow suit. They didn’t use the internet, they didn’t use any technology to organise that. It’s remarkable.

Impiombato: It’s even more significant that it happened at Tsinghua because it is also the breeding ground for CCP leaders and is Xi Jinping’s alma mater.

Xu: Indeed. And the CCP is actually very, very wary of student protests, given what happened in 1989 and given how these universities were breeding grounds for radical ideas. Whenever there’s the dissent brewing in China, especially in Beijing, there would be a lot of police officers sent to these campuses to watch and to crack down, so the students know what they’re getting into. But they’re doing it anyway. Again, nobody has seen anything like it in 30 years.

Impiombato: The protests were initially mainly focused on Covid restrictions, and there was a huge wave of anger after a building fire in the capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi, that killed at least 10 people. Those deaths were blamed on the Covid lockdown. But now it’s also become a protest about freedom of expression. To what extent do you think the protests reflect deeper anger about broader issues and about the CCP?

Xu: As you said, the catalyst was the fire in Urumqi. People were saying that at least 10 residents were trapped in a building that was locked down and they weren’t able to get out, and they burned to death. The officials deny this account. But nonetheless, this event really fired a lot of people up. This is after many, many more deaths that people blame ‘Covid zero’ for—many suicides, accidents, so many deaths.

One protester from Shanghai that I spoke to in my podcast joined what he initially thought was a vigil for the lives lost in the Urumqi fire. He saw all these people with flowers, following the Chinese tradition of pouring alcohol onto a sort of shrine. But then as more people gathered, they became galvanised and inspired each other and the anger and frustration multiplied.

Some people started yelling slogans like, ‘Stop Covid zero’. Shanghai residents really suffered for a number of months this year. Many people didn’t have access to food and medicine.

That very quickly shifted to, ‘Down with the communist party’ and ‘Down with Xi Jinping’, because everyone knows deep down that Covid-zero policy is a product of the communist party and is basically determined by one man’s will.

According to protesters I’ve spoken to, there are many different factions. Not everyone has the same political aspirations. Moderate people just want to change the Covid-zero policy, while other people think we need a new government and we need a new leader. It’s like the Hong Kong protest or like any other mass struggle: there is a range of opinions and thoughts.

Impiombato: And especially, as you said, with women being at the forefront, I’m sure there are reasons for that. There are additional grievances that Chinese women would be feeling with the three-child policy, for example—this pressure to bear children, not being represented politically. Also just not being able to express themselves, especially the feminist movement in China, which has received continuous crackdowns during the years.

And then there are ethnic minority groups that have been suffering for many, many years that would have grievances against Han Chinese that haven’t been so vocal about what was going on in Xinjiang, for example, and haven’t been really able to support Uyghurs against CCP oppression. Do you think that’s affecting coordination within the protest movements?

Xu: I think you’re completely right. There are women who feel as if the protest itself is not pro-women, and there are Uyghurs who have grievances that being locked up in concentration camps has never sparked the same kind of anger among mainland Chinese people. There definitely are factions. Overall, many protesters seem to realise that they have to work with each other. The protesters seem to be borrowing a lot of lessons from the 2019 Hong Kong protests. The word in Mandarin is ‘不割席’, or ‘do not split’ in English. Basically, they try to stay united and they don’t divide themselves. That is extremely important.

Impiombato: Has the reaction of the Chinese authorities been milder than people might have expected so far, and why that might be the case?

Xu: So far, many students have been arrested. Some have been released. Some have been sent to quarantine centres. The security apparatus seems to be struggling to keep up with suppressing the protests. For example, we are seeing a lot of recruitment ads for auxiliary police. It seems like police officers have been playing catch-up. In Shanghai, police officers are getting onto subways and checking people’s phones, one by one, to see if they have any anti-revolutionary material on their phones.

We don’t know yet what’s going to happen, because this is developing. We don’t yet know how the communist party at the highest level is interpreting the events. It’s likely that foreign forces would be blamed again, as though the Chinese people cannot possibly have their own agency and cannot possibly want a different government. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a month or two months’ time, all the protesters would be accused of colluding with the CIA.

Personally, I’m really, really afraid for the protesters because they’re really brave, but a lot of them are not wearing a mask. They’re on the front line, they’re not really thinking about their personal safety, and they’re getting into these physical struggles with the police. Personally, I wish protesters could do more to protect themselves and their faces. But again, people have different opinions on this.

Impiombato: I had been thinking about this as well. There are several groups within China that are so used to being persecuted by the party-state that they would be so extremely careful with their identity. I think because this movement is broader than that, and it involves people who haven’t had that experience of community organising, they maybe don’t fully grasp the extent of the consequences.

Xu: I totally agree with you, Daria. People are inexperienced with activism and with how far the communist party would go to surveil and crack down. All over the world, Chinese students are organising protests to echo what’s happening in China. There are these large group chats where people are organising. Last week, I suggested to a group of students that they should try to wear a mask and protect themselves. Several people challenged my viewpoint and said if people in China are not wearing a mask, why would people outside China be worried that they’re being surveilled? They find it quite lame. Maybe compared to them I’m just too old and conservative now. I don’t know.

Impiombato: They’re just going all in. Maybe they feel there’s not much to lose at this point?

Xu: Yeah, they’re going all in.

Impiombato: Last question to wrap our conversation up: Do you think this movement is going anywhere? Is there any chance of change? Is the government going to loosen the Covid policies? Is it going to give in to any other requests?

Xu: The most honest answer I can give you is that I don’t know. Two weeks ago, if you asked me or asked any of the protesters—is it possible that Chinese people would be so fed up with Covid zero and with Xi Jinping that they would take to the streets to protest? Everyone would tell you that you’re crazy. But now the protests have happened and it has spread like wildfire.

Maybe there’s something there that everybody has just missed. Maybe the anger and frustration will be enough to cause real political change. Some people are speculating that maybe there are factional differences within the communist party, which is why the protests so far have been largely tolerated. And that’s possible too. We just don’t know.

I wish the protestors would gain something. I wish there would be significant changes and, at the very least, the Covid restrictions would drop. We don’t know, but I wish the protesters all the best.