Tag Archive for: China

Producing policy-relevant China research and analysis in an era of strategic competition

This brief report explores the challenge of producing policy-relevant China research and analysis. Policy-relevant research is defined as work that drives action, affects decision-making, or both. It’s the kind of research think tanks seek to do, bridging the gap between academia and civil servants who work on policy.

This paper focuses on two key findings:

  1. There’s a distinction between conducting policy-relevant research and the process of disseminating it in a way that will effectively shape and influence the policy process in particular places by particular policy- and decision-makers. In practice, the difference between the two isn’t always clearly understood and perhaps not clearly taught.
  2. There’s limited training that prepares the China analytical community to deal with the challenges of producing policy-relevant research under conditions of restricted access to China. Researchers require more support in navigating the research environment and filling skill-set gaps.

Taking the low road: China’s influence in Australian states and territories

In November 2020 a Chinese official passed a list of 14 grievances to Australian journalists, highlighting what Beijing regarded as missteps in the Australian government’s relations with China. A striking feature of the list is that many concern Australian Government attempts to limit Chinese engagement with the states and territories, or state-based institutions such as universities.

Why did state and territory relations with China concern Canberra? This study explores the changing nature of China’s engagement with Australian states and territories, local governments, city councils, universities, research organisations and non-government organisations, all nested in Australian civil society. What emerges is the astonishing breadth and depth of China’s engagement, much of it the welcome outcome of Australia’s economic and people-to-people engagement with China over many decades. But it’s equally apparent that China has made covert attempts to influence some politicians and overt attempts to engage states, territories and key institutions in ways that challenge federal government prerogatives and have brought the two levels of government into sharp public dispute.

Here we provide a detailed analysis of how China has worked to build its political influence and build dependence through trade and economic ties with each Australian state and territory. In addition, unique cross-cutting chapters review the impact of Chinese engagement with Australian universities and show how Beijing’s ‘United front’ organisation is designed to build influence. We assess the impact on Australian businesses and the constitutional challenges presented by Chinese engagement with the states and territories.

The study methods and analytical approaches adopted in this book will be a model for similar research in many parts of the world. Understanding the nature of Chinese engagement with subnational jurisdictions is an important way for national governments to shape their security policies and to resist covert and, indeed, unwanted overt interference.

This book provides original insights into the scale of the challenge and distils practical policy recommendations for governments at all levels to consider and adopt.

Launch Webinar

#StopXinjiang Rumors

The CCP’s decentralised disinformation campaign

Introduction

This report analyses two Chinese state-linked networks seeking to influence discourse about Xinjiang across platforms including Twitter and YouTube. This activity targeted the Chinese-speaking diaspora as well as international audiences, sharing content in a variety of languages.

Both networks attempted to shape international perceptions about Xinjiang, among other themes. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denies committing human rights abuses in the region and has mounted multifaceted and multiplatform information campaigns to deny accusations of forced labour, mass detention, surveillance, sterilisation, cultural erasure and alleged genocide in the region. Those efforts have included using Western social media platforms to both push back against and undermine media reports, research and Uyghurs’ testimony about Xinjiang, as well as to promote alternative narratives.

In the datasets we examined, inauthentic and potentially automated accounts using a variety of image and video content shared content aimed at rebutting the evidence of human rights violations against the Uyghur population. Likewise, content was shared using fake Uyghur accounts and other shell accounts promoting video ‘testimonials’ from Uyghurs talking about their happy lives in China.

Our analysis includes two datasets removed by Twitter:

  • Dataset 1: ‘Xinjiang Online’ (CNHU) consisted of 2,046 accounts and 31,269 tweets.
  • Dataset 2: ‘Changyu Culture’ (CNCC) consisted of 112 accounts and 35,924 tweets.

The networks showed indications of being linked by theme and tactics; however, neither achieved significant organic engagement on Twitter overall—although there was notable interaction with the accounts of CCP diplomats. There were signs of old accounts being repurposed, whether purchased or stolen, and little attempt to craft authentic personas.

Twitter has attributed both datasets to the Chinese government, the latter dataset is specifically linked to a company called Changyu Culture, which is connected to the Xinjiang provincial government. This attribution was uncovered by ASPI ICPC in the report Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: the CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms.

Key takeaways

Different strands of CCP online and offline information operations now interweave to create an increasingly coordinated propaganda ecosystem made up of CCP officials, state and regional media assets, outsourced influence-for-hire operators, social media influencers and covert information operations.

  • The involvement of the CCP’s regional government in Xinjiang in international-facing disinformation suggests that internal party incentive structures are driving devolved strands of information operations activity.
  • The CCP deploys online disinformation campaigns to distract from international criticisms of its policies and to attempt to reframe concepts such as human rights. It aligns the timing of those campaigns to take advantage of moments of strategic opportunity in the information domain.

Notable features of these datasets include:

  • Flooding the zone: While the networks didn’t attract significant organic engagement, the volume of material shared could potentially aim to ‘bury’ critical content on platforms such as YouTube.
  • Multiple languages: There was use of English and other non-Chinese languages to target audiences in other countries, beyond the Chinese diaspora.
  • Promotion of ‘testimonials’ from Uyghurs: Both datasets, but particularly CNCC, shared video of Uyghurs discussing their ‘happy’ lives in Xinjiang and rebutting allegations of human rights abuses. Some of those videos have been linked to a production company connected to the Xinjiang provincial government.
  • Promotion of Western social media influencer content: The CNHU network retweeted and shared content from social media influencers that favoured CCP narratives on Xinjiang, including interviews between influencers and state media journalists.
  • Interaction between network accounts and the accounts of CCP officials: While the networks didn’t attract much organic engagement overall, there were some notable interactions with diplomats and state officials. For example, 48% of all retweets by the CNHU network were of CCP state media and diplomatic accounts.
  • Cross-platform activity: Both networks shared video from YouTube and Douyin (the Chinese mainland version of TikTok), including tourism content about Xinjiang, as well as links to state media articles.
  • Self-referential content creation: The networks promoted state media articles, tweets and other content featuring material created as part of influence operations, including Uyghur ‘testimonial’ videos. Similarly, tweets and content featuring foreign journalists and officials discussing Xinjiang were promoted as ‘organic’, but in some cases were likely to have been created as part of curated state-backed tours of the region.
  • Repurposed spam accounts: Accounts in the CNCC dataset tweeted about Korean television dramas as well as sharing spam and porn material before tweeting Xinjiang content.
  • Potential use of automation: Accounts in both datasets showed signs of automation, including coordinated posting activity, the use of four letter codes (in the CNHU dataset) and misused hashtag symbols (in the CNCC dataset).
  • Persistent account building: ASPI ICPC independently identified additional accounts on Twitter and YouTube that exhibited similar behaviours to those in the two datasets, suggesting that accounts continue to be built across platforms as others are suspended.

The Chinese party-state and influence campaigns

The Chinese party-state continues to experiment with approaches to shape online political discourse, particularly on those topics that have the potential to disrupt its strategic objectives. International criticism of systematic abuses of human rights in the Xinjiang region is a topic about which the CCP is acutely sensitive.

In the first half of 2020, ASPI ICPC analysis of large-scale information operations linked to the Chinese state found a shift of focus towards US domestic issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd (predominantly targeting Chinese-language audiences). This was the first marker of a shift in tactics since Twitter’s initial attribution of on-platform information operations to the Chinese state in 2019. The party-state’s online information operations were moving on from predominantly internal concerns and transitioning to assert the perception of moral equivalence between the CCP’s domestic policies in Xinjiang and human rights issues in democratic states, particularly the US. We see that effort to reframe international debate about human rights continuing in these most recent datasets. This shift also highlighted that CCP information operations deployed on US social media platforms could be increasingly entrepreneurial and agile in shifting focus to take advantage of strategic opportunities in the information domain.

The previous datasets that Twitter has released publicly through its information operations archive focused on a range of topics of broad interest to the CCP: the Hong Kong protests; the Taiwanese presidential election; the party-state’s Covid-19 recovery and vaccine diplomacy; and exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui and his relationship with former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. The datasets that we examine in this report are more specifically focused on the situation in Xinjiang and on attempts to showcase health and economic benefits of CCP policies to the Uyghur population and other minority groups in the region while overlooking and denying evidence of mass abuse. In both datasets, the emblematic #StopXinjiangRumors hashtag features prominently.

Traits in the data suggest that this operation may have been run at a more local level, including:

  • the amplification of regional news media, as well as Chinese state media outlets
  • the involvement of the Xinjiang-based company Changyu Culture and its relationship with the provincial government, which ASPI previously identified in Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: the CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms by linking social media channels to the company, and the company to a Xinjiang regional government contract
  • an ongoing attempt to communicate through the appropriation of Uyghur voices
  • the use of ready-made porn and Korean soap opera fan account networks on Twitter that were likely to have been compromised, purchased or otherwise acquired, and then repurposed.

The CCP is a complex system, and directives from its elite set the direction for the party organs and underlings to follow. Propaganda serves to mobilise and steer elements within the party structure, as well as to calibrate the tone of domestic and international messaging. The party’s own incentive structures may be a factor that helps us understand the potential regional origins of the propaganda effort that we analyse in this report, and have identified previously. The China Media Project notes, for example, that local party officials are assessed on the basis of their contribution to this international communication work. It’s a contribution to building Beijing’s ‘discourse power’ as well as showing obedience to Xi Jinping’s directions.

The data displays features of the online ecosystem that the party has been building to expand its international influence. The networks that we analysed engaged consistently with Chinese state media as well as with a number of stalwart pro-CCP influencers. One strand of activity within the data continues attempts to discredit the BBC that ASPI and Recorded Future have previously reported on, but the real focus of this campaign is an effort to reframe political discourse about the concept of human rights in Xinjiang.

The CNHU dataset, in particular, offers a series of rebuttals to international critiques of CCP policy in Xinjiang. As we’ve noted, the network was active on issues related to health, such as life expectancy and population growth. CCP policies in the region are framed as counterterrorism responses as a way of attempting to legitimise actions, while negative information and testimonies of abuse are simply denied or not reported. The accounts also seek to promote benefits from CCP policies in Xinjiang, such as offering education and vocational training. The BBC and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—the former having published reports about human rights abuses in the region, and the latter having criticised the party’s policies in the region—feature in the data in negative terms. This external focus on the BBC and Pompeo serves to reframe online discussion of Xinjiang and distract from the evidence of systematic abuse. For the CCP, both entities are sources of external threat, against which the party must mobilise.

Methodology

This analysis uses a quantitative analysis of Twitter data as well as qualitative analysis of tweet content.

In addition, it examines independently identified accounts and content on Twitter, YouTube and Douyin, among other platforms, that appear likely to be related to the network.

Both datasets include video media. That content was processed using SightGraph from AddAxis. SightGraph is a suite of artificial-intelligence and machine-learning capabilities for analysing inauthentic networks that disseminate disinformation. For this project, we used SightGraph to extract and autotranslate multilingual transcripts from video content. This facilitated extended phases of machine-learning-driven analysis to draw out ranked, meaningful linguistic data.

Likewise, images were processed using Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory’s PixPlot. PixPlot visualises a large image collection within an interactive WebGL scene. Each image was processed with an Inception convolutional neural network, trained on ImageNet 2012, and projected into a two-dimensional manifold with the UMAP algorithm such that similar images appear proximate to one another.

The combination of image and video analysis provided an overview of the narrative themes emerging from the media content related to the two Twitter datasets.

Twitter has identified the two datasets for quantitative analysis as being interlinked and associated via a combination of technical and behavioural signals. ICPC doesn’t have direct access to that non-public technical data. Twitter hasn’t released the methodology by which this dataset was selected, and the dataset may not represent a complete picture of Chinese state-linked information operations on Twitter.

The Twitter takedown data

This report analyses the content summarised in Table 1.

Table 1: Twitter dataset summaries

In both datasets, most of the tweeting activity seeking to deny human rights abuses in Xinjiang appears to have started around 2020. In the CNHU dataset, accounts appear to have been created for the purpose of disseminating Xinjiang-related material and began tweeting in April 2019 before ramping up activity in January 2021. That spike in activity aligns with the coordinated targeting of efforts to discredit the BBC that ASPI has previously identified. While some accounts in the CNCC dataset may have originally had a commercial utility, they were probably repurposed some time before 19 June 2020 (the date of the first tweet mentioning Xinjiang and Uyghurs in the dataset) and shifted to posting Xinjiang-related content. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave his attention-grabbing anti-CCP speech in July 2020, and criticism of him features significantly in both datasets.

Previous ASPI analysis identified Twitter spambot network activity in December 2019 to amplify articles published by the CCP’s People’s Daily tabloid, the Global Times (figures 1 and 2). The articles that were boosted denied the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and attacked the credibility of individuals such as Mike Pompeo and media organisations such as the New York Times. It isn’t clear whether that network was connected to the CNHU and CNCC datasets, but similar behaviours were identified.

Figure 1: Tweets per month, coloured by tweet language, in CNHU dataset

Figure 2: Tweets per month, coloured by tweet language, in CNCC dataset[fig2]

An overview of the tweet text in both datasets shows that topics such as ‘Xinjiang’, ‘BBC’, ‘Pompeo’ and ‘Uyghur’ were common to both campaigns (Figure 3). While there were some tweets mentioning ‘Hong Kong’, specifically about the Covid-19 response in that region, this report focuses on content targeting Xinjiang-related issues.

Figure 3: Topic summary of tweet text posted between December 2019 and May 2021

In early 2021, the #StopXinjiangRumors hashtag was boosted by both networks. Accounts in the CNHU dataset were the first to use the hashtag, and many accounts potentially mistakenly used double hashtags (‘##StopXinjiangRumors’). Accounts in the CNCC dataset that were batch created in February 2021 appear to have posted tweets using the hashtag and tagged ‘Pompeo’ following the tweets posted by accounts in the CNHU dataset. The use of the hashtags may be coincidental, but the similarity of timing and narratives suggests some degree of coordination. #StopXinjiangRumors continues to be a hashtag on Twitter (as well as YouTube and Facebook).

The rest of this report presents the key insights from the two datasets in detail.
 

Dataset 1: CNHU

Dataset 1: CNHU – Key points

  • Nearly one in every two tweets (41%) contained either an image or a video. There were in total 12,400 images and 466 videos in the CNHU dataset.
  • This video and image content was aimed broadly at pushing back against allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, particularly by presenting video footage of ‘happy’ Uyghurs participating in vocational training in Xinjiang, as well as screenshots of state media and government events promoting this content.
  • The network promoted phrases commonly used in CCP propaganda about Xinjiang, such as ‘Xinjiang is a wonderful land’ (新疆是个好地方)—the eighth most retweeted hashtag in the CNHU dataset.
  • In total, 48% (1,308) of all retweets by the network were of CCP state media and diplomatic accounts. The Global Times News account was the most retweeted (287), followed by the account of Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesperson Hua Chunying (华春莹) (108).
  • While the network shared links to state media, YouTube and Facebook, many videos shared in the CNHU dataset appeared to have originated from Douyin.
  • The network worked to promote state media. Of all the tweets, 35% had links to external websites—mostly to Chinese state media outlets such as the China Daily, the China Global Television Network (CGTN) and the Global Times.
  • The network showed potential indicators of automation, including coordinated posting, the appearance of randomised four-letter digit codes in some tweets, and watermarked images.
  • The network tweeted and shared content in a variety of languages, including using Arabic and French hashtags, suggesting that it was targeting a broad audience.

Dataset 2: CNCC

Dataset 2: CNCC – Key points

  • The CNCC dataset contained a considerable amount of repurposed spam and porn accounts, as well as content linked to Korean music and television.
  • While there was a small amount of content about Hong Kong and other issues, most of the non-spam content related to Xinjiang. Much of that content sought to present ‘testimonials’ from Uyghurs talking about their happy lives in China.
  • Some of this content may be linked to a company called Changyu Culture, which is connected to the Xinjiang provincial government and was funded to create videos depicting Uyghurs as supportive of the Chinese Government’s policies in Xinjiang.
  • The network had a particular focus on former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: @蓬佩奥 or @‘Pompeo’ appears 438 times in the dataset. Likewise, video content shared by the network referenced Pompeo 386 times.

Download Report & Dataset Analysis

Readers are encouraged to download the report to access the full dataset analysis.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the team at Twitter for advanced access to the two data sets analysed in this report, Fergus Hanson and Michael Shoebridge for review comments, and AddAxis for assistance applying AI in the analysis. ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre receives funding from a variety of sources, including sponsorship, research and project support from governments, industry and civil society. No specific funding was received to fund the production of this report.

What is ASPI?

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute was formed in 2001 as an independent, non‑partisan think tank. Its core aim is to provide the Australian Government with fresh ideas on Australia’s defence, security and strategic policy choices. ASPI is responsible for informing the public on a range of strategic issues, generating new thinking for government and harnessing strategic thinking internationally.
ASPI’s sources of funding are identified in our annual report, online at www.aspi.org.au and in the acknowledgements section of individual publications. ASPI remains independent in the content of the research and in all editorial judgements.

ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre

ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) is a leading voice in global debates on cyber, emerging and critical technologies, issues related to information and foreign interference and focuses on the impact these issues have on broader strategic policy. The centre has a growing mixture of expertise and skills with teams of researchers who concentrate on policy, technical analysis, information operations and disinformation, critical and emerging technologies, cyber capacity building, satellite analysis, surveillance and China-related issues.

The ICPC informs public debate in the Indo-Pacific region and supports public policy development by producing original, empirical, data-driven research. The ICPC enriches regional debates by collaborating with research institutes from around the world and by bringing leading global experts to Australia, including through fellowships. To develop capability in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region, the ICPC has a capacity building team that conducts workshops, training programs and large-scale exercises for the public and private sectors.
We would like to thank all of those who support and contribute to the ICPC with their time, intellect and passion for the topics we work on. If you would like to support the work of the centre please contact: icpc@aspi.org.au.

Important disclaimer

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.

© The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Limited 2021

This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers. Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.

First published December 2021. ISSN 2209-9689 (online). ISSN 2209-9670 (print).

Cover image: Illustration by Wes Mountain. ASPI ICPC and Wes Mountain allow this image to be republished under the Creative Commons.
License Attribution-Share Alike. Users of the image should use the following sentence for image attribution: ‘Illustration by Wes Mountain, commissioned by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre.’

Funding Statement: No specific funding was received to fund production of this report.

China’s cyber vision: How the Cyberspace Administration of China is building a new consensus on global internet governance

This report provides a primer on the roots of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) within China’s policy system, and sheds light on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) intentions to use cyberspace as a tool for shaping discourse domestically and internationally.

The report details the position of the Cyberspace Administration of China in China’s propaganda system. Considering its origins in the former Party Office of External Propaganda, the authors argue that ‘countries that lack comprehensive cyber regulations should err on the side of caution when engaging with the CCP on ideas for establishing an international cyber co-governance strategy.’

By assessing the CCP’s strategy of becoming a ‘cyber superpower’, its principle of ‘internet sovereignty’, and its concept of ‘community of common destiny for cyberspace’, this report seeks to address how the CCP is working to build a consensus on the future of who will set the rules, norms and values of the internet.

The report also examines the World Internet Conference – a ‘platform through which the CCP promotes its ideas on internet sovereignty and global governance’ – and its links to the CAC.

Translated versions of this report are also available in Indonesian, Malaysian, Thai, and Vietnamese.
The translation of these reports has been supported by the U.S. State Department.

The architecture of repression

Unpacking Xinjiang’s governance

This report is a part of a larger online project which can be found on the Xinjiang Data Project website.

What’s the problem?

Since the mass internment of Uyghurs and other indigenous groups1 in China was first reported in 2017, there is now a rich body of literature documenting recent human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.2 However, there is little knowledge of the actual perpetrators inside China’s vast and opaque party-state system, and responsibility is often broadly attributed to the Chinese Communist Party,3 Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo,4 or President Xi Jinping himself.5

For accountability, it is necessary to investigate how China’s campaign against the Uyghurs has been implemented and which offices and individuals have played a leading part. The current knowledge gap has exposed international companies and organisations to inadvertent engagement with Chinese officials who have facilitated the atrocities in Xinjiang. It has also prevented foreign governments from making targeted policy responses.

Finally, it is essential to carry out such an investigation now. Amid debate internationally about whether the recent events in Xinjiang constitute genocide,6 Chinese officials are actively scrubbing relevant evidence and seeking to silence those who speak out.7

Figure 1: A ‘resist infiltration, snatch the two-faced’ mass oath for school teachers in Hotan Prefecture in 2017. Many women are visibly crying.

Source: ‘Ten thousand teachers in Hotan Prefecture take part in ‘speak up and brandish the sword’ mass oath in Keriye County’ [和田地区万名教师集体发 声亮剑宣讲宣誓大会在于田举行], Keriye County official WeChat account [于田零距离], 16 June 2017, online.

What’s the solution?

This project maps and analyses the governance mechanisms employed by the Chinese party-state in Xinjiang from 2014 to 2021 within the context of the region’s ongoing human rights crisis. To that end, the authors have located and scrutinised thousands of Chinese-language sources,8 including leaked police records9 and government budget documents never before published. This archive of sources is made publicly available for the use of others.

For policymakers, this report will provide an evidence base to inform policy responses including possible sanctions. For the general public and anyone whose interests are linked to Xinjiang and China more broadly, this project can inform risk analysis and ethical considerations.

Finally, a detailed understanding of Xinjiang’s governance structures and processes and their relationship to wider national policies can contribute to a more concrete understanding of the Chinese party-state and its volatility.

Figure 2: American brand Nike was implicated in Xinjiang’s coercive labour transfer schemes. Uyghurs transferred from Xinjiang receive Chinese language and indoctrination classes at Nike’s contractor Taekwang factory in Qingdao, Shandong, around June 2019.

Source: ‘Municipal United Front Work Department conducts Mandarin training at Qingdao Taekwang “Pomegranate Seed” Night School’ [市委统战部’石榴
籽’夜校 走进青岛泰光举办普通话培训班], Laixi United Front official WeChat account [莱西统一战线], 1 July 2019, online.

Executive Summary

The project consists of two parts.

  • An interactive organisational chart of some 170 administrative entities that have participated in Xinjiang’s governance since 2014. The chart includes a brief profile of each party, government, military, paramilitary and hybrid entity at different bureaucratic layers, and more.10
  • This report, which highlights the governance techniques and bureaucratic structures that have operationalised the Chinese party-state’s most recent campaigns against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

The report is structured as follows.

Section 1: Background

This section is an introduction to the 2014 Counterterrorism Campaign and the 2017 Re-education Campaign in Xinjiang, which represent a top-down response to the perceived radicalisation of Uyghur society and a systematic effort to transform Xinjiang and its indigenous inhabitants.

Section 2: The return of mass campaigns

The crackdown against the Uyghurs has a striking resemblance to Mao-era political campaigns. ASPI can reveal that, in addition to mass internment and coercive labour assignments, Xinjiang residents are also compelled to participate in acts of political theatre, such as mass show trials, public denunciation sessions, loyalty pledges, sermon-like ‘propaganda lectures’, and chants for Xi Jinping’s good health. In doing so, they’re mobilised to attack shadowy enemies hiding among the people: the so-called ‘three evil forces’ and ‘two-faced people’.

Despite widespread recognition that mass political campaigns are ‘costly and burdensome’, in the words of Xi Jinping, the party-state has again resorted to them in Xinjiang. This section analyses the party-state’s reflexive compulsion for campaigns, and campaign-style governance, which is an intrinsic feature of the Chinese political system that’s often overlooked in the current English-language literature.

Section 3: Hegemony at the grassroots

ASPI researchers have gained rare and in-depth insights into Xinjiang’s local governance after analysing thousands of pages of leaked police files. This section focuses on the case of one Uyghur family in Ürümqi. Like at least 1.8 million other Uyghurs, Anayit Abliz, then 18, was caught using a file-sharing app in 2017. He was interned in a re-education camp and eventually ‘sentenced’ by his Neighbourhood Committee—a nominally service-oriented voluntary organisation responsible for local party control.

While he was detained, officials from the Neighbourhood Committee visited his family members six times in a single week, scrutinizing the family’s behaviours and observing whether they were emotionally stable.

Draconian control measures are typical of mass political campaigns, including those in Xinjiang.

During the crackdown against the Uyghurs, authorities implemented five key policies (including the ‘Trinity’ mechanism, which is first reported by ASPI here) that led to the unprecedented penetration of the party-state system into the daily lives of Xinjiang residents. Those policies gave Xinjiang’s neighbourhood and village officials exceptional power to police residents’ movements and emotions, resulting in the disturbing situation in which a Uyghur teenager’s social media posts about finding life hopeless were deemed a threat to stability and triggered police action.

Xinjiang’s community-based control mechanisms are part of a national push to enhance grassroots governance, which seeks to mobilise the masses to help stamp out dissent and instability and to increase the party’s domination in the lowest reaches of society.

Section 4: The party’s knife handle

Many Uyghurs become suspects after being flagged by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), which is a ‘system of systems’ where officials communicate and millions of investigations are assigned for local follow-up.

ASPI can reveal that the IJOP11 is managed by Xinjiang’s Political and Legal Affairs Commission (PLAC) through a powerful new organ called the Counterterrorism and Stability Maintenance Command,12 which is a product of the Re-education Campaign. One source states that a local branch of the command monitors the re-education camps remotely.

The PLAC is a party organ that oversees China’s law-and-order system, which is responsible for Xinjiang’s mass detention system. The PLAC’s influence tends to grow during times of mass campaigns, and the budget and responsibilities of the Xinjiang PLAC have expanded significantly in recent years— despite efforts by Xi Jinping to abate its status nationally. Two other factors may have contributed to the PLAC’s predominance in Xinjiang: its control over powerful surveillance technologies employed during the two campaigns, and a 2010 governance model in Ürümqi called ‘the big PLAC’, which was masterminded by Zhu Hailun, who is considered by some to be the architect of the re-education camp system.

Section 5: Weaponising the law

Law enforcement in Xinjiang is hasty, harsh and frequently arbitrary. Senior officials have promulgated new laws and regulations that contradict existing ones in order to accomplish the goals and targets of the campaigns; on the ground, local officers openly boast about acting outside normal legal processes, and their voices are sometimes amplified by state media. ASPI has found evidence that some neighbourhood officials in Ürümqi threatened to detain whole families in an attempt to forcefully evict them from the area.

Many Uyghurs have been detained for cultural or religious expressions, but police records reveal that low-level officials have also interned Xinjiang residents for appearing to be ‘dissatisfied with society’ or lacking a fixed address or stable income. In one case, Uyghur man Ekrem Imin was detained because his ‘neighbourhood police officer was trying to fill quotas’. As reported by Ürümqi police, he then contracted hepatitis B (which went untreated) as well as syphilis inside Xinjiang’s, and China’s biggest detention facility.13 This raises further questions about the conditions inside Xinjiang’s re-education facilities.

Efforts to weaponise the law in Xinjiang mirror wider legal reforms under Xi Jinping, where previous ideals about procedural accountability and judicial independence have been cast aside and the law is now openly used to tighten the party’s grip over society and eliminate social opposition.

Section 6: The frontline commanders

County party secretaries are the most senior officials at the local level in China, and their role is crucial to the regime’s survival, according to Xi Jinping. In Xinjiang, they oversee the day-to-day operations of the two campaigns. Researchers at ASPI have compiled a dataset of Xinjiang’s county party secretaries over the past seven years and found that the vast majority of these ‘frontline commanders’ are Han.

At the time of writing (September 2021), not a single county party secretary in Xinjiang is Uyghur, which speaks to the erasure of once-promised ethnic self-rule, and to deeply entrenched racism at the heart of the Han-dominated party-state system.

This section profiles three of the most celebrated county party secretaries in Xinjiang. Yao Ning, a darling of the Chinese media for his elite academic background at Tsinghua and Harvard universities.

Claiming absolute loyalty to the party-state from a young age, Yao now sits at the top of a chain of command over nine newly built or expanded detention facilities in Maralbeshi County.14 He has struggled with mounting pressure and the death of a close colleague due to exhaustion, but finds solace in quotes by both Mao and Xi.

Yang Fasen, who pioneered new governance tools during the campaigns, was recently promoted to vice governor of Xinjiang. His innovative propaganda templates—that the authorities dubbed the ‘Bay County Experience’—were copied by other counties in Xinjiang during the Counterterrorism Campaign. During a 2015 speech in front of Xi Jinping in Beijing, Yang claimed that subjecting undereducated Uyghur youth to labour reform (a practice that became commonplace later in the Re-education Campaign) can improve social stability.

Both Yao Ning and Yang Fasen are from the majority ethnic group in China, the Han. The third profile is of Obulqasim Mettursun, a Uyghur official, who like most Uyghurs serve in a deputy position under a Han overseer. He went viral after penning an open letter pleading with fellow Uyghurs to ‘wake up’ and actively participate in the party-state’s stability maintenance efforts. He represents an ideologically captured and dependent class of Uyghur officials committed to serving the party in largely ceremonial roles.

Section 7: ‘There is no department that doesn’t have something to do with stability’

During Xinjiang’s two campaigns, few offices or officials can escape the political responsibility of ‘stability maintenance’ work. At times, repressive policies have been carried out by the most innocent-sounding, obscure government agencies, such as the Forestry Bureau, which looked after Kashgar City’s re-education camp accounts for a year.

The final section highlights the astounding number of offices involved in key aspects of the Chinese party-state’s crackdown in Xinjiang: propaganda, re-education, at-home surveillance and indoctrination, forced labour and population control. Extra emphasis has been placed on propaganda as it has been the least reported aspect of the two campaigns, albeit highly important.

In Xinjiang, re-education work not only occurs in so-called ‘vocational education and training centres’, but is also front and centre in everyday life, as the party-state seeks to alter how people act and speak. Through more than seven years of intense propaganda work, Uyghurs and other indigenous groups now find themselves being assigned fictional Han relatives, and being taught how to dress and maintain their homes;15 their courtyards are ‘modernised’ and ‘beautified’16 while their ancient tombs and mosques are destroyed.17

Section 8: Conclusion

Xinjiang’s bureaucratic inner workings reflect a wider pattern of authoritarian rule in China. In fact, some governance techniques used in Xinjiang during the two campaigns were conceived elsewhere, and Xinjiang’s ‘stability maintenance’ tools are increasingly replicated by other Chinese provinces and regions including Hong Kong. Further research should be conducted on campaign-style governance in China in general, and its policy implications. Further studies on the cycle of collective trauma through China’s recurring campaigns may also be timely, taking into consideration that many senior Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping and Zhu Hailun, claimed that their personal experiences of being ‘re-educated’ through hard labour have been transformative.

Appendixes

ASPI researchers have curated three appendixes of key Xinjiang officials who have served in party, government, military, or paramilitary roles at the regional, prefecture and county levels from 2014 to 2021. In the sixth section of this report, the frontline commanders, the authors used the third appendix — the names and basic information about Xinjiang’s more than 440 county party secretaries over the last seven years — to generate data for analysis and visualisation. The appendixes have not been published but we will consider requests to access this research.

Download the full report

Readers are encouraged to download the full report.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank researchers Emile Dirks, Aston Kwok, Kate Wong, Nyrola Elima, Nathan Ruser and Kelsey Munro for their invaluable contributions to this project, and Fergus Hanson and Danielle Cave for their guidance and support.

Thank you to peer reviewers who provided excellent feedback, including Darren Byler, Timothy Grose, Sam Tynen, Samantha Hoffman, Peter Mattis, Michael Shoebridge and Edward Schwarck. Thank you also to Yael Grauer, who shared access to the Ürümqi Police Records. The opinions and analysis presented in this report are those of the authors alone, who are also responsible for any errors or omissions. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office provided ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) with a grant of A$116,770 for this project, of which this report is a key output. Other components of the project can be found at the Xinjiang Data Project website: https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/. Additional research costs were covered from ASPI ICPC’s mixed revenue base—which spans governments, industry and civil society. This project would not have been possible without 2020–21 funding from the US State Department, which supports the Xinjiang Data Project.

What is ASPI?

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute was formed in 2001 as an independent, non‑partisan think tank. Its core aim is to provide the Australian Government with fresh ideas on Australia’s defence, security and strategic policy choices. ASPI is responsible for informing the public on a range of strategic issues, generating new thinking for government and harnessing strategic thinking internationally. ASPI’s sources of funding are identified in our annual report, online at www.aspi.org.au and in the acknowledgements section of individual publications. ASPI remains independent in the content of the research and in all editorial judgements.

ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre

ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) is a leading voice in global debates on cyber, emerging and critical technologies, issues related to information and foreign interference and focuses on the impact these issues have on broader strategic policy. The centre has a growing mixture of expertise and skills with teams of researchers who concentrate on policy, technical analysis, information operations and disinformation, critical and emerging technologies, cyber capacity building, satellite analysis, surveillance and China-related issues. The ICPC informs public debate in the Indo-Pacific region and supports public policy development by producing original, empirical, data-driven research. The ICPC enriches regional debates by collaborating with research institutes from around the world and by bringing leading global experts to Australia, including through fellowships. To develop capability in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region, the ICPC has a capacity building team that conducts workshops, training programs and large-scale exercises for the public and private sectors. We would like to thank all of those who support and contribute to the ICPC with their time, intellect and passion for the topics we work on. If you would like to support the work of the centre please contact: icpc@aspi.org.au

Important disclaimer

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.

© The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Limited 2021

This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers. Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.

First published October 2021. ISSN 2209-9689 (online). ISSN 2209-9670 (print)

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Funding Statement: This project was in part funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

  1. The Chinese party-state officially recognises 56 minzu (民族) groups in China: a single Han majority and 55 numerically much smaller groups that currently make up nearly 9% of China’s population. The term minzu is deeply polysemic and notoriously difficult to translate. Depending on the context of its use, the term can connote concepts similar to ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘people’ and ‘ethnicity’ in English. Party officials initially used the English term ‘nationality’ to render the term into English. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party gradually pivoted away from nationality, preferring the term ‘ethnic minorities’ for the non-Han groups and reserving the term ‘nation’ for the collective identity and name of the ‘Chinese nation-race’ (中华民族). See James Leibold, ‘The minzu net: China’s fragmented national form,’ Nations and Nationalism, 2016, 22(3):425–428. While party officials reject any assertion of indigeneity in China, Harvard historian Mark Elliott argues that China’s non-Han peoples are better thought of as indigenous communities rather than as ‘ethnic minorities’, which is a term widely used to refer to migrant populations in places such Canada or Australia, as these groups ‘continue to live on lands to which they have reasonably strong ancestral claims; in their encounter with the majority Other, all of them assume the status of “natives” vis-a-vis the representatives of a central (often formerly colonial or quasi-colonial) government from the outside; and all of them find themselves in positions of relative weakness as a result of an asymmetrical power structure, often the consequence of technological inferiority.’ Mark Elliott, ‘The case of the missing indigene: debate over a “second- generation” ethnic policy’, The China Journal, 2015, 73:207, online. Throughout this report and our website, we’ve used the terms ‘indigenous’, ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘nationality’ interchangeably to gloss the term minzu, depending on the context. When we refer to the Uyghurs generically, we’re also referring to other Turkic communities in Xinjiang: the Kazakhs, Tajiks, Kyrgyzs and Uzbeks who have also been targeted in China’s crackdown in Xinjiang. ↩︎
  2. For two online repositories of this now vast literature see The Xinjiang Data Project, ASPI, Canberra, online, and The Xinjiang Documentation Project, University of British Columbia, online. ↩︎
  3. ‘China: Crimes against humanity in Xinjiang: Mass detention, torture, cultural persecution of Uyghurs, other Turkic Muslims’, Human Rights Watch, 19 April 2021, online; Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Myunghee Lee, Emir Yazici, ‘Counterterrorism and preventive repression: China’s changing strategy in Xinjiang’, International Security, Winter 2019–20, 44(3), online. ↩︎
  4. ‘“Eradicating ideological viruses”—China’s campaign of repression against Xinjiang’s Muslims’, Human Rights Watch, 9 September 2018, online; Chun Hang Wong, ‘China’s hard edge: the leader of Beijing’s Muslim crackdown gains influence’, The Wall Street Journal, 7 April 2019, online; Adrian Zenz, James Leibold, ‘Chen Quanguo: The strongman behind Beijing’s securitization strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang’, China Brief, 21 September 2017, 17(12), online. ↩︎
  5. James Leibold, ‘The spectre of insecurity: the CCP’s mass internment strategy in Xinjiang’, China Leadership Monitor, 1 March 2019, online; Austin Ramzy, Chris Buckley, ‘“Absolutely no mercy”: Leaked files expose how China organised mass detentions of Muslims’, The New York Times, 16 November 2019, online; Adrian Zenz, ‘Evidence of the Chinese central government’s knowledge of and involvement in Xinjiang’s re-education internment campaign’, China Brief, 14 September 2021, online. ↩︎
  6. Martin S Flaherty, ‘Repression by any other name: Xinjiang and the genocide debate’, The Diplomat, 3 August 2021, online; James Leibold, ‘Beyond Xinjiang: Xi Jinping’s ethnic crackdown’, The Diplomat, 1 May 2021, online; Joanne Smith Finley, ‘Why scholars and activists increasingly fear a Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2021, 23(3):348–370. ↩︎
  7. Lily Kuo, Gerry Shih, ‘China researchers face abuse, sanctions as Beijing looks to silence critics’, Washington Post, 7 April 2021, online; ‘China scrubs evidence of Xinjiang clampdown amid “genocide” debate’, The Washington Post, 17 March 2021, online; Rebecca Wright, Ivan Watson, ‘She tweeted from Sweden about the plight of her Uyghur cousin. In Xinjiang, the authorities were watching’, CNN, 17 December 2020, online. ↩︎
  8. These sources include English and Chinese-language academic papers, local media reports and official party and state documents. ↩︎
  9. The Ürümqi Police Records were provided to ASPI by journalist Yael Grauer, who wrote for The Intercept about the database, and has since left the outlet. See Yael Grauer, ‘Revealed: Massive Chinese police database’, The Intercept, 29 January 2021, online. ↩︎
  10. It also walks the viewer through the offices involved in several key aspects of the crackdown against Uyghurs: propaganda, re-education, Fanghuiju, forced labour and population control. The chart isn’t meant to be a comprehensive picture of the vast Chinese bureaucracy but rather an illustrative snapshot of the different levels of the Chinese bureaucracy that played an active role in designing, coordinating or implementing the party’s policies in Xinjiang, from the central level in Beijing to the villages and neighbourhoods in Xinjiang. ↩︎
  11. Integrated Joint Operations Platform [一体化联合作战平台]. ↩︎
  12. Counterterrorism and Stability Maintenance Command [反恐维稳指挥部]. ↩︎
  13. This case was first publicised by the Xinjiang Victims Database (@shaitbiz), ‘Some months ago, XJ officials told visiting journalists that the Dabancheng facility in Ürümqi was never a camp [Tweet]’, Twitter, 27 August 2019, online. The Associated Press reported that the detention centre was the largest in the world. See Dake Kang, ‘Room for 10,000:
    Inside China’s largest detention center’, The Associated Press, 1 December 2018, online. ↩︎
  14. See the map and dataset at The Xinjiang Data Project, ASPI, Canberra, online. ↩︎
  15. ‘“Home School” Initiative enters village households, “beautifying” the lives of villagers’ [“家庭学校”进农户活动让村民生活“靓”起来], Qingfeng Net [清风网], 20 November 2019, online. ↩︎
  16. Timothy A. Grose, ‘If you don’t know how, just learn’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 06 July 2020, online. ↩︎
  17. Nathan Ruser, ‘Cultural erasure: Tracing the destruction of Uyghur and Islamic spaces in Xinjiang’, ASPI, Canberra, 24 September 2020, online. ↩︎

Economic coercion in Indo-Pacific island states: Building resilience

Indo-Pacific island states face diverse challenges as they grapple with their own unique vulnerabilities to the geopolitical consequences of growing strategic competition in the region. This report explores the vulnerability of island states to economic coercion and the risks they face in navigating the growing economic power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

In this report, the authors examine four perceived examples of economic coercion within the region that challenge the Quad’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific. China’s increasing interest in the island states of the Indo-Pacific has led to concern that the imbalance in those relationships is so large that both domestic and broader regional stability are at risk.

This report offers a number of policy recommendations to protect Indo-Pacific island states from economic coercion, including:

  • Island states must be better invested in the rules-based international economic order;
  • Establishing codes of conduct to limit economic duress, limit undue economic influence and strengthen the rules-based international system;
  • Strengthening government institutions so they can resist economic coercion;
  • International partners should work with Indo-Pacific island states to help strengthen the ability of local businesses to take collective action against economic coercion.

Iron ore futures: possible paths for Australia’s biggest trade with China

The iron ore market is wrong-footing forecasters again, as it has throughout the last 20 years. Nobody expected the iron ore price to surpass US$200 a tonne as it did in May and no one predicted it would then plunge to less than US$100 as it has this week.

This report argues that Australia’s troubled relationship with China will be influenced by which path the iron ore market takes over the medium term.

China’s authorities are determined to reduce their dependence on Australian iron ore, both by seeking alternative supplies and by capping their steel production.

However, China has been trying and failing to curb its steel production for the past five years, with many local governments ignoring central orders. In just the first six months of this year, 18 new blast furnaces capable of producing as much steel as Germany’s entire output were approved.

Although China will never be able to rid itself entirely of the need for Australian supplies, this report warns that if an iron ore glut emerges, whether by Chinese government design or because of an economic downturn, the commodity may join the list of other Australian exports subject to Chinese coercion.

The report also highlights that the effort to reduce its dependence on Australia will come at considerable cost to China. Australia is by far the cheapest and closest source of high-quality iron ore for China’s mills.

An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001-2021

To mark its establishment in August 2001, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has published an intellectual history of its work over two decades: An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021.

ASPI’s mission is to ‘contribute an informed and independent voice to public discussion’. That was the vision embraced by the Australian Government in creating ‘an independent institute to study strategic policy’, designed to bring ‘contestability’ and ‘alternative sources of advice’ to ‘key strategic and defence policy issues’.

The story of how the institute did that job is told by ASPI’s journalist fellow, Graeme Dobell. He writes that ASPI has lived out what its name demands, to help deliver what Australia needs in imagining ends, shaping ways and selecting means.

An informed and independent voice covers the terrorism era and national security; the work of the Defence Department; Australia’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the evolution of Australia’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific; relations with China and the US; cyber and tech; Japan, India and the Quad; Indonesia and Southeast Asia; Australia’s island arc—the the South Pacific and Timor-Leste; Northern Australia; Women, peace and security; Climate change; Antarctica; 1.5 track dialogues; the work of the digital magazine The Strategist; and ‘thinking the ASPI way’.

The submission to cabinet on ASPI’s founding said that the principles of contestability had ‘not yet been effectively implemented in relation to defence and strategic policy, despite the vital national interests and significant sums of money that are at stake’. That demand, at the heart of the institute’s creation, has been met and still drives its work.

Introduction: sometimes we will annoy you

A senior diplomat from one of Australia’s close ‘Old Commonwealth’ partners tells a story about hosting an Australian visit from his country’s defence minister, an aspiring political operator. The minister came to ASPI for a 90-minute roundtable with senior staff. Mark Thomson briefed on Defence’s budget woes—this was one of those years when financial squeezing was the order of the day, and a gap was quietly appearing between policy promises and funding reality.

Andrew Davies reported on the challenges of delivering the Joint Strike Fighter, the contentious arrival of the ‘stop-gap’ Super Hornet and the awkward non-arrival of the future submarine. Rod Lyon spoke about the insurmountable problems of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and our own government’s foreign policy foibles. It was, like many ASPI meetings, a lively and sustained critique of policy settings. Driving back to the High Commission, a somewhat startled minister muttered to his diplomatic escort: ‘Thank God we don’t have a think tank like that back home!’

The genius of ASPI is that it’s designed to be a charming disrupter. Sufficiently inside the policy tent to understand the gritty guts of policy problems, but with a remit to be the challenger of orthodoxies, the provider of different policy dreams (as long as they’re costed and deliverable), the plain-speaking explainer of complexity, and a teller of truth to power. Well, that’s perhaps a little too grand. ASPI aims to be a helpful partner to the national security community, not a hectoring lecturer. But the institute ceases to have any value if it just endorses current policy settings: the aim is to provide ‘contestability of policy advice’. Not always easy in a town where climbing the policy ladder is the only game.

The story of ASPI’s creation has been told by several present at the creation1 and, very enjoyably, by Graeme Dobell in the second chapter in this volume. With the release of the Howard government cabinet records for the year 2000, we now get to see that the National Security Committee of cabinet deliberated carefully over ASPI’s composition, charter, organisational location, geographical location and underlying purpose. The annual expenditure proposed ($2.1 million) was, by Defence’s standards, trivial even in 2000. What the government was chewing over was the sense or otherwise of injecting a new institution into the Canberra policymaking environment.

The case for a strategic policy institute was set out in a cabinet submission considered on 18 April 2000:

There are two key reasons to establish an independent institute to study strategic policy.

The first is to encourage development of alternative sources of advice to Government on key strategic and defence policy issues. The principles of contestability have been central to our Government’s philosophy and practice of public administration, but 2 An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021 these principles have not been effectively implemented in relation to defence and strategic policy, despite the vital national interests and significant sums of money that are at stake. The Government has found in relation to the COLLINS Class Submarines project for instance, and more recently in relation to White Paper process, that there are almost no sources of alternative information or analysis on key issues in defence policy, including the critical questions of our capability needs and how they can best be satisfied. The ASPI will be charged with providing an alternative source of expertise on such issues.

Second, public debate of defence policy is inhibited by a poor understanding of the choices and issues involved. The ASPI will be tasked to contribute an informed and independent voice to public discussion on these issues.2

‘An informed and independent voice’. There couldn’t be a better description of what the institute has sought to bring to the public debate; nor could there be a more fitting title for this study of ASPI’s first 20 years by Graeme Dobell, ably assisted by the voices and insights of many ASPI colleagues.

The April cabinet meeting agreed that ASPI should be established, but the government went back to Defence a second time to test thinking about the institute’s organisational structure.

In July, the department proposed several options, including that ASPI could be added as an ‘internal Defence Strategic Policy Cell’, or operate as an independent advisory board to the Minister for Defence, or be based at a university, or be a statutory authority, executive agency or incorporated company. Having considered other possibilities, the government accepted Defence’s recommendation (endorsed by other departments) that ASPI be established as a government-owned incorporated company managed by a board ‘to enhance the institute’s independence within a robust and easy to administer corporate structure’.3

The most striking aspect of this decision is that the government opted for the model that gave ASPI the greatest level of independence. There were options that would have limited the proposed new entity, for example, by making it internal to Defence or adding more complex governance mechanisms that might have threatened the perception of independence. Those options were rejected. A decision to invite a potential critic to the table is the decision of a mature and confident government. It’s perhaps not surprising that there aren’t many ASPI-like entities. Prime Minister Howard was also keen to see that the institute would last beyond a change of government. ASPI was directed to be ‘non-partisan’, above daily politics. The leader of the opposition would be able to nominate a representative to the ASPI Council. ASPI would also be given a remit to ‘pursue alternate sources of funding and growth’, giving the institute the chance to outgrow its Defence crib.

Interestingly, the August 2000 cabinet decision to establish ASPI as a stand-alone centre structured as an incorporated company and managed by a board of directors also stated that: ‘The Cabinet expressed a disposition to establish the centre outside of the Australian Capital Territory.’4 By the time ASPI was registered in August 2001 as an Australian public company limited by guarantee, the institute’s offices were located in Barton in the ACT, where they remain to this day.

The government appointed Robert O’Neill AO as the chair of the ASPI Council, and the inaugural membership of the council was appointed in July 2001, meeting for the first time on 29 August 2001. That month, the council appointed Hugh White AO as the institute’s executive director and Hugh set about building the initial ASPI team. A fortnight later, the world fundamentally changed. Terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon and one unsuccessfully aimed at the White House jolted the strategic fabric of the Middle East and the world’s democracies. ASPI couldn’t have started at a more challenging time for strategic analysis.

Writing in ASPI’s first annual report, Hugh White reported that the institute in 2001–02 ‘did a small amount of work directly for government, including a substantial assessment for the Minister for Defence, Senator Hill, of the implications of September 11 for Australia’s defence’.5

ASPI’s first public report was a study by Elsina Wainwright, New neighbour, new challenge: Australia and the security of East Timor. This was followed by the first of Mark Thomson’s 16 editions of The cost of Defence: the ASPI defence budget brief 2002–03. This included a rundown of the top 20 defence capability acquisition projects. The slightly cheeky cartoon covers—state and territory seagulls pinching Defence spending chips is my favourite—didn’t start until 2003–04, but the first Cost of Defence began the trend to report Defence’s daily budget spend: $39,991,898.63. (The 2021–22 Cost of Defence records the daily spend at $122,242,739.73.)

Hugh White closed off his 2001–02 Director’s report with ‘Clearly the task of defining our role in the policy debate will take some time to complete, but we believe we have made a good start.’ It was quite a foundation year: tectonic global security shifts, challenging regional deployments, defence budget and capability analysis. ASPI’s course was set, and the rest, as they say, makes up the history that Graeme Dobell and ASPI colleagues cover in this book. Graeme’s analysis makes sense of what, to the participants, might have felt from time to time like one damned thing after another. But patterns do emerge, and they coalesce into the realisation that ASPI’s first 20 years have marked some of the most turbulent shifts in Australia’s security outlook. All of which puts, or should put, a tremendous premium on the value of strategic policy, contestable policy advice, an informed and engaged audience and a new generation of well-trained policy professionals.

ASPI today is a larger organisation working across a wider area of strategy and policy issues.

The annual report for 2019–20 lists 64 non-ongoing (that is, contracted) staff, of whom 45 were full time (22 female and 23 male) and 15 were part time (11 female and four male). The overall ASPI budget was $11,412,096.71, of which $4 million (35%) was from Defence, managed by a long-term funding agreement. A further $3.6 million (32%) came from federal government agencies; $0.122 million (1%) from state and territory government agencies; $1.89 million (17%) from overseas government agencies, most prominently from the US State Department and Pentagon and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Defence industry provided $0.370 million (3%); private-sector sponsorship was $1.241 million (11%) and finally, funding from civil society and universities was $0.151 million (1%).6

Behind those numbers is a mountain of effort to grow the institute and sustain it financially.

Think tanks need high-performing staff, and high-performing staff need salaries that will keep them at the think tank. The nexus between money and viability is absolute. Around the world, there are many think tanks that don’t amount to much more than a letterhead and an individual’s dedicated effort in a spare room at home. The reality is that building scale, research depth, a culture of pushing the policy boundaries and a back-catalogue of high-quality events and publications takes money. In the early stages of ASPI’s life, I recall the view expressed that the institute couldn’t possibly be regarded as independent if the overwhelming balance of its resources came from the Department of Defence. More recently, the charge is that the ‘military industrial complex’ or foreign governments must be the tail that wags the dog. The Canberra embassy of a large and assertive Leninist authoritarian regime can’t conceive that ASPI could possibly be independent in its judgements because, well, no such intellectual independence survives back home. ASPI must therefore be the catspaw of Australian Government policy thinking.

None of those contentions are borne out by looking at the content of ASPI products over the past two decades. There are plenty of examples (from critiques of the Port of Darwin’s lease to a PRC company; analysis of key equipment projects such as submarines and combat aircraft; assessments of the Bush, Obama, Trump and now the Biden presidencies; assessments of the Defence budget; differences on cyber policy) in which the institute’s capacity for feisty contrarianism has been on full display. In my time at ASPI, I haven’t once been asked by a politician, public servant, diplomat or industry representative to bend a judgement to their preferences. It follows that, for good or ill, the judgements made by ASPI staff, and our contributors, are their views, and their views alone. ASPI is independent because it was designed to operate that way. Its output demonstrates that reality every day.

And as you will see in these pages, ASPI has views aplenty. It became clear several years ago that the institute needed to broaden its focus away from defence policy and international security more narrowly conceived to address a wider canvas of security issues. That’s because the wider canvas presents some of the most interesting and challenging dilemmas for Australia’s national security. We sought to bring a new policy focus to cyber issues by creating the ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre. This was followed by streams of work addressing risk and resilience; counterterrorism; policing and international law enforcement; countering disinformation; understanding the behaviour of the PRC in all its dimensions; and, most recently, climate and security.

Does ASPI’s work have real policy effect? One of the curiosities of the Canberra environment is that officials will often go to quite some length to deny that a think tank could possibly shift the policy dial. To do so might be to acknowledge an implicit criticism that a department or agency hasn’t been on its game. Changing policy is often more like a process of erosion than a sudden jolting earthquake. It can take time to mount and sustain a critique about policy settings before the need for change is finally acknowledged. And it has to be said that the standard disposition of Canberra policymakers is to defend current policy settings. That shouldn’t be too surprising: current policy settings in many cases will be the result of government decisions, and, at times, the role of the public service is to raise the drawbridge and defend the battlements. So, it’s often the case that a department’s response to the arrival of an ASPI report isn’t a yelp of joy so much as the cranking up of a talking points brief for the minister that explains why current policy settings are correct, can’t be improved upon and quite likely are the best of all possible worlds.

ASPI’s influence is therefore more indirect than that of the Australian Public Service (APS), but, as Sun Tzu reminds us, ‘indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.’7 The institute has some natural strengths in this approach. ASPI has the advantage of being small and flexible; it has a charter to look beyond current policy settings; it can talk to a wide range of people in and out of government to seed ideas; it can engage with the media; it allows expertise to develop because more than a few ASPI staff have stayed in jobs for years and built a depth of knowledge not necessarily found in generalist public servants who frequently change roles.

Taking a longer view, I would suggest that ASPI has indeed managed to influence the shape of policy in a number of areas. The institute has helped to create a more informed base of opinion on key defence budget and capability issues. This has helped to strengthen parliamentary and external scrutiny of the Defence Department and the ADF. ASPI is really the only source providing detailed analysis of defence spending and has helped to lift public understanding about critical military capability issues, such as the future submarine project, the future of the surface fleet, air combat capabilities, the land forces, space, and joint and enabling capabilities.

ASPI has had substantial impact on national thinking about dealing with the PRC, and that has helped at least set the context for government decision-making on issues such as the rollout of the 5G network, countering foreign interference, strengthening security consideration of foreign direct investment and informing national approaches to fuel and supply-chain security.

ASPI has sought to make policy discussions about cyber, critical and emerging technologies more informed and more accessible. The institute has offered many active, informed and engaged voices on critical international issues of importance to Australia, from the Antarctic to the countries and dynamics of the Indo-Pacific, the alliance with the US, the machinery of Defence and national security decision-making, the security of northern Australia and even re-engaging with Europe.

It’s best left to others to judge the success or otherwise of the institute. Both from the approval, and sometimes disapproval, that ASPI garners, we can see that people pay attention to the institute’s work. That’s gratifying and motivates the team to keep doing more. 

Coincidentally to ASPI’s 20th anniversary, the Australian Parliament’s Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee has been conducting an inquiry into funding for public research into foreign policy issues. In making a submission to that inquiry, I offered what I hoped was useful advice about the contours of what a notional ‘foreign policy institute’ should look like if the government wanted to promote in the field of foreign policy what ASPI seeks to do for defence and strategic policy. That led me to suggest the following seven approaches, presented here with minor edits:

  1. A foreign policy institute must be genuinely independent, with a charter that makes its core functions clear and a governance framework that supports its independence. If the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) were to be the prime source of funding, it should be made clear that DFAT should not influence the policy recommendations of the institute’s work. A government-appointed council, including a representative of the leader of the opposition, should provide overall strategic direction for the institute. Any entity that is part of a larger government department will inevitably come to reflect the parent. A clear separation between the parent department and the institute is essential.
     
  2. The institute should not be part of a university, because university priorities would weaken the institute’s capacity to retain a sharp focus on public policy. The committee might like to test this proposition by seeing whether it can identify any contemporary foreign policy research outfit that is part of a university which has substantially shaped Australian foreign policy. My view is that you will search in vain. This is true in the main because universities have priorities other than shaping public policy outcomes. How universities recruit, reward and promote, what they teach and the outcomes they regard as constituting excellence are shaped towards other ends than providing contestable and implementable foreign policy.
     
  3. The institute needs scale to develop excellence. Successful think tanks—such as those at the top end of the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘Go To’ index—attract people interested in policy ideas and with lateral thinking skills and with some entrepreneurial flair. The quality of their thinking is strengthened by being able to test their ideas with colleagues and collaborate on interesting policy work. Some scale is needed to bring a group of people like that together, offering terms and conditions that allow people to develop skills over a few years. This approach stands in contrast to the instinct of some departments to offer one-off, short-term, small funding grants. In my experience, multiple ‘penny-packet’ grants become difficult for departments to administer, produce reports that lack an understanding of how public policy is really done and do not develop skills.
     
  4. The institute will need some time to establish itself. ASPI is 20, and every day is a story of how we manage the tasks of offering policy contestability, engaging with our stakeholders and sustaining ourselves financially. It took probably 15 years for an acceptance to be built in the rather tightknit defence and security community that ASPI was not simply to be tolerated but could add value and even be constructively brought into policy discussions. A foreign policy institute will take a similar amount of time to build an accepted place for itself. Hopefully, an institute would start producing good material on day one, but it will take years for such a group to be seen as a natural (indeed, essential) interlocutor in critical foreign policy discussions.
     
  5. The institute must be non-partisan, reaching out to all parts of parliament. Because foreign policy is a public policy good, it is appropriate and likely that the bulk of funding for a foreign policy institute will come from the public sector. If it is successful, the institute will survive through changes of governments, ministers and senior officials. As such, it can’t afford to be partisan in the way that many private think tanks are. That will still leave scope for engaged debate on policy options, which leads to approach number 6.
     
  6. Accept that the institute will, from time to time, annoy you. This is the price of contestability of policy advice. There is no question that ASPI has annoyed governments, oppositions and officials over the years on all manner of issues, from key bilateral relationships to defence equipment acquisitions, military operations, budgets and the rest. To advance policy thinking, it’s necessary from time to time to question existing policy orthodoxies. The test for the institute’s stakeholders is whether the value of contestable policy advice is worth the occasional annoyance. The test for the foreign policy institute will be whether the issue in question has been appropriately researched and thought through.
     
  7. A professional outfit needs appropriate funding. To succeed, a foreign policy institute needs to be able to attract a mix of staff who can be remunerated in line with their skills. As in all walks of life, one gets what one pays for. Funding of between $2 million and $3 million would set up an institute able to build some critical mass, working out of offices fitted out to an appropriately modest APS standard. The institute should have a remit to grow its funding base through its own efforts. This would be sufficient to enable a promising start to a potentially nationally important organisation.

    ASPI was designed to place the executive director position at (approximately) the level of the APS Senior Executive Service Band 3 (deputy secretary) level. Salary and conditions are determined by the Remuneration Tribunal. The executive director, on direction from the ASPI Council, determines salary levels for ASPI’s staff, who are recruited on contracts. The intent is to recruit people with the mix of policy skills and hands-on public policy experience who can realistically shape policy thinking. Government departments and agencies are, in general, willing to support staff taking positions at ASPI, using options for leave without pay from the APS. For more senior staff, the hope is that some time spent at ASPI will enhance their careers, perhaps enabling them to return to the APS with new skills and capacities. For more junior staff, the aim is to equip them with skills that will make them attractive new hires for departments and agencies.8

Of course, I was doing little more than describing the ASPI business model developed more than 20 years ago and validated through two decades of enthusiastic policy research and advocacy by many dozens of ASPI staff.

Speaking personally, it has been the privilege of my professional life to spend almost a decade as the executive director of the institute since April 2012, and a few more years before that as ASPI’s director of programs between 2003 and 2006. My commitment to the organisation comes about because of the value I believe it adds to Australia’s defence and strategic policy framework. These policy settings matter. They’re the foundation of the security of the country, the security of our people and the very type of country that Australia aspires to be. Australia would be better defended if we had more lively debates about the best ways to promote our strategic interests. ASPI has truly been a national gem in sustaining those debates.

At the core of this book is Graeme Dobell’s sharp take on the intellectual content of hundreds of ASPI research publications, thousands of Strategist posts and many, many conferences, seminars, roundtables and the like. Graeme has done a wonderful job of breathing life into this body of work, reflecting some of the heat and energy that came from ASPI staff and ASPI contributors investing their brain power into Australia’s policy interests. In these pages, you read the story of Australia’s own difficult navigation through the choppy strategic seas of the past 20 years. It’s a thrilling ride and a testament to the many wonderful people who have worked at or supported the institute.

We should all hope that ASPI reaches its 40-year and even 50-year anniversaries, because there’s no doubt in my mind that Australia will continue to need access to contestable policy advice in defence and strategic policy. The coming years will be no less difficult and demanding than the years recounted here. In fact, Australia’s future is likely to face even greater challenges. 

Never forget that strategy and policy matter. Profoundly so. That’s why ASPI matters.

Peter Jennings

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About ASPI

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute was formed in 2001 as an independent, non‑partisan think tank. Its core aim is to provide the Australian Government with fresh ideas on Australia’s defence, security and strategic policy choices.

ASPI is responsible for informing the public on a range of strategic issues, generating new thinking for government and harnessing strategic thinking internationally. ASPI’s sources of funding are identified in our annual report, online at www.aspi.org.au and in the acknowledgements section of individual publications. ASPI remains independent in the content of the research and in all editorial judgements. It is incorporated as a company, and is governed by a Council with broad membership. ASPI’s core values are collegiality, originality & innovation, quality & excellence and independence.

ASPI’s publications—including this report—are not intended in any way to express or reflect the views of the Australian Government. The opinions and recommendations in this report are published by ASPI to promote public debate and understanding of strategic and defence issues. They reflect the personal views of the author(s) and should not be seen as representing the formal position of ASPI on any particular issue.

Important disclaimer

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.

© The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Limited 2021

This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers. Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.

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Funding statement: No specific sponsorship was received to fund production of this report

  1. See, for example, Kim Beazley, John Howard et al., ASPI at 15, ASPI, Canberra, October 2016, online. ↩︎
  2. Cabinet memorandum JH00/0131—Establishment of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute—Decision, 18 April 2000, online. ↩︎
  3. Cabinet decision JH00/0216/CAB—Australian Strategic Policy Institute—alternate models to establish a strategic policy research centre—Decision, online. ↩︎
  4. Cabinet decision JH00/0216/CAB. ↩︎
  5. Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Annual report 2001–2002, ASPI, Canberra, October 2002, 10, online. ↩︎
  6. Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Annual report 2019–2020, ASPI, Canberra, October 2020, online; staff numbers are on page 10; funding data is on page 154. ↩︎
  7. Sun Tzu, The art of war, translated by Lionel Giles, Chapter V, 5, online. ↩︎
  8. My submission to the inquiry is available via the internet home page of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, Inquiry into funding for public research into foreign policy issues, online. ↩︎

Mitigating the risk of a China–India conflict

More than a year has passed since Chinese troops began to occupy previously Indian-controlled territory on their disputed border in Ladakh. The crisis has cooled and settled into a stalemate. This report warns that it could escalate again, and flare into a conflict with region-wide implications.

The report assesses the risk of conflict by analysing its likelihood and consequences. A possible war would be costly for both India and China. But a possible war could also risk stirring Indian distrust of its new partners, especially in the Quad – Australia, Japan, and the United States. The report outlines some conditions under which a war would disrupt or dampen those developing partnerships.

The report concludes by offering a framework for policymakers to shape India’s expectations and the strategic environment before and during a possible war.

To deter the PRC …

This Strategic Insights report is the first in a series of essays, workshops and events seeking to better understand the nature of deterrence, particularly from the viewpoint of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The series is a joint project between the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the US China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI).

Over the coming months, ASPI and CASI, along with our research associates, will examine the concept of deterrence, how both democratic countries and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) approach deterrence, what liberal democracies are doing to deter China and what China is doing to deter them, and assess the impacts of those efforts.

The series will culminate in an in-person conference that will put forward policy options for Australia, the US and our allies and partners. These publications will draw heavily from original PRC and PLA documents, as well as interviews and personal experiences, to help understand the framework that the PRC uses when it thinks about what we call here ‘deterrence’.

Tag Archive for: China

With US funding freeze, China nonprofits are facing extinction. They need emergency assistance

An entire ecosystem of vital China-related work is now in crisis. When the Trump administration froze foreign funding and USAID programs last week, dozens of scrappy nonprofits in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States were immediately affected. Staff are losing their jobs; some organisations face imminent closure due to lack of funding; others are paring back their programming.

In many cases, these organisations provide our last window into what is actually happening in China. They do the painstaking and often personally risky work of tracking Chinese media censorship, tallying local protests, uncovering human rights violations, documenting the Uyghur genocide, and supporting what remains of civil society in China. They provide platforms for Chinese people to speak freely; they help keep the dream of democracy in China alive. I’m not listing the names of any specific organisations at this time, because some prefer not to disclose that they receive foreign funding. Beijing believes funding that supports free speech and human rights is interference by ‘hostile foreign forces’.

As China’s President Xi Jinping has squeezed Chinese civil society and expelled journalists, information from inside China has gotten harder and harder to access. The 2017 Chinese foreign NGO law crushed US and other foreign nonprofits based in China. Some moved to Hong Kong or elsewhere. The spending freeze may deal them a death blow.

The research and other work done by these nonprofits is invaluable. It largely isn’t replicated by think tanks, universities, private firms, or journalists. If it disappears, nothing will replace it, and Beijing’s work to crush it will be complete.

As a journalist who covered China for more than 10 years, I took for granted the numerous organisations I could turn to when I needed certain kinds of information. But Donald Trump’s foreign spending freeze has revealed how dependent these organisations are on a single government for their survival—and, by extension, how fragile our sources of information about China really are.

The US must immediately grant emergency waivers to China-focussed nonprofits. If the US is not able to do this, governments around the world that value democracy, human rights and truth must step in and find a way to restore funding to these organisations now. It wouldn’t take much; a few million dollars spread across a handful of donor nations would be enough to preserve the research, expertise and networks these organisations represent.

Regardless of whether the US continues funding this work, this crisis should serve as a wake-up call for democracies everywhere. Funding from a single government should not be the only thing standing between us and an information blackout on Chinese civil society. That is not a model of international democratic resilience.

Providing funding for China nonprofits operating outside of China is directly aligned with the core interests of democratic nations. We base our security on the idea that democratic systems are the best way to guarantee the long-term stability, prosperity and wellbeing of citizens. Government budgets exist to preserve the democratic systems that make these goals possible; we don’t sacrifice these ideals to shave off a few numbers on a budget.

A key part of China’s agenda is to persuade its own citizens and the world, falsely and through deception and coercion, that democratic systems are not better. Beijing claims its system is the best way to guarantee economic prosperity and stability. It claims its one-party system is a meritocracy.

It is difficult and time-consuming—though not particularly expensive—to do the work that proves Beijing is lying, and that what it offers is smoke and mirrors. Tools that allow us to uncover the flaws of China’s own system and the actual struggles Chinese people face, directly support the goals, security and resilience of democratic governments.

Without the work that China nonprofits do, it will be much harder to show that China’s domestic model of economic and political governance is deeply flawed. If we can no longer prove that, it becomes much harder to understand why democracies are worth fighting for in the first place.

Trump is right to worry about China’s Panama Canal influence

Donald Trump’s foreign policy priorities are coming into sharp focus: shoring up economic security, bolstering national security and sending a clear signal to America’s allies and partners. One of those partners is Panama, a small Central American nation that happens to control one of the world’s most vital maritime passages. Of the many Trump proclamations over the past week, this is one that Australia, as a maritime nation, should pay attention too.

Built by the United States from 1904 to 1914 to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the 82km Panama Canal now handles around 6 percent of global maritime trade and 40 percent of US container trade, underscoring its importance to both American interests and the global economy.

Heavily reliant on seaborne trade, Australia is particularly vulnerable to disruptions in global shipping routes. Even though only a small portion of its maritime trade travels through the Panama Canal, disruptions to the Panama Canal would have an impact on the price of goods in Australia, as the global supply chain would have to respond to the constriction of another key waterway.

The Reserve Bank in its August 2024 report on monetary policy noted that maritime trade freight costs had risen sharply in 2024. This was predominantly as a result of conflict in the Red Sea and a reduction in capacity of the Panama Canal due to drought.

The Reserve Bank said increased freight costs hadn’t yet translated into higher goods inflation in Australia but could if they were sustained—demonstrating the impact to disruption of maritime trade on Australia’s economy.

So, what exactly are Trump’s proclamations? He has threatened to seize back the Panama Canal, not ruling out use of force, and has claimed it’s under the control of Chinese soldiers and that Panama is gouging US ships with exorbitant transit fees.

While his claims are demonstrably false, his underlying concern is not misplaced. Maritime infrastructure is crucial to the economic and national security of countries such as Australia and the US. Australia learned this lesson too late in 2015 when it rashly leased the Port of Darwin to Landbridge, a Chinese-owned company, for 99 years. Much as Darwin is vital to Australia’s security, the Panama Canal remains critical to America’s.

The canal has been fully owned by the Republic of Panama since 1999, when the US transferred control under two treaties, one of which was a treaty of neutrality, requiring the canal to remain in neutral hands—and stating that if it did not, the US reserved the right to defend the canal with military force.

Despite the canal being under Panamanian control, companies from mainland China and Hong Kong have acquired key port facilities on both its Pacific and Atlantic entrances. On the Atlantic side, Landbridge has taken control of Margarita Island, Panama’s largest port. Meanwhile, Hong Kong-owned CK Hutchison Holdings—which wholly owns Hutchison Ports Australia, operator of terminals in Sydney and Brisbane—holds concessions to operate the ports of Balboa and Cristobal, the canal’s major Pacific and Atlantic gateways.

While CK Hutchison Holdings is Hong Kong-owned, the national security laws that were introduced in Hong Kong in 2020 could allow China to exercise influence over these ports.

China’s national security laws can require companies, including Hong Kong companies, to assist the Chinese government in in­telligence gathering and military operations.

This means that even though China does not directly control the Panama Canal, it still holds significant sway at both its Pacific and Atlantic entrances. Coupled with a major uptick in Chinese investment in Panama, underscored by Panama’s decision to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2018, this port ownership provides China with a strategic foothold in the region, and specifically at ­either end of the canal.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday demanded that Panama end the influence of the Chinese Communist Party over the canal area.

The canal area is part of a broader trend of Chinese investment in maritime trade routes, including in the Indian Ocean. Think of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, to name a few. This foothold grants China significant influence over the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz and other vital shipping lanes in the region. China has poured resources into Pacific ports, such as those in the Solomon Islands.

The point is that China is investing heavily in infrastructure that underpins global maritime trade. Under its national security laws, the companies driving these investments, some of which are state owned or have close ties to the Communist Party, could be compelled to use them for intelligence gathering or even military purposes. In the event of heightened strategic competition or conflict, these investments would allow for the targeted constriction of maritime trade to countries such as the US and Australia.

Despite Trump’s threats, it’s unlikely the US would opt to take the canal by force. But Australia should take notice. While Trump’s claims of Chinese soldiers controlling the Panama Canal are false, China’s increased control of port infrastructure globally, including at each end of the canal, should generate concern for a maritime trading nation such as Australia.

DeepSeek may be cheap AI, but Australian companies should beware

Amid the shocked reactions this week to the release of the Chinese artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek, the risk we should be most concerned about is the potential for the model to be misused to disrupt critical infrastructure and services.

I wrote in 2023 about the many forms of Chinese AI-enabled technology we use that pump data back to China, where it is sorted by Chinese algorithms before it is sent back here.

These include things such as digital railway networks, electric vehicles, solar inverters, giant cranes for unloading containers, border screening equipment, and industrial control technology in power stations, water and sewerage works. Like DeepSeek, the vendors of these products are subject to direction from China’s security services.

This clear risk has been buried by the avalanche of commentary about the other implications—not least the panicked stock market reaction in which Nvidia’s share price plunged 17 percent and the Nasdaq fell 3 percent. With so much money chasing AI, investors are as twitchy as meerkats.

Don’t cry for Nvidia—cheaper AI models promise to broaden the market for its chips, and this is reflected in its recovering share price. Besides, Nvidia helped create its temporary setback by selling powerful H800 chips to Chinese companies—including DeepSeek—for a year before the Biden administration tightened up its chip export controls.

There may even be some upside when a company produces comparable results to leading US models—purportedly for a fraction of the price and using dumber chips. US big tech will be spurred to figure out how to do generative AI more cheaply. That’s good for business and good for the planet.

From a national security perspective, how worried should we be about an AI model with a chatbot algorithm that provides such lame answers on issues sensitive to the Chinese government?

Of course it’s undesirable for yet another wildly popular Chinese app to be shaping how we think. It’s also a worry that the company will make all our data available to Chinese security services on request. DeepSeek’s own privacy policy says as much: ‘We may access, preserve, and share the information described in “What Information We Collect” with law enforcement agencies (and) public authorities … if we have good faith belief that it is necessary to comply with applicable law, legal process or government requests.’

The policy also explains that the company stores ‘the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China’.

But the bigger question is what would happen if DeepSeek’s model lowered the costs and increased the competitiveness of Chinese AI-enabled products and services embedded in our critical infrastructure? If these offerings were even cheaper and better, they might become even more pervasive in our digital ecosystem, and therefore even more risky.

Here’s another case. What if DeepSeek became the default choice for Australian and other non-Chinese companies seeking to improve their products and services with customised, low-cost, leading-edge AI? As the Wall Street Journal notes: ‘DeepSeek’s model is open-source, meaning that other developers can inspect and fiddle with its code and build their own applications with it. This could help give more small businesses access to AI tools at a fraction of the cost of closed-source models like OpenAI and Anthropic.’

Useful applications might include customised chatbots and product recommendations, streamlined inventory management or predictive analytics and fraud detection.

Could DeepSeek embedded in tech made by non-Chinese companies be a vector for espionage and sabotage—an arm of China’s DeepState, as it were? Could DeepSeek be directed to alter embedded code or simply turn off access to its open-source model to disable these products and services?

Perhaps we can take some comfort here. One of the advantages of so-called ‘open source’ models is that users can host them in their own controlled environments to better protect their customers’ data. That would mitigate the espionage risk. Using isolated environments would also mitigate the sabotage risk to some degree as well. However, if DeepSeek AI were embedded in products and services that are used in sensitive and critical products—for example, essential components of an electricity station or grid—we might want additional mitigations, given the much higher stakes.

The key point is governments need take a close look at the potential risks of DeepSeek employed in sensitive areas in two contexts: by Chinese companies—given their legal obligations to co-operate with China’s security agencies—and by non-Chinese companies that might use applications derived from the DeepSeek model. In Australia, that sounds like a job for the security review process recently established under our framework to ‘consider foreign ownership, control or influence risks associated with technology vendors’.

It’s early days. US big tech is not going to rest on its oars. DeepSeek may not be as cheap as it claims, nor as original. Indeed, OpenAI is investigating whether DeepSeek leaned on the company’s tools to train its own model. But when it comes to protecting our digital ecosystems from emerging technologies with the game-changing potential of DeepSeek, it’s never too early to start planning.

DeepSeek’s disruption: Australia needs a stronger artificial intelligence strategy

The success of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, has thrown a wrench in the middle of what many observers thought were largely American, or at least democratic, gears.

While the world seems to have been woken up by an AI surprise, DeepSeek’s breakthrough should be a timely reminder for Australia of the need to reduce consumer dependence for technology on China through a proactive and strategic approach to AI.  The Australian government should not want our public to be getting its world view from only the ‘facts’ Beijing permits.

DeepSeek’s development of ‘R1’, a highly efficient and cost-effective AI model, has sent ripples through the global tech community, challenging the perceived dominance of the US in AI and raising questions about the effectiveness of current export controls in preserving technological advantage.

DeepSeek’s R1 model represents a significant departure from conventional AI development paradigms. Reportedly twice the size of Meta’s open-source model and trainable at a fraction of the cost of US-developed models, R1 has fuelled speculation that DeepSeek may have circumvented export controls to access restricted US-made Nvidia chips.

While DeepSeek’s CEO has denied these allegations, attributing the company’s success to innovative development methodologies, he has also openly acknowledged that US export controls have inadvertently spurred his efforts to reduce China’s reliance on American technology. This statement highlights a broader trend of indigenous innovation in China, driven by a desire to achieve technological self-reliance and reduce vulnerability to external pressures. If true, it doesn’t mean the US export controls were so ineffective to be dropped, but rather that the US and its allies have more work to do.

DeepSeek’s emergence as a major player in the AI arena has profound implications for AI in Australia.

First, it challenges the prevailing assumption that US technological leadership, which has long underpinned Australia’s strategic and economic partnerships, can be taken for granted in the medium term.

Second, it shows that while export controls are a tool for maintaining technological advantage, it needs to be part of a full toolbox in an era of rapid technological diffusion and globalised innovation networks.

Third, and most importantly, it underscores the urgent need for Australia to cultivate sovereign AI capabilities. In this regard sovereignty is not going it alone, but not relying on our partners, even our great ally the US, to do all the heavy lifting. Over-reliance on China is a national security threat while overreliance on the US is national negligence. This is why in addition to Australian investment in indigenous AI capabilities, doubling down on the AUKUS partnership is required to safeguard our national interests, maintain our competitive edge, and ensure our strategic autonomy in a technology-driven world. And it is why Australia, the UK and the US made AI one of the six advanced capabilities of AUKUS Pillar 2.

Australia cannot continue the current approach of responding to each new tech development—whether it’s HikVision surveillance, TikTok data manipulation, smart car communications or the risk of AI facts delivered by the Chinese government. As such, we must adopt a comprehensive tech strategy that covers AI.

This strategy should encompass the following key elements:

—Investing in sovereign AI capabilities: Increased investment in AI research and development is essential, along with the development of a national AI strategy that prioritises areas of national interest, such as defence, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure. This investment should focus on building a robust and resilient AI industry that can support innovation, drive economic growth, and enhance national security.

—Fostering international collaboration: In addition to AUKUS, strengthening partnerships with like-minded nations, such as Canada, Japan, and South Korea, is crucial for collaborative AI development, knowledge-sharing, and the establishment of international standards and norms for responsible AI development and deployment. Ideally groups like the Quad and the G7 plus should take this on.

—Promoting ethical AI development: Australia must play a leading role in promoting ethical AI development and ensuring that AI systems are designed and deployed in a manner that respects human rights, promotes fairness, and safeguards against bias and discrimination but that does not politically censor.

—Engaging the public: A public education campaign is necessary to raise awareness of the potential benefits and risks of AI, foster informed public discussion, and ensure that AI development and deployment align with society’s values and expectations.

As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote yesterday: ‘DeepSeek’s release marks a turning point … We should embrace the possibility that open science might once again fuel American dynamism in the age of AI.’

Australia should work with the US and other partners to ensure it is our ‘open science’ and not Beijing’s closed world that is keeping the world informed. This underscores the importance of international engagement to shape the global AI landscape.

By taking a strategic approach that recognises the enormous impact that AI will have on every field, by investing in sovereign capabilities, by fostering international collaboration, and by promoting ethical AI development, Australia can navigate the AI revolution and secure its place as a leader in this transformative technological era.

DeepSeek is a modern Sputnik moment for West

The release of China’s latest DeepSeek artificial intelligence model is a strategic and geopolitical shock as much as it is a shock to stockmarkets around the world.

This is a field into which US investors have been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars, and which many commentators predicted would be led by Silicon Valley for the foreseeable future.

That a little-known Chinese company appears to have leapfrogged into a neck-and-neck position with the US giants, while spending less money and with less computing power, underscores some sobering truths.

First, the West’s clearest strategic rival is a genuine peer competitor in the technologies that will decide who dominates the century and, second, we need to step up our efforts to become less not more reliant on Chinese technology.

More than any other single field, AI will unleash powerful forces from economic productivity through to military capabilities. As Vladimir Putin said in 2017, whoever leads in AI ‘will become the ruler of the world’.

Marc Andreessen, the influential Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, called the DeepSeek announcement a ‘Sputnik moment’ and ‘one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs’ in AI. The United States was shocked into action by the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, investing billions into a public-private sector partnership model that helped win back and sustain tech dominance that would play a major role in winning the Cold War.

Andreessen is right but, in many ways, this breakthrough is even more consequential than Sputnik because the world’s consumers are increasingly reliant on China’s technology and economy in ways we never were with the Soviets.

So what does the West need to do now? Above all we need to stop underestimating our major strategic competitor. If hundreds of billions of dollars isn’t enough investment, we either need to redouble our efforts or work more smartly, bringing governments and the private sector together, and working across trusted nations, as we’re doing with AUKUS security technologies—one of which is of course AI.

We also need to dramatically step up so-called derisking of our economies with China’s in these critical technology fields.

When our leaders say they want us to have consumer choice including Chinese-made tech products, they are ignoring the considerable risks of future Chinese dominance, given we have seen the way Beijing is prepared to use its economic power for strategic purposes, whether through 5G or critical minerals.

As it stands, Beijing will have control over the majority of our smart cars, our batteries, the news our public gets through social media and, if models such as the open-source DeepSeek are adopted cheaply by Western companies, the supercharging power that AI will bring to every other sector.

DeepSeek’s breakthrough should actually come as less of a surprise than the stunned market reaction has shown.

In 2015, China told the world its aim was to supplant the US as the global tech superpower in its Made in China 2025 plan.

At ASPI our research in our Critical Technology Tracker has been showing for almost two years that Chinese published research is nipping at the US’s heels.

It surely isn’t a coincidence that at the end of 2024 and the early weeks of 2025, Beijing has shown the world its advances in both military capability in the form of new combat aircraft, and now dual-use technology in AI. Simultaneously we see Beijing’s obsession with keeping Americans and all Westerners hooked on TikTok, which ensures its users see a Beijing-curated version of the world.

Some observers are arguing that the DeepSeek announcement shows the ineffectiveness of US restrictions on exports of advanced technology such as Nvidia’s advanced chips to China.

Far from backing away from such protective measures, the Trump administration should consider stepping them up, along with further investments in data centres—already under way through the Stargate project.

Restricting chips to China is still an important tool in the US toolkit—it’s just not a panacea.

As Donald Trump’s reportedly incoming tech security director, David Feith, argued last year, the US should also target older chips because ‘failing to do so would signal that US talk of derisking and supply chain resilience still far outpaces policy reality’.

It’s not certain how much direct support DeepSeek and its backers have received from the Chinese government but there are some clues in the way the company is behaving. The DeepSeek model is open-source and costs 30 times less for companies to integrate into than US competitors.

Founder Liang Wenfeng has been blunt that the company is not looking for profits from its AI research, at least in the short term—which would enable it to follow the Chinese playbook of undercutting competitors to create monopolies. And the firm had reportedly been stockpiling the most advanced Nvidia chips before the US restrictions, and has received allocations of chips apparently through the Chinese government.

These facts hint at the lopsided playing field China likes to create. As Edouard Harris, of Gladstone AI, told Time magazine: ‘There’s a good chance that DeepSeek and many of the other big Chinese companies are being supported by the (Chinese) government, in more than just a monetary way.’

While the West continues to debate the balance between fully open economies and national industrial and technology strategies with greater government involvement, China has already fused its industry with its government-led national strategy and is evidently stronger for it.

China sees the West’s open economies as a vulnerability through which it has an easy access to our markets that is not reciprocated.

DeepSeek is yet another reminder that China’s technology is a force to be reckoned with and one that its government will use strategically to make China more self-sufficient while making the rest of the world more dependent on China.

We must start recognising this era and responding decisively.

As Trump returns, Sino-Indian relations are changing

Weeks before his return to the White House, US President-elect Donald Trump issued a pointed warning to the BRICS countries. ‘Go find another sucker’, he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, threatening the group’s nine members with 100 percent tariffs should they attempt to challenge the dollar’s global dominance.

Trump’s warning came on the heels of his campaign promise to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported goods from Canada and Mexico on his first day in office. China, the primary target of Trump’s protectionism, is expected to face an additional 10 percent tariff. While this is hardly surprising, given the escalating trade war between China and the United States, Trump has also directed his ire at India, a founding member of the BRICS and one of the US’s key allies.

So far, India has managed to avoid immediate conflict by reaffirming its commitment to the dollar. But such policy uncertainties are among the many reasons why the Indian government has been quietly hedging its bets by pursuing rapprochement with China—a move that could herald a seismic geopolitical shift.

The China-India thaw has become increasingly evident in recent months. In October, the two countries reached an agreement to end the years-long military standoff along their shared Himalayan border, setting the stage for a surprise meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia. Another sign of this shift is Indian officials’ newfound interest in attracting Chinese investment.

Meanwhile, US-India relations appear to be cooling. Since a popular uprising ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August, Modi’s favoured news outlets, social-media operatives and Hindu supremacist allies have portrayed the insurrection as a CIA-orchestrated regime change. Some have even warned of similar attempts by the US deep state to destabilise India.

Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has since embraced anti-US sentiment, accusing the US of targeting Indian tycoon Gautam Adani—a close ally of Modi charged with securities fraud and bribery in the US—in an effort to undermine the Indian government. Such rhetoric, a stark departure from decades of strategic cooperation, evokes memories of the Cold War, when a nominally nonaligned India, wary of US interference, gravitated toward the Soviet Union.

This shift is driven by several factors, primarily the US’s diminishing ability and willingness to act as a global leader, along with China and India’s attempts to strengthen their bargaining position. With deglobalisation reshaping the world economy, the US has less to offer countries like India, which do not entirely rely on it for defence.

By contrast, China’s dominance in global supply chains has become impossible to ignore. As the world’s manufacturing superpower—producing more than the next nine largest manufacturers combined—China could support India’s efforts to expand its own industrial base. The government’s annual economic survey highlighted this imperative, stating that ‘to boost Indian manufacturing and plug India into the global supply chain’, the country must ‘plug itself into China’s supply chain.’ To this end, the report advocated a pragmatic approach focused on attracting Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI).

Such unequivocal government support for cooperation with China was once unthinkable in India, which has maintained adversarial relations with its neighbour since the 1962 Sino-Indian War. After 20 Indian soldiers were killed in border clashes in India’s Ladakh region in 2020, India responded by imposing sweeping restrictions on investments and imports from China, limiting executive visas, and banning Chinese apps. But these measures resulted in massive losses for Indian businesses reliant on Chinese imports. Worse, they deprived India of critical Chinese investments at a time when FDI inflows were already declining.

As global supply chains shift away from China, Chinese manufacturers are also relocating, establishing bases in countries that stand to benefit from the West’s friendshoring and nearshoring strategies. Chinese investments in greenfield projects tripled year on year in 2023, to US$160 billion, with much of these flows going to countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Hungary and Serbia. India, grappling with jobless growth and high youth unemployment, is eager to capitalise on this trend.

The US, once a major source of FDI, is now competing with India for investment as it seeks to boost domestic manufacturing. This competition, which is expected to intensify under Trump, has prompted India to approve several investment proposals and offer concessions—including expedited visas—to Chinese businesses and executives.

India’s course correction aligns closely with China’s interests, as the country’s economic slowdown has piqued Chinese firms’ interest in India’s rapidly growing market. India is projected to become the world’s third-largest economy by the end of this decade and deeper engagement with it would provide China with a major buffer against US efforts to contain its geopolitical rise.

Moreover, while global attention remains focused on the escalating tariff war between the US and China, India faces significant risks of its own. Trump, who has repeatedly labelled India a very big abuser of tariffs, had revoked its preferential trade status during his first term, raising the likelihood of further punitive measures.

To be sure, India—designated by the US as a major defense partner—is unlikely to abandon its strategic relationship with the US for closer ties with China. But like other emerging powers in the Global South, India is increasingly frustrated with the inherent asymmetry of the US-led liberal international order, particularly the dollar’s hegemony.

These frictions are also fuelled by the US’s occasional rebukes of India’s treatment of minorities. Having systematically weakened democratic institutions and tightened control over the media, Modi’s government bristles at any international criticism. Fortunately for Modi, such differences may resolve themselves. After all, it’s hard to imagine Trump being overly concerned by India’s ties to Russia, anti-Muslim policies or democratic backsliding.

Still, as Modi steps up his efforts to transform India into a Hindu state, he may want to secure America’s support by signalling that he has alternatives. In that sense, India’s overtures to China could be viewed as a geopolitical manoeuvre aimed at enabling India to tell Trump to ‘go find another sucker’ should he decide to play hardball.

The TikTok boomerang

Few predicted that TikTok users in the United States would flock to the Chinese app RedNote (Xiaohongshu) in defiance of a US government ban. And yet in the space of just two days this week, RedNote became the most downloaded app in the US, gaining 700,000 users—most of them American TikTok refugees.

Since US data security was the rationale for the TikTok ban, American users’ migration to other Chinese apps only amplifies those concerns. Unlike TikTok—a platform that does not operate in China and is not subject to Chinese law—RedNote is a domestic Chinese app bound by strict Chinese regulations. Moreover, while TikTok says that it stores US user data exclusively within the US, with oversight by a US-led security team, RedNote stores its data entirely in China.

In recent years, China has introduced a series of data protection laws ostensibly aimed at safeguarding user information. But these regulations primarily target businesses, imposing far fewer constraints on government access to personal data. Chinese public authorities thus have wide discretion in requesting and accessing user data.

Beyond the issue of data privacy, US authorities also worry that TikTok might be used to influence public opinion in the US. But TikTok’s algorithms are closely monitored by Oracle, as part of a deal to address security concerns. In contrast, RedNote’s algorithms operate under the close scrutiny of the Chinese government, and the app is subject to China’s stringent content-moderation requirements, which could further shape the opinions of the TikTok refugees now flocking to the platform.

Given the rationale for the law banning TikTok, it is hard to imagine RedNote escaping similar scrutiny. Now that the US Supreme Court has upheld the TikTok law, the president will have the authority to designate RedNote as a national security threat, too. But this process may quickly descend into a game of Whac-a-Mole. As US users migrate from one Chinese platform to another, regulators will find themselves locked in an endless cycle of banning Chinese apps.

As the list of banned apps grows, the US risks constructing its own Great Firewall—a mirror to the censorship strategy long employed by China. Even if Chinese apps are removed from US app stores, tech-savvy users can easily bypass such restrictions with VPNs, just as Chinese users do to access foreign platforms. That means the US government will soon confront the limits of its ability to ban Chinese apps.

Moreover, each new restriction risks fueling defiance, driving even more users toward Chinese-controlled platforms. Instead of mitigating national security concerns, this strategy may inadvertently exacerbate them, introducing the kinds of vulnerabilities that the original ban was supposed to address.

The TikTok ban thus puts the US government in a near-untenable position, which may explain why Donald Trump is reportedly weighing options to spare TikTok (despite having initiated the ban during his first term).

Yet reversing the ban carries its own risks. As legislation passed by congress, it cannot be repealed by executive order. In theory, Trump could direct law enforcement agencies not to enforce the ban; but that would have far-reaching consequences, not least by calling into question America’s commitment to the rule of law (again mirroring a charge the US has long leveled against China).

An alternative to banning TikTok is a forced divestiture of the app’s US operations, but that solution hinges on one critical factor: China’s approval. In 2020, China implemented restrictions on the export of technologies such as recommendation algorithms—the core of TikTok’s operations—effectively giving the Chinese government veto power over any potential deal.

The TikTok dilemma thus now serves as a powerful bargaining chip for China’s leaders, granting them significant leverage in their dealings with Trump, who campaigned on a promise to impose higher import tariffs on Chinese goods. Not surprisingly, he turned to Chinese President Xi Jinping for help just hours before the Supreme Court was set to weigh in on the ban.

At the same time, the TikTok saga has handed China yet another strategic gift. Friendly interaction between TikTok refugees and Chinese netizens on RedNote has created an unprecedented opportunity for cultural exchange, something China’s rulers have long aspired to but struggled to achieve.

For more than two decades, the Chinese government has aggressively tried to promote its culture and expand its influence in the US. But while it has purchased ads in Times Square and established Confucius Institutes on US university campuses, these efforts have largely failed to gain traction. Remarkably, what RedNote has achieved in just a few days seems to have eclipsed the cumulative impact of all these prior initiatives.

As I explored in my recent book, High Wire, centralised decision-making frequently results in fragile, rather than resilient, regulatory outcomes. The TikTok saga offers a stark reminder that an over-concentration of presidential power in shaping US foreign policy—particularly toward China—can lead to similar outcomes. With Trump expected to consolidate executive power, surround himself with loyalists and operate with fewer institutional constraints during his second term, this trend seems likely to intensify, generating vast unintended consequences.

China’s other new combat aircraft: a crewed fighter, maybe for aircraft carriers

Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group’s J-36 scooped up most of the publicity around China’s late-December revelations, but a second combat type, one from Shenyang Aircraft and referred to for now as J-XX, was revealed at the same time.

It was smaller, and the pictures of it were less clear, so it got some attention. But it deserves plenty, as the other half of an unprecedented double revelation and a complementary part of China’s future air combat system.

Observation of the design reveals that it’s very much a standard-size fighter with a pilot. There are good hints that it’s intended for shipboard operation, though that would not stop it from also equipping the air force.

Since China already has a new naval fighter in the works, the J-XX may be at a very early stage of development. What we saw could have been not a prototype, an aircraft close in design to the intended production version, but a technology demonstrator, which would look like the real thing but lack many features.

The content and style of the two disclosures is no accident, because there are no such accidents in China. There were more and better pictures of the J-36, suggesting that the authorities want more attention for the Chengdu aircraft from their target audiences. One of the audiences is the Chinese population, to be reassured that China is disputing the lead with the United States; another may be the US itself, with a new administration that might be tempted to respond with disclosures of its own, to China’s benefit.

The J-XX appears to be closer to a classic large-fighter size—25 tonnes gross weight, similar to the Eurofighter Typhoon—than the J-36, which has the size of a medium bomber. The J-XX certainly cannot accommodate anything like the J-36’s impressively large main weapon bay and respectably large secondary bays. It is not a competitor or alternative to the J-36.

The J-XX has no vertical tails. Some observers saw, in the first pictures to appear, articulated V-tails that could fold flat in straight and level flight and move into a raised position for takeoff and landing and maneuvering flight; later images, however, showed a tailless lambda wing shape, with a highly swept and blended inner section and less swept, tapered outer panels. The planform resembles many notional designs for next-generation fighters seen in the US and elsewhere since the 2010s.

As on the J-36, the trailing edge incorporates multiple moving control surface panels, and the outer segments are likely split in the same way to act as rudders and speedbrakes. The inner half of the trailing edge is swept sharply forward, moving the control surface further aft to make it more effective in pitch. The exhaust nozzles are laterally separated and extend beyond the structure (unlike the J-36’s nozzles), so full vectoring is both possible and likely, and can add to control in pitch, roll, and yaw.

The engines are apparently separated by a narrow tunnel—a very unusual design feature. Unlike the widely separated engines on the MiG-29 and the Sukhoi Flanker family, they are too close together to accommodate stores between them. The narrow passage is a mystery because it seems to make little sense in terms of aerodynamics, signatures or vehicle packaging: it would appear more logical to fill the space in and use it for fuel.

The undersides of the engine housings are flattened, suggesting that a future version might have shallow weapon bays there. The rest of the shape does not offer any obvious bay locations: the main landing gear bays occupy the strategic terrain on the body sides.

The canopy seems to have a low profile, so low that some people thought the J-XX was uncrewed. But it does have a pilot, at least: there is very little logic to building a drone with two engines, adding weight and complication when there is no concern about losing someone onboard due to an engine failure.

What does this add up to? The tell-tale features may be the large pitch control surfaces and the location of the break line on the trailing edge. The first provides the pitch control authority needed for carrier landings and the second accommodates a wing fold.

Shenyang has been responsible for both of China’s carrier fighters—the Sukhoi-derived J-15 family and the new J-35—and therefore owns China’s expertise in this specialised and challenging area.

The J-35 is still under development, so if the J-XX is a follow-on carrier fighter, production may be some years off. If the aircraft is an early-stage technology demonstrator, that might explain some of the design details.

One is intriguing if this is a carrier jet: the nose is quite long and, as noted, the cockpit is low. As a near-delta with no canard wings, the J-XX will point high when flying slowly for landing. So the pilot will see little of the flight deck that he or she is approaching. But Northrop Grumman demonstrated fully automatic carrier landing in 2013 with the X-47B, which achieved much better consistency in touchdown point than is normal for navy fighters.

Applied to a crewed combat aircraft, autoland would eliminate many training cycles and reduce the number of heavy landings, allowing a lighter airframe and landing gear and reducing operational costs. The Chinese navy, too, would not face the same cultural challenges in making that change that would inhibit the US Navy. The idea is speculative, but it would help explain an early start to a demonstration program.

China’s secretive build-up presents Trump with a difficult nuclear challenge

After disappearing from debate over the last couple of decades, nuclear politics are set to return with a vengeance. China has begun an unexpected and secretive nuclear force buildup. This presents a major challenge for Donald Trump’s new administration, which will want to maintain US nuclear advantage over China.

China’s shifting nuclear posture, the secrecy surrounding it, and the low likelihood of Chinese cooperation on arms control threaten stability in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

We have heard little from China’s official sources about its plans for nuclear expansion. The likelihood is that China is seeking parity with the US, driven by political drive for status or possibly by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ego. If so, it would be just one of many instances of China pushing for parity in foreign and security policy. It may also be part of a general preparation for any future conflict, which should alarm not just Trump but also other leaders in the Indo-Pacific.

No other reasons make much sense. There is little deterrence logic to China’s nuclear expansion. While some scholars have suggested that China is responding to the US’s offensive and defensive capabilities, this is not particularly convincing, given that the US has not expanded its nuclear arsenal in decades. China’s expansion is more likely the result of China’s ambitions.

Other reasons for the expansion, such as empire-building pressure from within the military establishment, are also unconvincing. Strategic forces are under tight political control in China: decisions definitely flow from the top down. Anyway, such an explanation also fails to explain why a change is happening now. There is little indication that military is more influential (the evidence suggests the opposite) or that its views on nuclear force sizing have changed.

Whatever the reason, China’s nuclear expansion itself is considerable and its end state is unclear.

If this expansion is driven by the pursuit of parity, the Trump administration will face an uphill battle on nuclear arms control with China. Beijing has faced repeated calls for it to join nuclear arms control agreements, all of which it rejected on the basis that its nuclear forces are much more modest than those of other nuclear states. If China is pursuing parity, it is unlikely to be interested in nuclear arms control for a while.

Territorial tensions in the Indo-Pacific and the question of Taiwan are already raising temperatures. Adding nuclear competition to the mix only raises them further.

Until now, China’s no-first-use policy and the nuclear imbalance between the US and China have been some source of comfort. But there have been indications that China may adopt a launch-on-warning posture, meaning it might fire before suffering confirmed nuclear hits. This departure, combined with the pursuit of parity, will make crises much more dangerous.

China’s secrecy should be viewed as a threat to all nations. US-Russia nuclear arms control agreements have meant that the US could justifiably concentrate on the threat posed by Iranian and North Korean proliferation. Meanwhile, China—already the second biggest military in the world—has covertly gone down the path of nuclear proliferation.

While some refer to Trump’s powers of distraction, Beijing has become a master magician: it has sold a lie to the Indo-Pacific that Australia and its AUKUS partners are nuclear proliferators. As a result, Australia has had to defend nuclear propulsion while China rapidly and secretly expands its nuclear weaponry.

China claims to want only equality but is actually seeking superiority across the military and technology sectors, including in the nuclear sector. Reaching arms control is likely to be more difficult in the context of a dissatisfied and difficult-to-satisfy power.

Even if Beijing engages in arms control arrangements, its nuclear history should make us question its commitment. While the US and Russia cooperated on non-proliferation, China has supported nuclear proliferation in Pakistan, North Korea and possibly even Iran. This is at least partly responsible for the growing interest in nuclear weapons in South Korea and Japan.

Beijing’s wider strategic behaviour is also indirectly encouraging nuclear proliferation among its neighbours, by trying to expel the US from the region and raising their fears that they will be left alone in facing China. In those frightening circumstances, going nuclear may seem more desirable to them, if not urgently necessary.

The growing Chinese nuclear threat should be an important consideration for the Trump administration, as well as for Australia and the Indo-Pacific. Regional allies, such as Australia and Japan, should make China’s nuclear threat a key agenda item with the US, starting with the Quad meeting reportedly happening next week.

Will Trump crack the mystery of Covid-19’s origin?

The Covid-19 pandemic killed an estimated 7.1 million people worldwide, causing global life expectancy to decline by 1.6 years between 2019 and 2021. It disrupted economies, destroyed livelihoods, and strained social cohesion in many countries. Yet no one has been held accountable for it. Will US President-elect Donald Trump change that?

Five years after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19), we still do not know where the pathogen first arose. Did it emerge naturally in the wet markets of Wuhan, China, or did it escape from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where studies into bat coronaviruses were underway?

We do know that China’s government allowed what might have been a local outbreak to morph into a global health crisis. After the first Covid-19 cases were reported in Wuhan, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored reports about the disease and hid evidence of human-to-human transmission for weeks. Meanwhile, travel to and from Wuhan was allowed to continue unhindered.

Unlike the Muslim gulag in Xinjiang province or naval-base construction in the South China Sea, however, Chinese authorities could not conceal the novel coronavirus for long, nor could the rest of the world ignore it once the secret was out. So many people contracted Covid-19 so quickly that many hospitals were soon overwhelmed, leaving many victims to be treated in tents.

China’s government then shifted from concealment to damage control. State media reframed the crisis in Wuhan as a story of successful recovery, while touting unrealistically low mortality rates. Meanwhile, Xi thwarted international efforts to initiate an independent forensic inquiry into Covid-19’s genesis, which he claimed would amount to ‘origin-tracing terrorism’. The only investigation he allowed was a 2021 joint study with the World Health Organization that China controlled and steered.

While Trump, who was president for the first few months of the pandemic, often highlighted the link between China and Covid-19, his successor, Joe Biden, effectively let China off the hook. Less than a week after his inauguration, Biden produced a presidential memorandum urging federal agencies to avoid mentioning the virus’s geographic origins.

Biden’s goal was to stem a rise in bullying, harassment and hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The toxicity of America’s partisan politics meant that pushing back against racism—which Trump and his cohort often stoked—also meant shutting down any discussion of China’s role in causing the crisis. Social-media platforms, mainstream media, and some prominent US scientists (who hid their conflicts of interest) also aided the suppression of debate about Covid-19.

The partisan divide over whether to investigate China’s responsibility for Covid-19 persists to this day. Just last month, Democrats challenged a 520-page report—produced by the Republican-controlled US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic—which concluded, after a two-year investigation, that the virus likely escaped from the WIV, faulting the report’s methodology. So, while some US government agencies—including the Department of Energy and the FBI—have given credence to the lab-leak theory, there remains no consensus in Washington.

Failure to get to the bottom of where Covid-19 originated may not only allow China to evade responsibility; it will also weaken the world’s ability to prevent another global pandemic. But there is reason to hope that the incoming Trump administration will revive the search for an answer. Beyond Trump’s own willingness to point the finger at China, some of his cabinet picks—notably, Robert Kennedy Jr, as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—challenged prevailing narratives about Covid-19 (albeit sometimes in dangerous ways).

An effective investigation will require considerable transparency from the US. The NIH, the US government’s medical-research agency, was funding studies on bat coronaviruses at the WIV as far back as 2014. The NIH knew that the work was risky; it was being done in China precisely because the US has stricter rules governing ‘gain-of-function’ research, which involves modifying a biological agent’s genetic structure to confer on it new or enhanced activity, such as increasing a pathogen’s transmissibility or virulence. The NIH continued to fund research at the WIV even after multiple State Department cables flagged the lab’s lax safety standards, stopping only after the pandemic began (when it also removed the description of gain-of-function research from its website).

Making matters worse, we now know that the WIV has been carrying out classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017. A 2021 State Department fact sheet acknowledged that some US funding for civilian research could have been diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the institute.

One rule of thumb in forensic investigations is to follow the money, so the Trump administration should start by disclosing the full extent of US funding of coronavirus research in China. But investigators will also have to follow the data, meaning that the US will have to disclose the results of the research it funded in Wuhan, which was part of a collaborative US-China scientific program.

Holding China accountable for its role in the pandemic is only the first step. To safeguard humanity’s future, the Trump administration will also have to address a more fundamental issue: dangerous gain-of-function research is still taking place in some labs in China, Russia and the West. The genetic enhancement of pathogens represents the greatest existential threat to humankind ever produced by science, even greater than nuclear weapons. By tightening rules on such activities—or, ideally, prohibiting lab research that could unleash a pandemic—Trump would leave an important positive legacy.

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