The Chinese Communist Party has a problem with women of Asian descent who have public platforms, opinions and expertise on China.

In an effort to counter the views and work of these women, the CCP has been busy pivoting its growing information operation capabilities to target women, with a focus on journalists working at major Western media outlets.

Right now, and often going back weeks or months, some of the world’s leading China journalists and human rights activists are on the receiving end of an ongoing, coordinated and large-scale online information campaign. These women are high-profile journalists at media outlets including the New Yorker, The Economist, the New York Times, The Guardian, Quartz and others. The most malicious and sophisticated aspects of this information campaign are focused on women of Asian descent.

Based on open-source information, ASPI assesses the inauthentic Twitter accounts behind this operation are likely another iteration of the pro-CCP ‘Spamouflage’ network, which Twitter attributed to the Chinese government in 2019.

Hundreds of accounts in this network have been created with the sole purpose of targeting these women; some target one woman while others target multiple women at a time. Other accounts have shifted from other topics to focus on these women, having previously shared text, images and videos that align with the CCP’s narratives. These include propaganda, disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the origins of Covid-19 (including sharing links to a fake ‘Milk Tea Alliance’ report), human rights abuses in Xinjiang and forced Uyghur labour, US politics and foreign policy, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This latest campaign, in both English and Mandarin, includes a spectrum of psychological abuse, harassment, mass trolling and threats. Some women have been bombarded with tweets on a range of topics, frequently from spam accounts accusing the target of fake news or anti-China coverage, though the tweets are often not personalised.

Other parts of the campaign are far more sophisticated and tailored. A number of women of Asian descent are being targeted by a widespread, coordinated, intimidating and malicious campaign that has been crafted to be highly personal, abusive and threatening. Content has been tailored to their individual circumstances, covering their work and personal lives. This would have required extensive surveillance of targeted individuals in order to tailor these tweets and their messaging.

These women are accused of being traitors and liars, betraying their ‘motherland’ and slandering their home country (even though many of them were born overseas and have never held Chinese citizenship). These accounts attempt to attack their physical appearance, question their credibility and the quality of their work, often in response to specific content they’ve written or produced. These parts of the campaign are characterised by high levels of personal abuse including sexist, misogynistic and racist attacks that include messages such as ‘traitors don’t die well’ and ‘traitors often come to a bad end’.

The hashtag #TraitorJiayangFan—targeting New Yorker staff writer Jiayang Fan—is one such malicious example. Fan has previously written about being subjected to Chinese propaganda and nationalistic trolling. Our research shows the latest #TraitorJiayangFan campaign was started and amplified by at least 367 inauthentic Twitter accounts beginning on 19 April. Some accounts shared videos from suspicious YouTube accounts including Lino Nissan, for example, which was created on 25 May and has only posted videos in Mandarin targeting Fan. Most Twitter accounts in this network have appropriated images of real women from other websites to use as profile images, while some accounts have used artificial intelligence to generate profile pictures. These profile images are mostly of women, but in some cases of children.

AI-generated images used by inauthentic Twitter accounts:

A lack of counter-measures by social media platforms and the governments of the countries where the women being targeted reside has allowed the operators of these accounts to constantly replenish them, seemingly undeterred, continuously using the same tactics over and over to maintain a presence on US-based platforms.

Many indicators that point to inauthentic activity linked to the Chinese state have allowed ASPI to infer similar sets of activity and track the network across multiple platforms and languages for years. Such indicators include posting content denying human rights abuses in Xinjiang, amplifying hashtags that ASPI has assessed to be other iterations of Spamouflage, using profile images similar to previous Spamouflage-linked accounts and more. Our analysis revealed the text of many of the tweets in this dataset contained double-byte characters commonly used in East Asian language fonts such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Most of the targeting was done during Beijing business hours and accounts were far less active during China’s 30 April to 4 May holidays.

Graph showing number of tweets per day with holidays and weekends shown in yellow:

New York Times reporter Muyi Xiao and Washington-DC-based video journalist Xinyan Yu are currently the targets of some of the most malicious parts of this campaign. Many of the Twitter accounts targeting them are linked to the same operators targeting Fan and other CCP-linked information operations (that have targeted, for example, Guo Wengui and other Chinese dissidents). Earlier this week, at least 112 different accounts posted more than 500 tweets targeting Xiao within 24 hours. Of these accounts, 54 were created on 15 April alone. Since we collected this data, it appears that Twitter has taken down some of the accounts, but not all.

This activity is escalating. Inauthentic pro-CCP Twitter accounts are beginning to harass other high-profile journalists and human rights activists including Alice Su, Mei Fong, Lingling Wei and Jane Li. These covert activities appear coordinated with a broader campaign by the Chinese government to silence women of Asian descent who have criticised its policies, or even simply reported on some issues happening in China. In March, China’s Xinhua News Agency published an article accusing Chinese journalists of helping Western media with ‘anti-China’ reports. In February, a collage of Chinese women—originally created in 2019 to target the women for their reporting of the Hong Kong protests—was shared by a Twitter account named ‘Dai Weiwei’, whose account has since been suspended. Twitter profile images of the women targeted in the latest campaigns were all present in this photo collage.

This isn’t the first time the CCP has targeted women online. Within China, women have been abused, censored, deplatformed, and sometimes even arrested for their work on women’s rights, for example. Journalists working in China have long been targeted by authorities.

Outside of China, overt and covert transnational repression is a booming industry. In 2020, our former ASPI colleague Vicky Xu was on the receiving end of one of the most sophisticated, persistent and multi-platform campaigns we have ever seen, which took place on both US- and China-based platforms. Back then, the Australian government wasn’t set up to tackle this challenge. Some departments and agencies wanted to help but couldn’t do so because they didn’t have the right legislative authorities. Others didn’t see it as a high priority or believed it to be a problem that the social media platforms should be leading on.

Over the last five years, the CCP’s online information capabilities have tended to rely on quantity rather than quality, but that’s changed and governments and social media platforms are failing to keep up. The use of more strategic, global propaganda channels, mobilising and shepherding online nationalist activity, employing and amplifying Western online influencers and amplifying Russian narratives and disinformation on Ukraine all point to an actor that is broadening its scope and targets, constantly adding to its information toolkit and evolving far more quickly than it was just a year or two ago.

The CCP’s online capabilities can now easily swing from targeting narratives and topics to foreign governments, whether they’re Xinjiang, the Quad and Japanese defence policies or US politics. It does this while also targeting organisations and individuals who play key roles in informing global public discourse on China-related issues, including Uyghur, women’s and human rights activists, as well as journalists and media outlets (including the BBC), and researchers and think tanks, among others. ASPI has regularly been on the receiving end of small- and medium-scale disinformation campaigns.

Social media platforms need to urgently shift their thinking and move from taking down these campaigns though a defensive ‘whack-a-mole’ approach, to a more pre-emptive and proactive stance. Platforms and governments need to work more collaboratively to build the infrastructure, capability and deterrence measures necessary to respond to cyber-enabled foreign interference and digital transnational repression. Both also need to work more closely with expert civil society groups in policy development and to identify networks, actors and targets.

A good first step would be for governments to more publicly denounce these malicious harassment and disinformation campaigns. The US government is the most advanced in its thinking here, having signalled this issue as a key policy focus for President Joe Biden’s administration. The White House could, for example, lead a coalition of countries in condemning digital transnational repression. A joint statement should gain support from countries and regions like Australia, the UK, Canada, Europe, Japan and hopefully others. It would signal to publics, diaspora communities, social media platforms, malicious actors and, of course, the individuals and organisations under threat, that there will be a rapid step-up in policy focus and action.

Australia can’t continue to put this in the too-hard basket. Cyber-enabled foreign interference and digital transnational repression is a rapidly emerging security challenge that will make its way into the media, and into new cabinet members’ briefing packs and intelligence assessments, far more than it has before. Luckily, the Senate’s multi-year effort looking at foreign interference through social media puts the new government in a strong position to hit the ground running—but its efforts will need to be consistent and they will need to keep up with the ever-evolving nature of the challenge.

Aside from fake snow and Covid-19, the Beijing Winter Games are controversial for many reasons.

They are a potent political symbol of the Chinese state’s ambitions and authority. Held just a year after the triumphalist 100-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding, General Secretary Xi Jinping is using the Olympics to showcase to the world that China is powerful and on track to fulfil its ‘Chinese dream’ of national rejuvenation.

How will the CCP use the Games domestically to push this narrative and how will it be viewed by the rest of the world? What does the party hope to gain by the event being perceived as a success?

Some observers see China’s rise as generating a strategic power conflict and threatening the liberal world order.

Others see China’s rise as more benign, even appropriate for a country possessing 4,000 years of history and having made astonishing economic progress in the past 50 years.

These contrasting interpretations have generated much debate internationally before the Olympics. Several Western countries have declared a diplomatic boycott because of concerns over the shocking human rights violations of the Uyghur minority and deep repression in civil society, particularly in Hong Kong.

China’s reputation worsened after the safety of tennis star Peng Shuai, an alleged sexual assault victim, became a matter of international concern.

Domestically, however, the Olympics are portrayed as something that benefits the Chinese people—a way for Chinese athletes to achieve glory and to showcase the CCP’s ability to execute a world-class sporting event. The underlying narrative glorifies the regime and legitimises the party’s institutions and practices.

Chinese media have struck back at the international criticism, saying the US is being  ‘arrogant and mean’ for criticising China’s highly restrictive zero-Covid policies and the Americans weren’t invited to the Olympics in the first place.

The domestic objective of these aggressive narratives is to reaffirm the primacy of the CPP as the best protector of China and its people against provocative elements in the international community.

At the same time, the Games represent an opportunity for Xi to reset the global rhetoric on China by welcoming the world to Beijing’s ‘smart, environmentally friendly’ Olympics.

China’s so-called wolf-warrior diplomacy has hurt more than helped its interests abroad. As a result, Xi has pleaded with party members, Chinese diplomats and the Chinese media to ‘set the tone right’ by being more modest and humble, to promote a more ‘credible, lovable and respectable image of China’, a request with which they have grudgingly complied.

For Xi, he needs both the party’s compliance and acceptance. The party is at the core of everything he wants to do—primarily, to deliver his Chinese dream to the people.

While the Chinese dream has often been compared to the ‘American dream’, it is most emphatically not an American dream with Chinese characteristics.

The American dream emphasises individual freedoms, social mobility and material success brought about by one’s own efforts. In the Chinese dream, national wellbeing supersedes individual desires and achievements. As such, the CCP spins a narrative that only the party can achieve the Chinese dream for the Chinese people.

So, when someone or something is perceived as a threat to the party’s centrality, the regime launches into self-preservation mode. For example, when some in the West raised the prospect that Covid may have been engineered in a Chinese lab, the Chinese Foreign Ministry struck back hard by endorsing a conspiracy theory that the US Army introduced the virus to Wuhan.

In Xi’s speech on the 100th anniversary of the CCP’s founding last year, party members were reminded that the party leadership, with Xi at its core, is ‘the foundation and lifeblood of the Party and the country, and the crux upon which the interests and wellbeing of all Chinese people depend’.

The presentation of the Beijing Winter Olympics to the Chinese people is crucial to this overarching narrative that Xi and the party are creating. They need the Chinese people to adhere to the Chinese dream as their dream.

This need is evident in the language Xi uses in public statements. Xi uses a great deal of imagery to exhort the Chinese people to march together with the party on the same difficult path towards this shared vision of the future.

As China continues to build its economy and burnish its great-power status with high-profile events such as these Winter Olympics, it is also attempting to show the world that its model of governance is supreme.

These Games are a giant advertisement for the Chinese Communist Party, exemplifying the kind of sharp efficiency that high-tech, authoritarian governments can bring to events of this magnitude. It can also demonstrate how successful the government has been in containing Covid, though this has involved blockading people in their own homes and the discriminatory treatment of Africans living in China.

So, when global audiences cheer for their winter heroes, they will also be cheering for the CCP—whether they like that or not.

Video testimonials from Uyghurs saying they’re content with the economic opportunities provided for them through Chinese Communist Party re-education programs; promotion of Xinjiang as an idyllic tourism destination; commentary on the positive impact of CCP policies on the health and life expectancy of the region’s Uyghur population; content distributed in multiple languages on US and Chinese social media platforms: these are all efforts revolving around the hashtag #StopXinjiangRumors to recalibrate international perceptions of life in the Xinjiang region.

The content is distributed by social media networks that previously focused on porn and Korean soap operas but also—curiously—by CCP diplomats. Yet these networks are run by the Chinese state, directly or by outsourcing to state-directed companies linked to state and regional propaganda departments.

ASPI’s new report on Xinjiang disinformation linked to the Chinese party-state highlights how different strands of CCP online and offline information operations now interweave to create an increasingly coordinated propaganda ecosystem made up of Chinese government officials, state and regional media assets, outsourced influence-for-hire operators, social media influencers and covert information operations.

The two datasets analysed by ASPI’s disinformation team demonstrate that international criticism of CCP policy in Xinjiang continues to be acutely sensitive for the party-state and that this is driving investment in international-facing disinformation at multiple levels in the party’s propaganda apparatus.

Twitter’s state actor information operations datasets offer the most substantive evidence base for analysing the trajectory of the Chinese party-state’s online disinformation since its attribution on US social media platforms in 2019. Twitter has undertaken three major disruptions of on-platform manipulation by assets it linked with high confidence to the Chinese state through a combination of technical and behavioural signals. And Twitter is forward-leaning in making state actor information operations datasets available to the public.

ASPI’s disinformation team is one of the small handful of research teams internationally that are capable of analysing these datasets. For this report, we had advance access to the data prior to Twitter’s public release. By integrating analysis of these datasets and the CCP’s own directives and rhetoric, we learn more about how the party apparatus operationalises the CCP’s strategy for public opinion warfare.

Within the data we see overlaps that reflect different strands of pro-CCP online and offline influence activity. There are multiple intersections that suggest coordination across the party-state’s propaganda assets. Some of this is clearly directly coordinated—for example, where we see this covert information operation’s interactions with, and reciprocal amplification of, the CCP’s state and local media. Other interactions with the party’s propaganda assets, however, may be more opportunistic—for example, the engagement with prominent pro-CCP social media influencers and diplomats.

Yet cumulatively they point to the building of a propaganda ecosystem for projecting the party’s discourse power at international audiences.

The data offer insights into how propaganda directives from the top of the party structure are operationalised and suggest that there are likely to be multiple strands of CCP online information operations underway at any given time, each directed by different elements from within the party structure.

Analysis of procurement documents shows that the party is increasingly outsourcing propaganda work to a range of Chinese media, marketing and internet companies. Private-sector innovation is diversifying the CCP’s propaganda ecosystem. While publicity campaigns are generally acceptable in Western countries and not necessarily coercive, the Chinese party-state views publicity and propaganda as perfectly compatible. The datasets we analysed for our report are a good illustration of this point. They highlight how the Chinese government’s efforts to portray a positive version of Xinjiang are interwoven with disinformation denying human rights abuses.

The campaigns are also reflective of what is likely to be the future direction of the CCP’s online information operations.

Following a Politburo collective study session in May, President Xi Jinping urged the party to expand its ‘circle of friends in international public opinion’. The CCP’s recent propaganda efforts have adapted to incorporate and appropriate a more expansive circle that includes influencers and other proxies that align in projecting the party-state’s preferred narratives into international political discourse. The party is clear that this effort is an important part of its public-opinion struggle to ‘shape a more just and equitable international order and forge a new type of international relations’.

This doctrinal element adds a valuable layer to how we understand the scale, persistence and diversity of pro-CCP online influence activity. The party’s incentive structures may be driving at-scale online information operations that have performance metrics based on their ideological value on the party’s own terms—rather than on their capacity to deliver effects—as leaders of various party organs compete to demonstrate allegiance to contemporary party doctrine.

The coordination between covert information operations and other CCP propaganda assets that we identify highlights the emergence of an increasingly complex system of international-facing propaganda distribution that comprises overlapping strands of activity by diverse elements of the party-state. The CCP is leveraging asymmetric advantage in the information domain as its officials, state media and their proxies exploit the open access to international audiences that US social media platforms provide. That access, of course, isn’t reciprocal, as the CCP exercises an extensive system of control, manipulation and censorship over its domestic internet.

This report also demonstrates the value of innovative cross-sectoral partnerships and of open-source data analysis. Our industry partners at Twitter have taken the enforcement action to disrupt these assets. But ASPI identified the connection between social media accounts or channels and a local company contracted by the regional government in Xinjiang to distribute international-facing propaganda, which was an important element in Twitter’s attribution of one of these two datasets to the Chinese state. Whole-of-society responses to hybrid threats necessitate these kinds of partnerships to create the resilience we need to counter propaganda and disinformation from authoritarian regimes.

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

The most widely read study ever produced by ASPI is Uyghurs for sale:‘re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang.

First published in March 2020 (with rolling additions and updates since), the report by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre had received nearly half a million unique page views and downloads by June 2021.

The lead author, Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, wrote:

The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 82 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.

The report estimated that more than 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China between 2017 and 2019, and some of them were sent directly from detention camps. The estimate was conservative, and the real figure was likely to be far higher:

In factories far away from home, they typically live in segregated dormitories, undergo organised Mandarin and ideological training outside working hours, are subject to constant surveillance, and are forbidden from participating in religious observances.

The 2020 study Cultural erasure detailed China’s systematic program to rewrite the cultural heritage of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The campaign sought to erode and redefine the culture of the Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking communities to make those cultural traditions subservient to the ‘Chinese nation’, Nathan Ruser reported:

Using satellite imagery, we estimate that approximately 16,000 mosques in Xinjiang (65% of the total) have been destroyed or damaged as a result of government policies, mostly since 2017. An estimated 8,500 have been demolished outright, and, for the most part, the land on which those razed mosques once sat remains vacant. A further 30% of important Islamic sacred sites (shrines, cemeteries and pilgrimage routes, including many protected under Chinese law) have been demolished across Xinjiang, mostly since 2017, and an additional 28% have been damaged or altered in some way.

Alongside other coercive efforts to re-engineer Uyghur social and cultural life by transforming or eliminating Uyghurs’ language, music, homes and even diets the Chinese Government’s policies are actively erasing and altering key elements of their tangible cultural heritage.

Apple Inc. severed ties with Chinese component supplier Ofilm because of its use of forced labour. Ofilm had to sell its factory and saw its share price plummet.

French prosecutors opened an investigation into four leading fashion retailers over suspicions that they benefited from and concealed ‘crimes against humanity’ by using Uyghur forced labour. The inquiry followed a lawsuit filed against the companies by human rights groups and a Uyghur woman who said she had been imprisoned in Xinjiang. The lawsuit was largely based on ASPI’s report.

ASPI can point to some direct policy impact beyond Australia. Legislation was introduced in the US Congress in 2019 that directly cited ICPC research.

Governments in the UK and Europe have introduced laws and regulations citing or informed by the centre’s work on 5G, technology transfer, supply chains, forced labour and other human rights issues, disinformation, critical infrastructure, and talent recruitment focused on science and technology.

ICPC runs a website, The Xinjiang Data Project, drawing on open-source data, including satellite imagery, Chinese government documents, official statistics, and a range of reports and academic studies. The site focuses on ‘mass internment camps, surveillance and emerging technologies, forced labour and supply chains, the “re-education” campaign, deliberate cultural destruction and other human rights issues’.

Another website, Mapping China’s Technology Giants, charts the overseas expansion of key Chinese technology companies. The project, first published in April 2019, was relaunched in June 2021 with new research reports, a new website and updated content. The data-driven online project—and the accompanying research papers—fill a ‘policy gap by building understanding about the global trajectory and impact of China’s largest companies working across the internet, telecommunications, AI, surveillance, e-commerce, finance, biotechnology, big data, cloud computing, smart city and social media sectors’.

ICPC took on new leadership in mid-2017, eager to push the think-tank model.

The new director, Fergus Hanson, had worked in three think tanks—the Lowy Institute, the Brookings Institution and the CSIS Pacific Forum. Hanson saw ‘an opportunity to take from that experience to try a new approach’. The new deputy director, Danielle Cave, had previously worked in two think tanks.

For Hanson and Cave, it was a case of going back to basics to focus on policy influence, both at home in Australia and globally. Cave summarises the philosophy:

The collapse of traditional media led many think tanks around the world to fill that vacuum by producing large volumes of opinion and analysis. But at the end of the day, opinion and analysis can be contradicted by the next person with a different opinion. The real value of a think tank is original, empirical, data-driven research.

The withering of old economic models for news media means fewer resources for investigative work and getting the ‘facts’. A think tank can do the investigation, amass the expertise and spend the time—picking up some of the work once done by journalism. ICPC uses its tools to amass the facts as data—a modern version of the old editor’s injunction for firm facts and hard news.

The Hanson–Cave approach brought together key elements:

• finding and hiring young, emerging talent to bring in skills in open-source intelligence, such as geospatial mapping skills
• an entrepreneurial model that created untied funding for research on sensitive and emerging topics that governments around the world desperately needed but were often too risk-averse to fund themselves
• new approaches to the dissemination of research that took a more global approach
• hiring people with a more diverse mix of skills and backgrounds, most notably ASPI’s first Chinese linguists and first Indigenous person.

The bets paid off.

In a few years, ICPC’s growth had doubled ASPI’s headcount, including one of the largest China teams in the think-tank world.

Topics worked on by the centre broadened out and new teams were built up to focus on information operations and disinformation; foreign interference; work on opening careers in science, technology, engineering and maths for Indigenous Australians; critical technologies; and cyber capacity building. Much of the work has an Indo-Pacific frame.

By 2020, ICPC had produced all 20 of ASPI’s most read reports, attracting hundreds of thousands of views from the US, China, the UK, Europe, India, Japan and Canada—in addition to Australia. This is the work of a centre with a staff of around 30 in mid-2021.

Drawn from the book on the institute’s first 20 years: An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021.

Why is Beijing so ‘out and proud’ in using its power in ways that conflict with others’ interests, break international law and breach treaty commitments?

Since 2015, we’ve seen Xi Jinping’s government build military facilities on disputed territory in the South China Sea, end the ‘one country, two systems’ freedoms in Hong Kong, build huge detention camps in Xinjiang holding over a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, break treaties it signed, pressure and intimidate Taiwan, and coerce governments, parliaments and companies that dare to not support these and other measures.

The answer seems to be Beijing’s ‘Tiananmen calculation’—a brutally cynical assessment that the Chinese Communist Party can use its growing military, technological and economic power as it wishes because the consequences are low and the benefits high.

While other states and civil-society groups will respond with sanctions, declarations, tariffs, arbitral proceedings under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and disputes at the World Trade Organization, all of those problems will be ephemeral. That’s because every government and every company wants the wealth they perceive will flow from keeping access to ‘the China market’—and they’ll compromise their other interests to get it.

The Tiananmen massacre was ordered by Deng Xiaoping because of the threat that the protest movement posed to continued CCP rule. Consideration of the global reaction was a second-order issue given what was at stake for the leadership. In the aftermath of the massacre by heavily armed People’s Liberation Army units, the US put economic sanctions in place against China, the Europeans imposed an arms embargo, and Australia gave citizenship to thousands of people who would otherwise have had to return to mainland China.

But in later years, we all got back to business, relegating pressure on the Chinese government over the massacre to backroom dialogues, and leaving the issue to human rights groups and concerned citizens. Businesses got back to business, whatever their home governments thought or did.

This lesson of impunity has been learned well by Xi. The ‘China dream’ he has set out so clearly in speeches shows he’s banking on that lesson to enable his use of power as a core element of his ‘rejuvenation of China as a great nation’ under the perpetual rule of the CCP.

Two examples are Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

Last year, Xi enacted a new national security law in Hong Kong, ending the political freedoms for its 7.5 million people that the Chinese government had guaranteed would last until 2047 under the treaty Beijing signed with the UK.

With this, he risked big Western companies based in Hong Kong leaving, as well as Hong Kong becoming a far less important financial gateway for foreign investment into China. Or did he? The US and EU imposed sanctions on China that limited sales of equipment helping Chinese security forces implement the repressive law, and the US ended Hong Kong’s special economic status. Australia and the UK opened pathways to extended residence or citizenship for Hongkongers.

But business sailed on. It turns out that a significant number of big Western companies not only didn’t leave town, but signed a petition congratulating Beijing on the law, because it would bring stability to Hong Kong.

UK-origin banks HSBC and Standard Chartered both signed the petition. And, going considerably further in showing where its future lies in a world of growing strategic competition between the US and China, HSBC recently announced that it’s ending its retail bank presence in the US to concentrate on growing its Asian, and Chinese, business instead. And China’s advocates in the EU, such as Hungary, stopped the EU from taking further steps after Beijing imprisoned Hong Kong politicians.

But there are signs that this isn’t over: a survey of members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong from May found that ‘42% of the 325 respondents said they were considering or planning to leave the city, citing uneasiness over China’s new security law’.

On Xinjiang, the story is maybe uglier and bigger. The amount of factual information showing China’s human rights abuses, including leaked Chinese government documents quoting Xi directing his officials to show no mercy, leaves no room to doubt the massive scale of the atrocities the Chinese government is committing against its own Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim peoples. It also leaves no doubt that this is a deliberate, centrally directed program led by Beijing.

Governments in many countries understand the gravity and scale of these abuses and have condemned Beijing for them. Some parliaments, states and key officials have found that Beijing’s state-directed abuses meet the definition of genocide against the Uyghur people. The EU, US and like-minded nations have enacted sanctions, travel bans and asset freezes targeting Chinese officials over Xinjiang.

But, once again, these government-level actions don’t seem to be affecting business in Xinjiang much. And when companies have poked their heads up on the abuses, they’ve had direct experience of Chinese economic coercion and CCP-stoked consumer boycotts.

Last year, in response to pressure from customers outside China, and revelations of Uyghur forced labour in multiple multinationals’ supply chains, the Swedish global clothing giant H&M announced that it would terminate business relationships in Xinjiang it identified that involved the practice.

In March this year, Chinese authorities stoked consumer outrage about H&M’s stance, leading to the removal of its advertising from Chinese digital sites and consumer boycotts.

The action against H&M seems almost certainly to be a signal to EU policymakers and businesses about the risk to their business plans if the EU proceeds down the path of continued pressure on Beijing over Xinjiang and refuses to ratify the Angela Merkel–led EU–China Investment Agreement. Targeting a European but non-EU member state company is a deliberate act, perhaps even an attempt to show some kind of odd restraint.

The effect on H&M is more interesting, though, and it’s not an effect that’s isolated to this one company. After the consumer boycotts began, the company issued a statement that didn’t mention forced labour or Xinjiang, but instead said ‘We are dedicated to regaining the trust and confidence of our customers, colleagues, and business partners in China  By working together with stakeholders and partners, we believe we can take steps in our joint efforts to develop the fashion industry, as well as serve our customers and act in a respectful way.’

It wouldn’t be surprising if Beijing interpreted this as showing that its coercion is working and that the example it has made of H&M reduces the likelihood of companies making operational decisions Beijing doesn’t like in response to the abuses the Chinese state is committing in Xinjiang.

A last illustration of Beijing’s Tiananmen calculation proving prescient and powerful comes from a candid interview that the CEO of Carlyle Group, Kewsong Lee, gave to Nikkei late May. This Washington-based investment firm has over US$260 billion in assets under management. Questioned about US–China strategic competition and the effect on his business, Lee simply said, ‘I think too many folks focus on headlines and are worried about the present moment when in light of the bigger picture of the trends of what’s happening, there’s just real opportunity.’

He was much more insightful about his company’s approach to Xi’s economic strategy of dual circulation—which is about growing China’s domestic economy to be less dependent on others, while also increasing other economies’ dependence on China.

It’s all opportunity, Lee said. ‘But increasingly I think what’s going to be more important in the future with the US–China drift is an appreciation to understand that China is at a place where local companies with local entrepreneurs can meet with Carlyle on a local level, partner together, and grow locally, and they can be fabulous investments.’

Interpreting these remarks, it seems this huge US investment firm plans to actively engage with Chinese partners in ways that will help Xi succeed in making China’s economy less dependent on the US and other economies more dependent on China’s.

An outcome Beijing seeks from this is to be more able to exercise increased economic leverage over others. And we know that Beijing already uses its economic power coercively—with companies and with whole sectors and nations like Australia.

I don’t think the Carlyle CEO is alone in this thinking. I’d be surprised if Xi doesn’t expect many boardrooms to help him out by thinking similarly, even when in the longer term it’s deeply against their business interests.

With the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre coming in the lead-up to the centenary of the CCP in July, though, I think it’s time to take stock and use government policy and regulation to reconnect businesses based in jurisdictions subject to coercive Chinese power to their nations’ strategic and security needs.

There are encouraging signs in things like the G7 statement on acting against states’ use of economic coercion and the Biden administration’s commitment to not reset US–China relations while Beijing is economically coercing US allies.

For Australia, a primary direction of this government–business partnership has to be pre-emptive diversification from the high levels of dependence on the single China market for our exports and on China as a source of imports—currently both at levels above the global average. Beijing’s coercion is helping this happen with our exports, but there’s equally important work to be done on imports.

The business community needs to be part of this story. It must not turn its face away with lines about shareholders and profits being the focus and not national security and strategy. As we see with Xi’s China, state interests have a way of getting in the middle of business interests.

What we need most from here is a rebuilding of the partnerships between governments and between government and industry to thrive in a world where Xi’s Tiananmen calculation turns out to be not just cynical, but wrong.