ABSTRACT
The context, aim, and purpose of this chapter are as follows: to explain China’s specific political purposes for using hybrid threats; to explore the cultural and ideological origins of Chinese hybrid threats; to identify the tools and actors China uses to implement hybrid threats; and to use examples to illustrate how China deploys hybrid threats across Australian society. Using inductive and deductive reasoning, first- and second-hand literature, author-conducted confidential interviews, and a heuristic model developed by the author and used by Chinese and Western military and civilian defence analysts, this chapter finds the following. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) deployment of hybrid threats should be understood as a force multiplier and an integral component of its Belt and Road initiative and its portfolio of related foreign direct investment (FDI), fiscal aid, bilateral financing, and development policies worldwide. Although much of this activity is legitimate, the CCP is simultaneously leveraging its tremendous cultural, economic, political, technological, and private sector engagement with other nations as vectors for ambiguous and plausibly deniable malign hybrid threat activities. This chapter shows how Chinese hybrid threats are designed to operate across all these spaces, exploiting the open character of liberal democratic societies—including democratic norms of supporting political campaigns, freedom of speech, education, and open markets—to find gaps and achieve effects that are damaging to the target state’s national security across the whole of society. This includes Chinese hybrid threat activities designed to win the battle for influence by changing how other societies think and speak about China.
