Tag Archive for: CCP

Xi–Albanese meeting shows strength of Australia’s resolve

It is tempting to express a bit of triumphalist satisfaction at Chinese President Xi Jinping’s acquiescence in meeting with an Australian prime minister after six years of stubborn rejection. And it must be said, a few commentators couldn’t help seeing the meeting as the bell tolling on Beijing’s attempt to grind Australia into submission.

True, China has blinked. But the bell was simply the end of the first round. We have survived it, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves; while Beijing might shift tactics, it has not changed its objectives.

The Chinese Communist Party wants a region and ultimately a world in which it is the dominant geopolitical force; in which it sits at the centre of global economic activity; in which it remains inoculated from the contagious appeal of democracy and liberalism; and in which it can project sufficient military, economic and diplomatic power to coerce neighbours if necessary to get its way.

There is absolutely no sign that the CCP has reined in these ambitions—certainly not in Xi’s decision to meet with Albanese.

What we can celebrate is the fact that, by refusing to compromise on any area of Australia’s national interest, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was able to go into the meeting with his counterpart in a position of strength. Beijing has effectively accepted that its coercion of Australia has, so far, been unsuccessful. That is a significant achievement, not just for us but for all countries that were watching to see how far Beijing would go to bend another country to its will.

By underestimating Australia’s resilience, Beijing has shown itself to be a bully, but not an altogether effective one—a mistake it also made with Lithuania. Australia can now continue its steady, consistent course of making sovereign decisions without second-guessing itself. Any cleavage of the diplomatic relationship will have to come at Beijing’s initiative—and it would need a very powerful justification for doing so.

Meanwhile, Canberra ought to cooperate with Beijing where it can, even while we pursue fundamentally incompatible goals with respect to the shape of the international and regional order. The disciplined approach of Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles—which can be summed up as ‘cooperate if possible but counter where necessary’—reflects this truism.

Beijing’s readout put its own spin on the situation by welcoming ‘the will Australia has recently demonstrated to improve and grow its relations with China’—even though Australia’s standing position for the past six years has been a preparedness to talk with China at all levels without preconditions. To Albanese’s credit, he maintained that position with a dignified posture.

While the change of government in Australia has provided Beijing with an opportunity to re-engage, the Albanese government is demonstrating that bipartisanship is an indispensable strength in taking on a major power. In correctly identifying that Beijing’s responses to Australian policy decisions were wholly disproportionate and were breaches of international rules, the government has signalled it will not give an inch on security, foreign and defence policy, even as it maintains a calibrated and measured tone in dialogue.

Importantly, Albanese is showing both China and the Australian people that tensions can be managed, not ignored.

The prime minister said after the meeting that the two countries were taking ‘an important step to moving forward’, adding that there are of course many further steps needed.

What does moving forward involve? It is emphatically not a return to the callow attitude in which we believed we could keep business separate from international politics; nor is it relying on time-wasting platitudes such as that we ‘don’t have to choose’, or being deceived by feints such as ‘win–win cooperation’ and other favourite strategic phrases of Beijing’s.

China’s readout of the meeting noted that the two countries needed to learn from recent experience and look to ‘steer the relationship back on to the right track’.

The right track for Beijing is a perspective about which the Albanese government will need to remain extremely disciplined. Beijing is not capitulating but doing what it does better than most—treating this as a 12-round bout and assuming the other side lacks stamina. As dialogue increases, Beijing will aim, over time, to weaken Australia’s resolve on issues ranging from negotiations on the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, to investments in critical infrastructure and technologies, to human rights and regional security.

An easy litmus test is the coercive trade measures Beijing has imposed over the past two years. Diplomatic gestures on Beijing’s part lack credibility while those measures remain in place, and the Albanese government will need to watch carefully for any attempt by Beijing to move forward with those as part of a new baseline. Beijing will expect to receive a quid pro quo for ending its coercion – but Australia should not reward Beijing for simply ceasing to punch us in the face.

Similarly, all Australians hope that detained citizens like Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei will be released and that the sentences for those on death row will be commuted. Such actions from Beijing would help stabilise relations and reduce some bilateral tension, but they should not elicit any compromise or praise on Australia’s part because they are simply the right thing to do.

There’s a long way to go in this period of strategic competition in which Australia is unavoidably a participant, not as an ally of the United States or a member of any particular international grouping but simply as a sovereign, democratic nation that wants to live in an open region not dominated by any one country, particularly an authoritarian superpower.

We have come through the first round well. Without hubris, we can take a moment to appreciate that before resuming our clear-eyed focus on what lies ahead.

Musk’s Twitter takeover comes as the CCP steps up its targeting of smart Asian women

Graphic online depictions of sexual assault, homophobia and racist imagery (sometimes involving Australian lawmakers) and life-threatening intimidation (including calling for targets to kill themselves) are a growing part of the Chinese Communist Party’s toolkit of digital transnational repression. Such imagery, and associated threats, characterise ongoing coordinated information operations the CCP is running online against women of Asian descent living in democracies around the world, including in Australia, the UK and the US.

This strand of cyber-enabled foreign interference—targeting both overseas public debates and key women within those debates—continues without consequential intervention from policymakers or social media platforms.

In Australia, parts of this campaign are seeking to interfere in public debates by using the #auspol and #qanda hashtags. Concerningly, a more sophisticated subset of posts are seeking to engage in political interference by promoting a fringe Australian political party. This highlights the importance of prioritising cyber-enabled foreign interference, both as a major part of the next national cyber strategy and in Australia’s foreign policy.

If Elon Musk drills down to examine Twitter’s work on state-backed information operations and platform manipulation, he will discover he’s taking over a platform considered industry leading in areas such as transparency, data sharing and policy responses designed to deter such activity. Policymakers and regulators around the world will watch closely to see if Musk’s known support for freedom of speech results in an open slather on the vulnerable, including reductions in transparency and data sharing. Recent news that Twitter has slashed its workforce, including teams responsible for dealing with misinformation and hateful conduct, will be setting off alarm bells for officials.

Notwithstanding Twitter’s reputation for prioritising its work in this space, Chinese state-backed information operations are proliferating on Twitter because they are now on all major platforms. They are becoming more sophisticated and increasingly target countries, elections, policy topics, organisations and individuals.

Commentators and industry figures have argued that some of these operations are low impact, including because they attract little genuine online engagement. But such arguments rely solely on online metrics that don’t factor in the distressing impact it has on the targeted individuals (or companies) or those who worry that they too could become targets. They also don’t consider the wide range of activity now occurring across global platforms, including the more insidious forms of state-backed activity that have more recently emerged.

Since ASPI first revealed in June 2022 that the CCP had turned its disinformation and coercive capabilities towards women of Asian descent reporting critically on China—including journalists, researchers and human rights activists—new evidence suggests the party has stepped up its psychological-warfare techniques. The following tweets were all posted in the past fortnight:

‘People like you who betray the motherland, smear and slander at will, are really inferior to dogs.’

‘Traitors will not end well.’

‘I think you’d better see a doctor, you’re scared you’re going to self-harm.’

‘If you enter this restaurant with a dog, the waiter will take care of the dog first.’

‘You should live your whole life with the guilt of killing your own mother.’

‘You are just relying on your Chinese identity and belittling your country to survive, you are just a tool. If you are not Chinese, your value is zero.’

‘I advise you not to run around. Stray dogs are easy to kill.’

These tweets form just a tiny percentage of the abusive and threatening messages targeting a small group of high-profile Asian women who’ve become a focus of this persistent and harmful activity. (Note: ASPI deliberately selected tweets that did not include the women’s names. Tweets of that kind are often more personalised and abusive.)

In addition to constant abuse, many of these accounts also tweet bespoke imagery (see Figure 1). These images are tweeted at the women, are circulated through hashtags and are also tweeted at other high-profile figures, including Australian politicians and journalists and think tankers who work on China.

Figure 1: Examples of abusive imagery tweeted at high-profile Asian women

ASPI assesses that, like previous Chinese-state-affiliated harassment and trolling campaigns, the Spamouflage network—which Twitter attributed to the Chinese government in 2019—is likely behind the targeting of these women. Twitter publicly confirmed that this was the case in response to ASPI’s June 2022 analysis.

Examination of these newly created accounts that reveals they repeatedly share the same images, mostly post content during Beijing business hours (see details on activity below) and use double-byte fonts commonly used in Asian languages. Accounts also previously shared the #USCyberHegemony hashtag, which is part of a broader CCP-linked propaganda campaign, and flooded other online platforms with pro-Chinese police content to drown out the latest report of the human rights organisation Safeguard Defenders on China’s transnational policing. Some accounts have diverted to focus on spreading propaganda claiming former CCP general secretary Hu Jintao was expelled last month from the 20th party congress because he was in poor health.

The coordinated activity targeting these women uses a combination of Twitter replies, direct tweets and quote tweets. It builds up dedicated hashtags about its targets and also seeks to tap into existing popular hashtags—those used internationally as well as domestically in countries where these women live (including #auspol in Australia). It includes crude imagery that appears to have been designed specifically for, and which links to, YouTube videos. In October, tweets that formed a part of this campaign led and dominated Twitter search results for related hashtags and versions of the target’s name.

The online activity we analysed is often highly customised and is clearly the result of extensive surveillance of each targeted individual to tailor messages and react quickly to developments in their lives. This includes information they’ve shared publicly and, for some, information they haven’t shared publicly. It’s all blended with disinformation, threats and abuse.

The tactics are multifaceted and are designed to intimidate and silence through constant harassment with misogynistic, racist and homophobic content. They also spread disinformation and abuse that seeks to undermine the credibility of the women being targeted by attacking their work, physical appearance, values and morals, ethnic background, sexuality, friendships, partners and deceased family members.

In addition to the examples given above (such as repeatedly being called a ‘dog’) smears such as ‘liar’, ‘biased’, ‘untrustworthy’, ‘promiscuous’, ‘prostitute’, ‘ugly’, ‘scum’ and ‘psychopath’, and insults like ‘beasts dressed in human skin’ are common. Accusations that they have betrayed and smeared their ‘motherland’ and any (real or perceived) links to a Western democracy, particularly any association with the US, are a key focus of the campaign (noting many of those targeted are actually citizens of the countries in which they live). Threats calling for women to kill themselves, or insinuating that they should do so, and telling them that their lives are in danger, are commonplace.

Three ongoing campaigns, in English and in Mandarin, stand out for their threatening approach; deep misogyny; and coordinated, persistent harassment.

For months, a network of accounts has harassed Jane Wang, a UK-based activist campaigning for the release of Zhang Zhan, a journalist jailed in China for her early reporting of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. Under almost every tweet posted by Wang, accounts with anglicised names followed by eight numbers (a default format Twitter uses for newly created accounts) call her a ‘traitor’ and a ‘puppet of Western capitalism’. In one post referencing the Sitong Bridge protest, Wang received more than 588 replies exclusively from inauthentic accounts abusing her and seeking to undermine her credibility. Other accounts post highly sexualised cartoons depicting her being molested by another Chinese pro-democracy advocate, Qiu Jiajun, who has also been targeted separately by these accounts. Wang told ASPI that she has never met Qiu.

A second campaign targets ASPI senior fellow Vicky Xu, who has long been attacked by the CCP across multiple platforms—in China and globally—in an incredibly obsessive fashion. This campaign was reignited recently after Xu returned to social media after an extended break. A group of authors at the Chinese state-owned Global Times collectively named BuYiDao (补壹刀) published a hit piece about Xu in July 2022 and called her one of the ‘female vanguards against China’. The article currently has over 75,000 vitriolic comments, mostly calling for her execution.

More recently, coordinated covert Twitter campaigns have escalated their abuse against Xu. Between 14 and 24 October, at least 199 accounts posted around 582 tweets mentioning her Chinese name, calling her a traitor and making physical threats. Of these tweets, 92% were posted between 9 am and 5 pm Beijing time, with a significant break in activity between 12 and 2 pm when businesses usually have their lunch break (Figure 2). Some of these accounts have already been suspended, but many remain active online and are harassing Xu hourly and in response to every post she tweets. One series of clearly concocted tweets asks, ‘Why didn’t you get hit by a car?’

Figure 2: Number of abusive tweets mentioning Vicky Xu by hour of posting, 14–24 October 2022

In an effort to tap into Australian public discourse and draw political and media attention, accounts posting about Xu often include hashtags such as #Australia, #Metoo and #Auspol and #qanda in their tweets. Short for ‘Australian politics’, #Auspol is one of Australia’s most popular hashtags discussing domestic politics, and #qanda is used to discuss the ABC’s weekly TV show Q&A. For Twitter users searching a combination of these hashtags—for example, ‘#Australia #metoo’ or ‘#Auspol #metoo’—tweets in this campaign are displayed prominently in Twitter’s search results, both in the ‘top’ and ‘latest’ categories. ASPI searched multiple times between 24 and 31 October.

These accounts also tag journalists, researchers and human rights activists. Some of these high-profile commentators tweet in response calling for action by Twitter.

A linked but more sophisticated subnetwork of accounts that has recently started targeting Xu is also seeking to engage in more direct interference in Australian politics. Many of the accounts in this small network—which are new as of September and October 2022—are promoting the Australian Citizens Party, a fringe party affiliated with the LaRouche political movement. Commentary by the Australian Citizens Party is regularly promoted and cited by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chinese state media, and Chinese embassies and diplomats on social media.

Accounts in this network, some of which have also tweeted about or tagged ASPI (along with dozens of other organisations and individuals, including current and former politicians), are attracting more organic online engagement than other parts of the network. Their personas are slightly more authentic than other parts of the campaign and are sometimes based on real Australians. For example, one inauthentic account, ‘Erin Chew’, is based on a real woman named Erin Chew who works at the Asian Australian Alliance advocacy network (figure 3).

Figure 3: Example of tweet posted on inauthentic Twitter account ‘Erin Chew’

These accounts are seeking to drive online attention towards the Australian Citizens Party and its members, as well as public commentators in Australia and globally whose political beliefs sit on the alt-left of the political spectrum (through retweets and mass tagging of other accounts), including some individuals who promote conspiracy theories. They are seeking to engage in debates on topics including the state of Australian democracy, Australia–US relations, Australia–China relations and AUKUS. They are also making allegations of corruption in Australian politics.

While this small network is more sophisticated and far more proactive in its efforts to interfere in Australian political debates, it is still in its infancy and hasn’t yet had any serious impact.

The activity targeting Xu isn’t limited to US-based social media platforms. On Chinese social media, posts sharing photoshopped images of Xu in faked pornographic situations are prominently displayed at the top of search results under Xu’s Chinese name on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. That these posts remain visible on China’s domestic internet, where the government has criminalised highly sexualised content, means they are very likely to be state sanctioned and deliberately left uncensored to broaden their reach.

The activity doesn’t just target Wang and Xu. Many of the journalists targeted earlier this year when ASPI conducted its original analysis are still constantly abused. They include the New York Times’ Muyi Xiao, Washington DC–based video journalist Xinyan Yu and New Yorker writer Jiayang Fan.

Attacks on Fan are intense. On 27 October, for example, abusive and threatening tweets were sent to her every few minutes. One busy hashtag, #TraitorJiayangFan, is kept alive entirely by inauthentic accounts. Since January, more than 400 accounts have posted at least 4,300 tweets using that hashtag. Like the accounts targeting Vicky Xu, 90.9% of these tweets were posted between 9 am and 5 pm Beijing time.

Fan has previously written and spoken about being targeted by China’s propaganda apparatus and Chinese nationalist trolls, including while her mother was in hospital in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic. After Fan’s mother died in early 2022, the campaign cruelly pivoted to focus on her mother’s death, bombarding her with tweets accusing her of being responsible and warning, ‘Your mother’s experience will be repeated on you.’ Some tweets in the campaign link to crude YouTube videos, originating from Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, about the death of Fan’s mother, titled ‘You love America, but does America love you?’

Spamouflage’s persistent multi-year presence on US social media platforms has allowed the CCP to refine its ability to incapacitate groups of people and organisations seen as critics, such as journalists, researchers, dissidents, activists and victims of human rights abuse. Parts of this campaign are agile in responding to new developments—some accounts regularly divert from key targets to harass and threaten others in the China-watching community as they share their reporting and analysis on Twitter. Another common tactic is to create hundreds of replicant accounts of individuals and organisations to harass those targets and confuse online users (see figure 4).

Figure 4: Tweet from Jane Wang with examples of replicant accounts using her name

These campaigns can cause enormous harm to those targeted, and some of these women have already spoken about this publicly.

For democratic governments, this is about much more than a group of individuals being relentlessly harassed. The CCP is taking advantage of open societies that tolerate bona fide criticism of high-profile individuals. These women are targeted because of their gender and perceived ethnicity and because their work—even if only partially focused on topics that irritate the Chinese party-state—has a global reach. For the CCP, this potent mix is enough for it to invest serious resources into harming these women and seeking to deny them a public voice. It’s only a matter of time before the CCP expands its targeting to include politicians, industry leaders and other public figures who work on China. That would be consistent with the CCP’s increasingly aggressive interference in the political processes of democracies.

That these campaigns remain so prevalent, despite global media coverage and efforts from high-profile commentators to bring them to Twitter’s attention, highlights the massive scale of this problem. Much more work is required for social media platforms and policymakers to tackle the CCP’s increasingly global efforts to censor and interfere in public debates, to threaten and harass individuals and to spread disinformation outside China’s borders.

We propose eight recommendations for governments and social media platforms, focusing on enforcement, building deterrence, public signalling and transparency.

1. Social media platforms must better enforce their rules and terms of service prohibiting harassment, hateful conduct and threats of violence—all rules we saw repeatedly broken by many of the inauthentic accounts taking part in this campaign. Platforms should also invest more resources in beefing up their capabilities, human and technical, to identify and remove inauthentic material.

2. Social media platforms need to urgently shift their thinking and move from taking down these campaigns through a defensive ‘whack-a-mole’ approach to a more proactive stance. As an example, limiting searches of these women’s names, as appears to have occurred in some cases, is a band-aid solution that also punishes the victim. This feature may limit public access to some of the inauthentic activity under a particular search term, but it can also censor everything the public can see about that person—including authentic media about that person or their work and their own tweets. Restricting the reach of all content about and tweeted by the women who are being targeted just limits their voice further. Instead, platforms could remove access to the tweet analytics, such as impressions or engagements, of accounts identified in coordinated information campaigns. Depriving the operator of the metrics required to assess the impact of their operations will disrupt plans for future iterations.

3. Political leaders and parliamentary bodies, including in Australia, must take greater responsibility for ensuring that foreign states can’t so easily manipulate Western social media platforms to target elections, public discourse and individuals. Given the rapid rate at which CCP information operations are proliferating, it’s time for parliamentary bodies to commission dedicated inquiries into Chinese cyber-enabled foreign interference. They should work with all major social media platforms to share technical data with third-party researchers and cybersecurity experts. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports on Russia’s Internet Research Agency and the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, could act as models.

4. Cyber-enabled foreign interference, in all its forms, needs to become a standard focus for governments in both cyber and national security strategies. Online interference often receives minimal attention in government strategies because of artificial and unnecessary distinctions between whether cyberspace is being used to commit malicious behaviour, is enabling malicious behaviour or is only a vector. This distracts from dealing with the problem. Cyber-enabled foreign interference is a growing policy challenge for democracies, yet most democracies only focus on it before an election. The result is that most other online interference that’s occurring falls through the cracks between policy and intelligence agencies. The reality is that we’re not even tasked or institutionally set to deal with a threat at which our adversaries excel. In Australia, the departments of Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs and Trade need to coordinate and lead on implementing policies to build greater deterrence, and they must engage closely with social media platforms as they undertake a more proactive stance.

5. Democracies should establish an Indo-Pacific hybrid threats centre. This could be modelled on the NATO–EU Hybrid Centre of Excellence in Finland, while reflecting the differences between the European and Indo-Pacific security environments. It would contribute to regional stability and enhance cooperation on the emerging security challenges countries in the region are struggling with while having few places to turn to for support and information sharing. The centre would build broader situational awareness on hybrid threats across the region and build confidence through measures supporting research and analysis, greater regional engagement, information sharing and capacity building.

6. Democratic governments should step up their global signalling. A group of democracies led by the US, Australia and the UK, whose citizens are targeted in this campaign, should coordinate a joint statement denouncing harassment and disinformation campaigns. Diplomats should work with the UN special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression and the new UN high commissioner for human rights to investigate the perpetrators of such online attacks.

7. Governments should do much more to deter this activity, with costs placed on the Chinese government’s transnational repression by summoning China’s ambassadors and consuls-general to explain the CCP’s disinformation campaigns and ongoing threats targeting these women. For Australia, the government should raise the harmful practice in bilateral meetings with Beijing counterparts—as was done in 2016–17 on cyber-enabled intellectual property theft.

8. Finally, governments need to consider forcing platforms to disclose cyber-enabled foreign interference activity. While there are differences in the content and impact, data-breach notification requirements around the world could provide a template for how policymakers build a system requiring social media platforms to disclose state-backed inauthentic activity on their platforms. While some platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, disclose such activity, others don’t, or do so rarely. But few platforms disclose all activity and many don’t disclose foreign interference in a timely fashion. And, as we’ve highlighted, none invest enough resources in tracking and removing such activity.

Elon Musk has an opportunity to prioritise policy areas such as preventing state-backed information campaigns, disinformation and online harms. But early indications suggest this is unlikely to happen, at least in the short term. Regardless, we cannot rely on any one individual—and the challenge is far greater than any one platform. Too many policymakers and regulators have been overinvested in admiring the problems and underinvested in developing policies to solve them. They must now step up and produce those policies.

While we wait for action, smart Asian women across the globe are being threatened and viciously abused every day by the world’s newest superpower.

Policy, Guns and Money: Inside the CCP’s 20th national congress

This week, senior Chinese Communist Party officials are meeting in Beijing for the party’s 20th national congress, at which Xi Jinping is expected to secure a third term as leader.

In this episode, ASPI senior analyst Samantha Hoffman and Charlie Parton, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, provide insights into the CCP congress—what it is, the importance of ideology and why it matters, as well as initial takeaways from Xi’s speech and what to expect from the rest of the event.

Beijing’s plan to crush Taiwan under the ‘wheels of history’

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.

Two prime ministers on Australia’s China challenge

‘The past decade has seen a huge turnaround in Australia’s attitudes towards China. Handling this relationship is unquestionably our biggest foreign policy challenge at present. China is our largest export destination. Approximately 1.4 million Australians are of Chinese descent. Chinese is the most widely spoken foreign language in our country.’

— John Howard, A sense of balance, 2022

‘For policy makers in Beijing and Washington, as well as in other capitals, the 2020s will be the decade of living dangerously. Beneath the surface, the stakes have never been higher or the contest sharper, whatever diplomats and politicians may say publicly. Should these two giants find a way to coexist without betraying their core interests—through what I call managed strategic competition—the world will be better off. Should they fail, down the other path lies the possibility of a war that could rewrite the futures of both countries and the world in a way we can barely imagine.’

— Kevin Rudd, The avoidable war, 2022

For John Howard, Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister (1996 to 2007), it’s the perplexing ‘China dilemma’.

For Kevin Rudd, Howard’s successor in 2007, it’s the ‘avoidable war’—what would be a ‘catastrophic conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China’.

The new books by the two prime ministers have different purposes, but on China they rhyme.

Howard seeks balance, while Rudd thinks only a grand bargain for ‘managed strategic competition’ can deliver equilibrium.

Howard’s chapter on China sits naturally as one theme of his discussion of how Australia’s ‘sense of balance has defined us as a nation and will safeguard our future’.

Using the same frame that served him well as PM, Howard describes his ‘China dilemma’ chapter as ‘reflections on the balance between supporting our major ally and dealing with our major trading partner’.

Howard is confident that balance can be achieved. Rudd fears the ‘Chinese party-state is increasingly on a self-selected collision course with America’. Xi is set to be paramount leader through the 2020s and well into the 2030s, Rudd writes, as China and the US prepare for war.

Howard’s book is written about, and for, Australia. Rudd’s book is written for the US and China, arguing that geopolitical disaster is fast approaching.

Much of the American strategic community, Rudd writes, has ‘a deep view that some form of armed conflict with Beijing is inevitable … In Washington, therefore, the question is no longer whether such confrontation can be avoided, but when it will occur and under what circumstances. And to a large extent, this mirrors the position in Beijing.’

Rudd hits high with his blurb writer. Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger commends Rudd’s focus ‘on the signal challenge posed by China’s evolution to America and to world order. Can the US and China avoid sleepwalking into a conflict?’

The two prime ministers are as one on the significance of the Quad and the AUKUS agreement, which reaches its first birthday this month.

Howard describes AUKUS as ‘a counterbalance to the growth of Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific’ and ‘the most significant defence arrangement since ANZUS’, while the Quad is ‘a major hedge against Chinese expansionism’.

Rudd says the Quad has ‘crystallised geopolitical resistance’ to China into a focused institutional response. Attracting South Korea to join the Quad, Rudd writes, and Indonesia (‘a more remote prospect’) would add to the Quad’s strategic heft, presenting ‘a serious challenge to China’s ambitions’. The emergence of the Quad and China’s response are ‘likely to accelerate the regional arms race that is already under way’.

Rudd argues that Beijing’s fear of the Quad as an ‘Indo-Pacific NATO’ is a key reason for China’s hammering of Australia over the past two years. China wants to break the Quad apart, he writes, and selected a target, aiming ‘to kill one (Australia) to warn two (Japan and India)’. The intent was to demonstrate to others the risk of being cut off from China’s huge domestic market, Rudd writes:

Beijing clearly estimated that Australia was the least likely of the Quad countries to actually break with the United States; the most vulnerable to economic coercion (as the smallest of the Quad states); and the least threatening to Chinese interests (being more distant from China’s borders than Japan, India, or the long arm of American power).

Howard predicts the icy age between Australia and China will continue, because Beijing feels ‘safe in attacking Australia’ in ways it wouldn’t dare with the US:

There is no sign that China’s diplomatic sniping towards Australia will ease soon. In fact, it may be intensified because of AUKUS. Given Australia’s now even closer links with the United States, and the quite sophisticated understanding the Chinese have of that relationship, I predict that Australia will remain something of a proxy punching bag in Chinese eyes.

Howard is more sanguine about the danger of a war over Taiwan. In a ‘knock-down, drag-out fight’, Taiwan would be tough to subjugate, Howard writes, and a ‘defeated and resentful Taiwan would prove a costly and resource-consuming Chinese Province’. He predicts that China will pile on pressure but will not dare invade:

I regard it as highly unlikely that China will launch a conventional attack on Taiwan, largely because it fears a retaliatory response from the US that could well prove embarrassing. Military or other action short of a frontal strike is far more likely, particularly if it causes the US to agonise over how to respond.

Speaking at ASPI’s conference in April on China’s emerging military and strategic capabilities, Rudd said conflict over Taiwan would quickly descend into a catastrophic general war: ‘In my judgement there is no such thing as a limited war over Taiwan. You cannot construct a warfighting scenario for Taiwan which is just a couple of grey ships taking pot-shots at each other.’

Rudd views Australia’s struggles with China in the context of the ‘unfolding crisis’ between the US and China and the danger of ‘global carnage on an industrial scale’.

Howard brings it back to the dollars and shared interests:

Amid all the diplomatic analysis, we Australians should not forget that the Chinese understand how valuable the economic links are between our two countries. For different reasons, we both need this trading relationship. Self-respecting pragmatism should always guide our approach to China. Fundamental beliefs should never be compromised, but schoolboy point-scoring should be shunned.

China’s information operations are silencing and influencing global audiences on Xinjiang

The Chinese Communist Party is using social media and disinformation campaigns to project its preferred narratives about Xinjiang and influence unwitting audiences around the globe. Instead of improving its treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities, the CCP is responding to critiques of its human rights record by coordinating its state propaganda apparatus, security agencies and public relations industry to influence and even silence governments, businesses and civil society at home and abroad.

For our new ASPI report, Assessing the impact of CCP information operations related to Xinjiang, we collected and analysed a vast amount of multi-language data, including Chinese government documents and speeches, government statements made to the UN Human Rights Council, corporate responses to Chinese state-affiliated consumer backlashes (regarding Xinjiang-related forced labour), 613,301 Facebook posts, 6,780,809 tweets and retweets, and 494,710 media articles.

The findings come on the back of President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Xinjiang—his first since 2014. Despite almost a decade of repressive and discriminatory policies, including the arbitrary detention, mass sterilisation and cultural degradation of minorities in Xinjiang, reporting from Xi’s visit showed Uyghurs and other Muslim minority residents apparently waving and cheering the draconian policies they have been forced to live under.

Our research reveals that CCP information operations are successfully silencing governments, businesses and civil society organisations globally and deterring them from criticising the CCP’s humans rights record and actions. CCP online information operations deny, distract and deter voices critical of CCP policies by flooding social media with positive depictions of Xinjiang and whitewashing evidence of human rights abuses. These activities are coordinated with other coercive tactics such as state-affiliated trolling campaigns, cyber surveillance operations and offline harassment.

Xinjiang-focused CCP propaganda and information operations were more effective on Facebook than on other platforms such as Twitter. For example, of the top 400 Facebook posts with the most interactions (including reactions and shares), 60.3% were posted by Chinese state media and diplomats. Of the top 1,000 tweets with the most interactions (including likes and retweets), only 5.5% were posted by Chinese state media and diplomats, and 4% were from accounts suspended by Twitter for platform manipulation.

Social media data collected in this report also confirmed that the CCP and state-affiliated entities are likely deploying coordinated inauthentic accounts to amplify their online public diplomacy and disseminate disinformation. In the top 400 Facebook posts mentioning Xinjiang, there was a statistically significant difference in the number of comments posted by non-CCP Facebook accounts compared to posts from CCP-affiliated accounts with similar numbers of total interactions. Facebook posts by CCP-affiliated accounts tended to have fewer comments than posts by other accounts with a similar number of interactions. One explanation for this could be that CCP-affiliated accounts (such as those of Chinese diplomats and state media) are being inauthentically amplified.

News articles in different languages varied significantly in the tone of their reporting about Xinjiang and reflected differences in global public opinion about the CCP’s policies in the region. Of 494,710 articles analysed in more than 65 languages, Chinese-language articles were more likely to convey positive assessments of Chinese state policy and action in Xinjiang. Statistically similar results came from analyses of articles published in Urdu, Japanese, Thai and Turkish.

Our analysis of government statements at UNHRC sessions that found most countries that have supported CCP policies were based in Africa or the Middle East, which are emerging markets for US-based social media companies, while countries that have condemned CCP policies were mostly democratic nations in Europe and elsewhere. Most notable is the silence of governments in Muslim-majority and non-Western countries. Of the 57 member states forming the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, only Albania and, more recently, Turkey have condemned the CCP for its policies in Xinjiang.

Countries supporting or condemning CCP human rights abuses in Xinjiang at UNHRC sessions, 2019 to 2021

Source: ASPI analysis.

The impact of these operations isn’t widely understood, and the international community—including governments and social media platforms—have failed to adequately respond to the global challenges posed by the CCP’s rapidly evolving propaganda and disinformation operations. The CCP’s public diplomacy is bolstered by covert and coercive campaigns that impose costs and seek to constrain international entities—be they states, corporations or individuals—from offering evidence-based critiques of the party-state’s record on human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and other sensitive issues.

CCP information operations—including those targeting Xinjiang narratives and human rights abuses—should be countered now to mitigate the party’s global campaign of transnational repression and information warfare. Achieving that will require governments and civil society to work more closely with social media platforms and broadcasters to deter and expose propaganda organisations and operatives.

Governments must lead this policymaking process in coordination with allies and partners with shared interests. We recommend expanding economic sanctions regimes that target the perpetrators of serious human rights violations and abuses to include the distributors of disinformation and foreign propaganda who silence, intimidate and continue the abuse.

Australia and its partners should expand visa programs to help Hong Kong and punish Beijing

Xi Jinping’s visit to Hong Kong during the 25th anniversary of its handing back to China helped confirm that Beijing is committed to fully subjugating the former British colony. In his speech, Xi distorted the meaning of ‘one country, two systems’, to align with his vision of ‘patriots’ ruling Hong Kong. Meanwhile, 47 democratic politicians and campaigners potentially face life in prison on spurious national security charges.

The paranoid security, goose-stepping police and Putin-esque social distance Xi maintained from his subjects reflected simmering discontent in Hong Kong, but Beijing’s draconian grip prevents the people shaping their own future as they tried to do in mass protests in 2019 and 2020.

Hongkongers can only look forlornly overseas for hope. Unfortunately, despite British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s pledge that ‘we’re not giving up on Hong Kong’, there is scant prospect of Hong Kong regaining the freedoms the Chinese Communist Party has stolen.

But even if Hong Kong is effectively lost, we must still ensure Beijing feels the cost of its actions to deter it from further aggression.

So far, international condemnation has been piecemeal and ineffective. Western politicians marked the 1 July anniversary with familiar rhetoric. Foreign Minister Penny Wong urged Beijing to uphold the freedoms guaranteed until 2047 by the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an extant treaty registered at the UN, and enshrined in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s de facto constitution.

But even the West’s appetite for statements is receding. While the G7 criticised John Lee’s appointment as Hong Kong’s chief executive in May, there was nothing jointly marking 1 July like the Five Eyes’ statements of the past. In joint action at the UN, Hong Kong slips behind Xinjiang in the rollcall of Chinese human rights abuses. Burdened with the combined challenge posed by China and Russia, and dealing with supply shortages, inflation and looming recession, the West lacks the bandwidth to keep international attention focused on Hong Kong.

Beyond public rhetoric, legal avenues look uninviting.

There is no realistic hope of using an international court to hold Beijing to account for breaching treaty commitments. And, as the Philippines discovered over the South China Sea in 2016, China simply ignores arbitral decisions its doesn’t like. Some foreign judges have withdrawn cooperation with Hong Kong’s highest court to avoid what British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called the risk of ‘legitimising oppression’. But a handful of retired foreign judges, including three from Australia, have exercised their independence by staying—much to the enjoyment of CCP propagandists.

Sanctions also appear ineffective. The US revoked Hong Kong’s special status and has sanctioned a handful of high-profile individuals, including Lee, but they seem to be weathering the pressure despite some inconveniences. Under the Hong Kong autonomy act, foreign financial institutions that knowingly transact with sanctioned individuals are also targets, but the US Treasury is yet to find such ties.

Other countries have hesitated to apply sanctions, despite parliamentary lobbying in Australia, Britain and the EU. Greed and cowardice might be factors. But Western countries also have legitimate concerns about hurting Hongkongers and aiding Beijing by inadvertently accelerating homogenisation with the mainland.

Meanwhile, many foreign businesses are relocating. But this seems more because of the ‘Covid zero’ strategy, which Beijing supports despite Hong Kong’s economic contraction, rather than reasons of conscience or mounting political risk.

Fundamentally, Beijing seems unconcerned by Western opprobrium or economic blowback.

In his 1 July speech, Xi spoke warmly of a place in Hong Kong for ‘foreign friends’, but his call to remove all ‘interference’ was the real message. In relative terms, Hong Kong is not as economically important to the mainland as it used to be. And, ultimately, the CCP always prioritises control and subservience over other considerations.

So, having taken stock of the West’s options, the only remaining policy that can offer hope to Hongkongers and impose long-term costs on Beijing is expanding facilitated migration.

Significant numbers of Hongkongers are already voting with their feet. While businesses favour Singapore, Britain is attracting a good share of permanent migrants. More than 120,000 Hongkongers are already on the pathway to UK residency launched in January 2021 for so-called British Nationals (Overseas), or BN(O)—a unique identity available to nearly three million people tracing ties back to pre-handover Hong Kong, plus more than two million of their dependents. At smaller scale, Australia and Canada have also launched new routes to residency, while the US has acted to assist refugees and delay mandatory returns.

There are also potentially huge benefits for recipient countries, reflecting the skills many migrants bring, including high education and English-language standards. The British Home Office estimates that around 300,000 eligible Hongkongers will arrive in the first five years of the scheme. In narrow economic terms, this should increase growth in the UK by at least £2.4 billion (around $4.2 billion) over that time. The social and cultural benefits are much wider.

Beyond ceasing to recognise BN(O) passport holders, Beijing seems relatively unconcerned while Hong Kong’s workforce is backfilled with more politically acquiescent mainlanders. As Britain’s last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, reflects in the postscript of his newly published diaries, Beijing’s ‘ideal city will be a Hong Kong without Hongkongers, they want Hong Kong with political lobotomy’.

But migration from Hong Kong poses a long-term headache for the CCP. As Patten notes, Hong Kong’s pre-1997 population consisted of ‘refugees from some of the worst excesses of communism’, which shaped their opinions of the CCP. As the Hong Kong population grows in Australia and other Western countries, many of its members can be expected to speak out against the CCP and its abuses, working with established communities including Tibetans and Uyghurs. The true cost to the CCP for betraying Hong Kong will be a motivated and resistant diaspora.

It is also in the West’s strategic interest to welcome Hongkongers. Inaction would embolden our authoritarian adversaries and tarnish the soft power we accrue by acting on our values, as former prime minister Bob Hawke did when he granted asylum to Chinese students in Australia after the Tiananmen massacre. And migration can have benign, long-term effects that dictators overlook—such as the contribution East–West migration made to ending Soviet tyranny.

Hesitation over concerns for domestic social cohesion would play into Beijing’s hands. Despite the CCP’s claims, it does not speak on behalf of all people of Chinese descent. As polling shows, Australia’s Chinese community is diverse and deserves our support. It was the Chinese consulate-general in Brisbane that applauded the ‘patriotic behaviour’ of violent protesters at the University of Queensland in 2019—we must address malign CCP influence rather than stifle peaceful protests by our migrant communities.

So, to channel Emma Lazarus, let’s open our doors to Hong Kong’s ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. Our gain is Beijing’s pain.

The Chinese Communist Party’s overseas influence operations seek to alter the Xinjiang narrative

Over the last decade the free world has watched the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region with growing alarm. Its use of mass extrajudicial interment, intrusive surveillance and coercive brainwashing has fundamentally altered the human and physical geography of the region and its indigenous Uyghur population. Yet the complex ways in which the Chinese Communist Party is exporting this repression abroad have received less attention.

Our new report, Cultivating friendly forces: The Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations in the Xinjiang diaspora, exposes how the CCP is actively monitoring Uyghurs living abroad, creating databases of actionable intelligence and mobilising community organisations in the diaspora to counter international criticism of its policies in Xinjiang while promoting its own interests abroad.

More than a million people with connections to Xinjiang now live in countries such as Kazakhstan, Turkey and Australia. This diasporic community is dominated by Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples but also includes a small group from the Han ethnic majority who formerly lived in or have links to Xinjiang. Many of these Han are part of the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps, or Bingtuan for short, which settled millions of Han in Xinjiang and colonised the region in the name of the CCP.

Collectively, the Xinjiang diaspora is referred to as ‘overseas Chinese from Xinjiang’ by the Chinese government, regardless of their distinct identities as the colonised Uyghurs and the Han colonisers, or their cultural connections to the Uyghur homeland. By claiming to speak on behalf of ‘Xinjiang’ and its people, these CCP-aligned community organisations can neutralise—even silence—genuine criticisms of CCP policies in the region, while sowing fear, confusion and division not only in the Xinjiang diaspora but throughout the wider community. They actively foster a climate of plausible deniability that can cause foreign governments, politicians, corporate entities and civil society groups to ignore or discount the crimes against humanity being committed by the CCP in Xinjiang.

The Xinjiang diaspora is scattered widely across the world and its members are active targets of the Chinese government’s vast united front system: a complex network of decentralised party, state and civil society entities responsible for influencing people outside the CCP. United front work seeks to advance the CCP’s agenda, both domestically and abroad, by winning over friends and neutralising enemies. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, united front work has increased in size, scope and strategic ambition.

The Chinese government and its united front agents are actively monitoring and harassing Uyghurs and other individuals and groups critical of its agenda. Amid this climate of intimidation, some overseas community groups with close ties to the CCP’s united front apparatuses are actively whitewashing the human rights abuses in the Uyghur homeland and even openly praising the party’s policies.

The CCP is also systematically collecting information on members of the Xinjiang diaspora and creating databases that could strengthen the party’s overseas surveillance and interference work. Party officials in Xinjiang have been building such databases—of former and current Xinjiang residents with overseas connections—since 1997. They collect detailed personal information, including ‘political inclinations and attitudes towards the motherland’ and ‘the methods and consequences of the efforts by hostile foreign forces to co-opt this group’, and then use that information to develop and influence strategies.

In our new report we present four case studies to pull back the veil on the activities of Xinjiang-linked community organisations in Canada, Australia, Central Asia and Turkey, and their ties to the CCP’s united front system. The full extent of their activities requires additional research and public transparency, and any policy responses will need to respond dynamically to the specifics of each situation. However, the starting point must be a more nuanced understanding of the CCP’s united front system: its aims, tactics, operations and global footprint.

Take the example of the South Australian Xinjiang Association in Adelaide. This small Han-dominated community organisation has strong backing from the China’s diplomatic mission and, until recently, local Australian politicians, who have openly praised the group for its contributions to Australian multiculturalism. The group regularly co-opts Uyghur cultural traditions (clothing, food, music) at their public events and claim to represent the diversity of both Xinjiang and Australian society despite the objections of Adelaide’s large Uyghur community—many of whom have relatives who’ve disappeared inside the dystopian ‘re-education’ system in Xinjiang.

Former presidents of the SA Xinjiang Association, Irena Zhang (far left) and Genargi Xia (far right) with South Australian MLC Jing Lee (second from right) and the Chinese Consul-General in Adelaide He Lanjing at an event welcoming the consul-general to Australia in December 2018 (source).

The group’s founder, Irena Zhang (Zhang Yanxia), has been involved with a prominent united front organisation, the Australian Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China, which has come under intense scrutiny for foreign interference activities in recent years. On the CCP’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Zhang reportedly told a local newspaper: ‘In my opinion, I don’t think they are being mistreated.’

Another of the group’s former presidents, Genargi Xia (Xia Guanjun), has served as an overseas member for at least two united front bodies while its current president, Vivian Lim (Nian Wei), claims: ‘Xinjiang is a place where multiple ethnic groups lived since ancient times, where diverse cultures fuse and intersection…an environment where the sons and daughter of all ethnic groups coexist in mutual respect and harmony.’

Nominally independent community organisations like the SA Xinjiang Association are powerful resources in Beijing’s ongoing efforts to reshape the global narrative on Xinjiang, and they are making inroads. Look at the way some international leaders, including UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev have recently echoed some of the CCP’s talking points on Xinjiang. We have plenty of examples of how the CCP is influencing—even corrupting and capturing—political elites abroad while seeking to ultimately control diaspora groups regardless of their nationality or political disposition.

Community groups like the SA Xinjiang Association may not be immediately recognisable as aligned with the CCP and its united front system. But our research demonstrates how the CCP actively cultivates these organisations and its leaders as conduits for advancing the party’s agenda abroad and, in turn, relegating or even silencing the voices of Uyghurs and other critics of its policies in Xinjiang. Their activities can mislead the public and could amount to foreign interference if properly exposed.

The CCP’s united front system employs a range of methods and tactics depending on local circumstances. In free and open countries, such as Australia and Canada, it exploits democratic institutions, civic participation and multiculturalism to create the false impression that Xinjiang is not that dissimilar to these societies and amplifies pro-CCP voices and narratives. In less open societies, such as Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it exploits business and cultural links while leveraging the growing economic dependency of these countries on China.

Despite its abstruse nature, the party’s influence operations can be highly effective, especially when they go unnoticed and operate in a conducive environment. In countries where public scrutiny is possible because of, for example, a strong media and research community, the corrupting and corrosive nature of the CCP’s influence operations can be exposed, and short-term impacts can be counteracted if governments have set up appropriate operational and policy mechanisms to deal with such surveillance and foreign interference. Yet, in countries where democratic protections and transparency are lacking, such activities can quickly alter public opinion, exporting the CCP’s repression overseas and undermining domestic sovereignty.

The global rollback of open societies and democratic institutions leaves more dark shadows for the CCP’s united front agents to operate in and fewer opportunities to expose their pernicious effects. Under Xi, the CCP has doubled down on united front work and shown a willingness to properly resource its vast network so it can adapt and evolve in light of past successes and failures.

Our recommendations for policymakers, researchers and civil society includes a call for governments, law enforcement and civil society groups to more actively disrupt the CCP’s ability to interfere in sovereign countries and co-opt ethnic Chinese community groups and individuals through countermeasures such as enhanced public transparency, legislative reform, capacity building and law enforcement. Transparency is the best weapon for safeguarding the ability of citizens of all backgrounds to engage in public life free from outside interference and counteracting the hazards of the CCP’s united front system.

By accident or design—or designed accident? China’s unsafe air intercepts

On 26 May a J-16 fighter aircraft from the Peoples Liberational Army Air Force conducted an ‘unsafe’ interception of an Australian P-8A Poseidon routine surveillance flight above international waters. The Chinese fighter pulled alongside releasing flares, then cut in front of the Royal Australian Air Force aircraft and released ‘chaff’—aluminium fragments to decoy incoming missiles. Chaff is familiar to audiences for its frequent appearance in the movie Top Gun: Maverick.

Only hours after the encounter, a second RAAF aircraft returned to patrol the area indicating that Australian forces had not been deterred from continuing their operations. This flight was not contested.

Between 26 April and 26 May, a Royal Canadian Air Force CP-140 Aurora patrol aircraft was similarly dangerously intercepted by Chinese aircraft in violation of air-safety norms, while flying in international airspace near the Korean peninsula as part of UN-sanctioned Operation NEON.

These air intercepts, and previous incidents, including the use of a laser by a Chinese vessel to dazzle the crew of another RAAF P-8 over the Arafura Sea in February, have been condemned by Australian leaders as aggressive acts. Harassment of foreign aircraft and vessels has become commonplace and appears to be increasing. This strongly suggests that rather than being regrettable but isolated ‘accidents’, a more deliberate ‘design’ can be discerned behind Chinese actions.

A closer look at the recent Australian case may reveal why this intimidation is occurring.

At the tactical level, it has been argued by some that the Australian case could be the work of a ‘rogue pilot’—perhaps overzealous in protecting China’s declared sphere of influence from foreign incursions. This is possible, but it would then appear that the Chinese armed forces have quite a few ‘rogue operators’, something unlikely to be tolerated in a rigid authoritarian system like China’s, or a military presumably dedicated to upholding professional standards. At any rate, the pilot’s deliberate discharge of chaff cannot be considered an ‘accident’ in and of itself, even if it was not explicitly ordered by his/her commander.

At the operational level, perhaps a permissible environment has been approved for pilots engaged in such intercepts that sanctions such risky behaviours—in this ethos: ‘accidents will happen’ and will not attract punishment for the perpetrator. Are they now part of PLAAF standard operating procedures and rules of engagement? Certainly a pattern appears to be emerging, rather than a series of unlikely coincidences.

At the strategic level, if a permissible environment has been approved, that would suggest it forms part of a coordinated strategy across service branches and in different subregions to use hybrid means of warfare. This looks more credible when one recalls Chinese strategists’ interest in such below-kinetic-threshold activities, informed by Sun Tzu’s famous maxim appertaining to the art of fighting, without fighting (to paraphrase). By this stage, deliberately ‘designing accidents’ like this, looks more convincing.

Last, at the political level, while the Chinese military has shown a measure of independence from policymakers in the past, the tight rein of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping may suggest that such a strategy—the sanction of operational procedures that permit such tactics—implies that this behaviour is approved at the very top. This assumption—reasonable to the extent that the CCP’s authoritarian system has exceptionally tight control of events, most especially in matters concerning the South China Sea—necessarily ascribes a high level of coordination and efficiency within the system (a misperception applied to the Soviet Union in the past). Given that the communist system remains a ‘black box’ to outsiders, we have no way of knowing for certain. Alternatively, the fact that the dangerous intercept occurred when Chinese diplomats were pressing for a ‘reset’ in bilateral relations with Australia could be read as ‘the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing’.

For Beijing, the beauty of such seemingly contradictory activities, military provocation combined with diplomatic denial and putative olive branches, might suggest more than a tactical ‘accident’ by a rogue pilot, but rather a ‘designed accident’. That would be plausibly (or implausibly) deniable but nevertheless discombobulating for the recipient of such mixed messages. Rather surreally, Chinese officials have both retorted that ‘the measures taken by the Chinese military were professional, safe, reasonable and legal’ and then accused Australia of ‘dangerous and provocative acts’.

If such nominal ‘accidents’ are part of a carefully controlled posture sanctioned all the way to the top of the hierarchy—either actively approved or simply passively tolerated—what’s the purpose?

Destabilisation of the target. Uncertainty is achieved by the appearance of various theories, none of which can be conclusively verified as true and therefore dealt with appropriately and categorically by policymakers. Add to this a heavy dose of disinformation to further muddy the waters and create doubts and this leads to a degree of policy paralysis for the respondent.

It places the onus the target country to escalate in response and/or risk further incidents by continuing with such patrols, and Beijing clearly feels confident that this would be unpalatable or infeasible, at least for countries like Australia (and Canada). In China’s view, they can be counted upon to blink first in a game of brinksmanship, just as intended. The clearance of a second flight hours after the chaff incident indicates that Australia may not be playing the game as scripted.

There may be pitfalls in the strategy of ‘designed accidents’ in the sense that they are inherently dangerous and may lead to real rather than theatrical incidents. The Australian crew of the P-8, upon witnessing the activation of a (defensive) weapon system by the Chinese interceptor, may have responded to a ‘combat’ situation (the P-8 is not suitably armed to respond, but in other cases this may not be the case). Equally worrisome, due to the ingestion of the chaff fragments into its engines, the P-8 could have been downed by the encounter leading to casualties and/or an ensuing diplomatic crisis (like the Hainan Incident in 2001 in which a US EP-3 surveillance plane was brought down after an accident involving a PLAAF J-8 interceptor, whose pilot was killed).

Ultimately, how we view this incident—whether accident or accident by design—will lead us to different conclusions ranging from: ‘some Chinese pilots are reckless mavericks’ through ‘the Chinese military is adopting a riskier posture on purpose’, to ‘the PLA high command, with the approval of party decision-makers, has crafted a deliberate strategy that extends to the minutiae of tactical operations’.

Whatever the accidental, deliberate or unintended effects of such activities by Chinese armed forces, tensions will be raised accordingly. That will confirm the worst fears of strategic planners in Canberra, Ottawa and elsewhere, and drive more robust (and probably combined) responses.

Close encounters of the PLA kind: Xi shows the South Pacific its future

The 26 May incident where a Chinese fighter aircraft fired flares and chaff at an Australian maritime patrol aircraft in international airspace above the South China Sea, risking a potentially fatal crash, is not an isolated episode. And it’s not peculiar to the Australia–China relationship, so it would be wrong to see it as all about us and connected with any notion that Beijing is focusing much effort on a positive ‘reset’ of our bilateral relationship.

Instead, this type of aggression is the face the People’s Liberation Army is showing to numerous nations and in more places as its power-projection ability grows. It’s doing what Xi Jinping wants from it in his ‘new era’ of a Sino-centred world, controlled by the CCP.

On several occasions including on the same day as the incident with the Australian jet, Chinese fighter aircraft aggressively and dangerously harassed a Canadian military aircraft enforcing United Nations sanctions along the border with North Korea. As the Canadian government stated after the incidents, the PLA Air Force aircraft ‘did not adhere to international air safety norms’. It added ‘These interactions are unprofessional and/or put the safety of our Royal Canadian Air Force personnel at risk.’

On 24 May, Chinese bombers flew a joint patrol with Russian bombers over the sea of Japan and East China Sea to add military tension to the Quad leaders’ meeting happening in Tokyo.

The problem is that Xi has instructed his military to operate this way. He seems to want to make the PLA such a risky, dangerous entity to approach, that other forces will give it a wide berth for their own and the PLA’s safety.

It’s reminding many of the 2001 incident when a Chinese fighter collided with a US EP-3C Orion surveillance aircraft and damaged it so badly that it had to make a forced landing on Hainan Island. The Chinese pilot died. Now we have prospect of this happening on any day of the week to a number of nations’ military aircraft and ships who encounter Xi’s PLA. The PLA risks its own losses in these encounters also.

The Chinese military is acting under Xi Jinping’s instructions to be ‘primed to fight at any second’. The PLA is comfortable using force during peacetime, and even has a term for this: ‘peacetime confrontational military operations’. So, the Canadian and Australian examples are not local Chinese commanders or even individual pilots acting on their own. They are doing what Xi and the PLA high command want and expect.

This direction is why Chinese foreign ministry officials routinely deny documented aggression by their military and blame others in egregious statements along the lines of: ‘[relevant country] should respect the efforts made by China and ASEAN countries to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea, instead of frequently sending vessels and aircraft to the South China Sea’.

True to form, the state media mouthpiece, the Global Times, has done just this in an article headed ‘PLA aircraft deal with Canadian, Australian provocative close-in recon in East and South China Seas’. Apparently, ‘by accusing the Chinese warplanes of threatening flight safety, the two members of the Five Eyes complained first while being the ones who are guilty in the first place’.

The Chinese government can’t mention that China has no legitimacy to its expansive claim to the South China Sea, because its arguments were comprehensively rejected by a 2016 ruling in a case the Philippines brought against it, based on the international law China helped draft and then signed up to—the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. So, its warplanes were enforcing rights China does not have in international airspace where every nation has the right to operate without harassment.

And the Global Times didn’t mention the UN mission that the Canadians were performing along the North Korean border, because it would be too uncomfortable to note that China is a party to the sanctions and so should actually be assisting with their enforcement, not risking the lives of its own pilots and Canadian aircrew to prevent that from happening.

There are some particularly dangerous features of what the PLA J-16 did during its close encounter with the Australian P8-A Poseidon. Letting off flares close to the Royal Australian Air Force aircraft is one of those.

But the fact that the Chinese J-16 pilot flew close in front of the P-8 and fired chaff back towards the P-8 while manoeuvring dangerously is more than disturbing. Chaff and flares are used to distract missiles fired at planes, so the PLA pilot had no legitimate reason to do this. Depending on what the PLA’s decoy systems are composed of and how much material gets ingested (neither is clear), this could damage the aircraft’s engines and cause it to crash. Certainly, the combination of flares, chaff and close-proximity dangerous flying risks a mid-air collision and crash. The PLA pilot would have known this, so it is deliberate aggression and an escalation from the Chinese military.

Of course, if Beijing was at all serious about any positive ‘resetting’ of its relationship with Australia, it could have instructed its military to refrain from such hostility. But it hasn’t. Its rhetoric of resetting is all about seeking policy change in Canberra and allowing Beijing to dictate both what it wants from Australia and what we have to do to achieve that.

Beijing could also apologise to Australia and Canada and discipline the PLA pilots involved and their commanders. But no one who’s watched how Xi has stoked violent nationalism, turned his diplomats into ‘wolf warriors’ and let violent voices shout online for the Ukrainian people to die to deliver Vladimir Putin victory in his horrific war can expect to see this from Beijing.

These latest acts of PLA aggression should be seen in that light. It’s Beijing saying the world—not just Australia and Canada—now must live with how the Chinese leadership chooses to use its military power. It’s trying to normalise its behaviour and force others to adjust in response.

Sophistication and nuance is not something Xi and his officials and military are practising. Instead, hard power, assertion, coercion, aggression and denial are the primary characteristics of Xi’s ‘new era’. In this era, Russia is China’s ‘no limits’ partner in aggression, as shown by the joint bomber flights.

No nation dealing with Beijing’s assertion of military power should feel lonely or allow China to isolate it in bilateral discussions. The broad, united approach to facing down Putin in his horrific war must be applied to the China–Russia strategic partnership.

There’s also a connection between these potentially deadly military acts by China and the future of the South Pacific.

How glad the 10 nations who didn’t sign Beijing’s proposed regional security pact must be that they rejected this offer. The Canadian and Australian incidents, together with the joint Russian-Chinese bomber mission are graphic demonstrations of why enabling the Chinese military to operate more routinely and easily in the South Pacific—as Beijing wants and as Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare is helping happen—is bad news for South Pacific nations.

This is ‘security assistance’ the PLA way.