China's friends in far-flung places
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 6, 2010
China pays a lot of attention to anniversaries. Next year it faces a big one: the centenary of the moment in October 1911 when a republican underground in the Yangtze city of Wuchang set off a revolt that became a revolution, overturning imperial rule.That revolution will have many claimants as political heirs: the Communist Party in Beijing, the Kuomintang in Taipei, and probably many individual Chinese who think both those parties have betrayed the high hopes of the original revolutionary leaders, Sun Yat-sen and Huang Hsing.The sudden collapse of the celestial monarchy in 1911 helps explain another phenomenon troubling Australia and countries: the extensive networking by Chinese embassies and consulates to build up sources of information and influence, using expatriate Chinese people as nodes of contact.Much of that networking, and more conventional intelligence activity by the Ministry of State Security, has been directed at building support for the People's Republic in the Chinese diaspora, as well as detecting and countering dissident or subversive movements.Sun, after all, inspired the 1911 revolution from outside China, where he was successful in raising support and finance from wealthy Chinese and sympathy from Westerners and other Asians.When the Chinese Legation in London kidnapped Sun in 1896 and was preparing to spirit him home to execution, British sympathisers won his release. For 16 years Sun's efforts seemed futile; rebellion after rebellion was put down by imperial troops. Then the half-botched plot at Wuchang caused support for Beijing to crumble all across southern China.Communist rule, and China itself, is immensely stronger than the feeble Manchu dynasty then. But Mao Zedong and his successors have always been keenly aware of history and prone to take precautions - witness the savage crackdown on the Falun Gong movement at home and the huge attention paid to its exiled elements, as exposed by the defecting diplomat from the Sydney consulate, Chen Yonglin.Many other governments also use diasporas to further national aims. India has steadily formalised the status of "non-resident Indians" - initially to extract deposits of foreign currency, later to help brand and promote wider economic power - and even has a special minister for them. Israel and Ireland are other notable cases.How benignly we view these hot-housed linkages depends largely on the image of the foreign country concerned and its government.The term "agent of influence" is a much abused one, and perhaps should be dropped. It came into use during the Cold War, when it was insinuated that certain individuals in the West were unwitting agents of the Soviet KGB, giving an inflated importance to the type of person Lenin once called "useful idiots".A similar accusation no doubt hovers among critics of the former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon's relationship with the Sydney businesswoman Helen Liu, a relationship that Fitzgibbon strenuously denies is in any way compromising or improperly hidden from parliamentary scrutiny of pecuniary interests.Those who look askance at politicians, executives or journalists accepting trips and other hospitality from Chinese interests would probably not apply the same criteria to those who take part in, say, the Australian American Leadership Dialogue or the regular trips to Israel put on by the Jewish Board of Deputies.Many countries, including Australia, use officially sponsored trips to influence foreign opinion in the short term, and cultivate the emerging leaders of the future. Misjudgments happen. Barry Wain mentions in his new book, discussed in the Herald last week, that in 1969 Canberra invited a rising young Malaysian politician called Mahathir Mohamad for a trip, then withdrew the invitation when he lost an election. Mahathir later became Malaysia's prime minister for 22 years, nursing a grudge against Australia.The Chinese networking has long looked much more systematic than most and, as China's strategic interests become more global, it's seen as becoming a foreign-intelligence gathering system as well as one protecting domestic security. Where the old round of trips, banquets and tacky memorabilia was pretty easy for our counter-spooks to monitor, the addition of cyber-hacking makes it a more sinister game.According to a warning the British security agency MI5 is said to have circulated to 300 leading companies in Britain, China's state security and military intelligence agencies are engaged in concerted efforts to hack into business computer systems, as well as blackmail executives caught in embarrassing situations.Chinese spooks were said to hang around trade fairs and industrial exhibitions handing out small cameras and USB memory sticks as free promotional "gifts" but which contain Trojan programs that open up the computer to remote access when they are plugged in.In addition, the recent Google case has highlighted intense activity by China-based hackers to break into Western computer systems - activity that must have some official condonement, at the very least. One fear is that the malware could put China in a position to shut down key infrastructure systems in the event of conflict.One suspects that if a conflict did break out, say over Taiwan, the Chinese would be hit by a barrage of cyber-warfare by the Americans that they wouldn't begin to imagine before it happens. We should, meanwhile, be careful to separate actual espionage and subversion from what is mostly an effort by a nervous regime to win friends and influence in a global economy where its officials and business leaders are still comparative novices.
© 2010 Sydney Morning Herald
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