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ASPI’s decades: China’s cyberpower
Posted By Graeme Dobell on October 5, 2021 @ 06:00
ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.
The list of 14 grievances [1] issued last year by China’s embassy in Canberra had one point aimed at ASPI.
Among the sins of the Australian government, in the eyes of China, was to fund an ‘anti-China think tank for spreading untrue reports, peddling lies around Xinjiang and so-called China infiltration aimed at manipulating public opinion against China’.
The aggrieved and annoyed tone was also an acknowledgement: the institute’s research was having an impact. Beijing’s growing cyberpower had made China a natural focus for the work of ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre [2].
As ICPC’s director Fergus Hanson noted in March 2020: ‘The simple act of looking at what the Chinese government says it wants to do and is doing has produced some remarkable empirical research and insights [3] into the type of state that Australia, and the world, is dealing with.’
Chinese anger at what’s been revealed produced unusual pushback, smear campaigns and cyber-enabled interference targeting ASPI and individual staff members. Tackling state-backed information operations and disinformation can also make you a target.
In Enter the cyber dragon [4] in 2013, Tobias Feakin wrote about the cyber capabilities of Chinese intelligence agencies and their ‘industrial scale’ operations.
While Chinese agencies were collecting vast quantities of data, Feakin said, ‘what happens to it once it’s collected is relatively unknown. We’re not certain how the data is processed and analysed, and whether it ever becomes a fully usable intelligence product that’s of value to Chinese policymakers’.
A deeper understanding of what China was doing in the cyber realm, Feakin wrote, would shape Australia’s own policy settings.
A 2014 report on China’s cyberpower by James Lewis dismissed claims that China was waging an economic war [5] in cyberspace. China’s behaviour, he wrote, had more to do with commercial interests than geopolitical strategy:
China’s cyber doctrine has three elements: control of networks and data to preserve political stability, espionage to build China’s economy and technological capabilities, and disruptive acts aimed at damaging an opponent’s military command and control and weapons systems, all of which are dependent on software and networks.
ASPI staff and contributors to The Strategist debated whether the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei should be allowed a role in Australia’s 5G network [6], tackling the broad Australia–China relationship, other states’ experience with Huawei, the Chinese government’s approach to cyber espionage and intellectual property theft, and the Chinese Communist Party’s view of state security and intelligence work.
In August 2018, the government banned China’s Huawei and ZTE, stating that ‘the involvement of vendors who are likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government that conflict with Australian law, may risk failure by the carrier to adequately protect a 5G network from unauthorised access or interference’.
It was a key moment in the dawning of an icy era in Australia’s relations with China.
The anger that China directed against ASPI was based on the detailed work of the cyber centre and the facts it revealed about Chinese policy and behaviour:
In 2020, Hanson responded to criticism [3] that ASPI’s research on China was ‘one-sided’ and ‘dystopian’. He noted that Australia had put lots of effort into understanding China’s economy, but other critical areas were ignored, such as technology transfer programs, united front activities, military modernisation and interference in diaspora communities:
ASPI has one of the largest concentrations of Chinese-language speakers in any think tank in the country. Their specialisations include China’s military, technology transfer, online censorship, smart cities, social credit and industrial espionage. Our China research runs across different thematic programs and, while it attracts attention, is still only a modest part of ASPI’s total research output.
Hanson said ASPI didn’t have an editorial line on China, but it did follow a very clear research method: original empirical work that, wherever possible, generated new data. Researchers had to trawl through masses of information in multiple languages over months and sometimes years in order to create new datasets:
This focus on empirical research is grounded in the idea that analysis informed by the hard work of empirical research is the most valuable contribution we can make to the policy debate. People don’t have to agree with our analysis, but it at least provides a factual basis for a debate.
Drawn from the book on the institute’s first 20 years: An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021 [26].
Article printed from The Strategist: https://aspistrategist.ru
URL to article: /aspis-decades-chinas-cyberpower/
URLs in this post:
[1] 14 grievances: https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/if-you-make-china-the-enemy-china-will-be-the-enemy-beijing-s-fresh-threat-to-australia-20201118-p56fqs.html
[2] International Cyber Policy Centre: https://www.aspistrategist.ru/program/international-cyber-policy-centre
[3] remarkable empirical research and insights: /aspis-china-research-the-big-picture/
[4] Enter the cyber dragon: https://www.aspistrategist.ru/report/special-report-enter-cyber-dragon-understanding-chinese-intelligence-agencies-cyber
[5] economic war: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/import/SR74_China_cyberpower.pdf?VersionId=R7nGofs8ZdT2nhDIb6NqAekikBTLuC9m
[6] role in Australia’s 5G network: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2018-10/Huawei%20and%20Australias%205G%20Network.pdf?VersionId=wk2qurC5OGPs1DZmePkkYm_bKw8Rn5Yj
[7] censorship: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2018-05/Weibo%20diplomacy%20in%20China.pdf?VersionId=sDRZXengE6wbHcoaAmYFKNEjUpa7zODd
[8] deterrence: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2018-05/Deterrence%20in%20cyberspace_0.pdf?VersionId=JtY9WhXLd53pCnni2U5PiHr8ikcPMC5I
[9] ‘social credit system’: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2018-06/Social%20credit_1.pdf?VersionId=O3X2xnkGONvJFjK4Z57Xbf06lget_MID
[10] ‘dual-use’: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2018-07/Tech-Entanglemen_PolicyBrief_20180702-v2.pdf?VersionId=7BahbUgNHCY1umz4PCrLOEdBJUrjULCg
[11] big data: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2018-06/Winner%20takes%20it%20all_0.pdf?VersionId=r0DDh71qxQgqwHtX8z8tmScoz55JQVyc
[12] hostile narratives: https://www.aspistrategist.ru/news/online-influence-and-hostile-narratives-eastern-asia-report
[13] study abroad: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2018-10/Picking%20flowers%2C%20making%20honey_0.pdf?VersionId=H5sGNaWXqMgTG_2F2yZTQwDw6OyNfH.u
[14] elections: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-05/Hacking%20democracies_0.pdf?VersionId=.RKLLc8uKm1wobfWH1VvC.C88xGWYY29
[15] How do we compete with them?: https://www.aspistrategist.ru/report/capabilities-competition-and-communication
[16] great-power rivalry: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-10/A%20new%20Sino-Russian%20high-tech%20partnership_0.pdf?VersionId=xAs9Tv5F.GwoKPiV9QpQ4H8uCOet6Lvh
[17] tools for shaping global governance: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-10/Engineering%20global%20consent%20V2.pdf?VersionId=eIvKpmwu2iVwZx4o1n8B5MAnncB75qbT
[18] influence and interference operations: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-09/Mind%20your%20tongue.pdf?VersionId=v8CaHleKmZF1Bt6zh9_B8sib20tph_6h
[19] information operations: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-12/Tweeting%20through%20the%20great%20fire%20wall.pdf?VersionId=TRGkGXh8FPY5KXLSc_4SfDUy7sMfNkw0
[20] talent-recruitment programs: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2020-10/Hunting%20the%20phoenix_v2.pdf?VersionId=TX_kD_pNKlBF.xuSdZO1UMuTKmiNEeAK
[21] co-opting: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2020-06/The%20party%20speaks%20for%20you_0.pdf?VersionId=gFHuXyYMR0XuDQOs.6JSmrdyk7MralcN
[22] surveillance, censorship and propaganda’: https://www.aspistrategist.ru/report/tiktok-wechat
[23] coercive diplomacy: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2020-08/The%20CCPs%20coercive%20diplomacy_0.pdf?VersionId=4M_JTUAd05Bjek_hvHt1NKKdCLts4kbY
[24] centralised repository: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2020-10/Digital%20currency_1.pdf?VersionId=I70Ql0IhgfgSIJeH6YKTN0ml.Y6MLHLI
[25] Chinese-language media landscape: https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2020-12/The%20influence%20environment.pdf?VersionId=Mjytg1N_V2azySJlJoahgWzMOqxEpMYk
[26] An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021: https://www.aspistrategist.ru/report/informed-and-independent-voice-aspi-2001-2021
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