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Alex Joske is an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government funded think tank based in Canberra, where his work focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and technology transfer efforts. Joske earned widespread attention in late 2018 for “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” his first report for the ASPI, which detailed an extensive CCP campaign to place thousands of military scientists in foreign universities to covertly secure cutting-edge research and technologies. His latest report, “The Party Speaks For You,” examines the Chinese government’s efforts to disrupt dissenting movements by co-opting their leaders and spokespeople. Joske, only a couple of years removed from university, has quickly risen to prominence on issues of Chinese government influence. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A.

Q: You’re one of the younger analysts at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. We’ll go into your first report, “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” which was widely followed in 2018, but first, how did you come to focus on China?

A: I lived in China for about six years as a kid, because my father was there as a diplomat and an economist. My mother is also from China, so I’ve always been able to speak a bit of Chinese. And then, when I went into university, I majored in classical Chinese. More than anything else I’ve studied, that’s what gave me the kinds of research skills that I use in my work today. It’s so hard to read classical Chinese, and if you’re taught it the right way, you have to dig to fully understand all the references and allusions in the text. You have to know how to read something by looking at context and guessing the meaning of things when you don’t have complete information. So, I feel like it’s a similar set of skills to what investigative journalists and researchers use.

But it was journalism and working at the student newspaper that really got me interested in what I’m working on now. And it has paired well with my interest in Chinese language. In my second year at school, John Garnaut [the respected journalist and one time advisor to former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull] had been writing about Chinese Communist Party influence on [Australian] universities and how they [the Communist Party] were using student organizations, almost as informant groups. So, I took a look at the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at my own university. And, you know, I don’t know if they’re informants or anything, but they clearly had close ties to the [Chinese] government. My first China story was in 2016 about how the CSSA president went into the university pharmacy and forced the pharmacist to let him chuck out all their copies of Epoch Times [the Falun Gong sponsored newspaper critical of the CCP] and forced her to refuse to distribute further copies of the Epoch Times.

You were pretty young. What was the reaction? 

That story kind of blew up at the time. I think it got some coverage in mainstream papers because that was just when Australia was starting to look into CCP influence. 

Wasn’t there a Netflix series set in Australia focused on this very same subject? 

Yes, “Secret City.” That TV show based on a book written by Chris Uhlmann, one of the journalists who was breaking some of these stories on CCP influence. It kind of drew on some of his experiences, from a decade ago, when he was reporting on how our defense minister at the time, Joel Fitzgibbon, had a really close relationship with someone who came from, I think, a Chinese military family. It looked like they were trying to influence him. Recently, we found out that this lady was good friends with Liu Chaoying, the PLA Lt. Colonel who was involved in the [Bill] Clinton donation scandal. 

So, you were interested in journalism. Why didn’t you end up at the Sydney Morning Herald or one of the country’s major publications working on this topic?

I was thinking of becoming a journalist, but I just felt it was going to be hard for me to really specialize in the things that I wanted to work on as a journalist. At that stage, I’d probably have to spend a couple years doing breaking news, and then work towards a China correspondent role. Besides, I’ve always wanted to do more detailed research on [Chinese influence campaigns] because I’d spent a year working on it pretty heavily with Clive Hamilton [Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University] for his book, Silent Invasion, before I finished university, and I just felt like I didn’t really understand it yet. And working at ASPI was really attractive because it would give me a lot of time to shut everything else out and focus on this with more time and resources.

You published your first report, “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” shortly after you graduated. Take me through that. How long did that take you? What was your objective? And what was the most surprising finding?

“Picking Flowers, Making Honey” came out three months after I started working at ASPI.  When I was working with Clive Hamilton, we were looking at the research collaboration between Australia and China, and I remember reading this article that tracked how North Korean scientists were collaborating with people around the world in peer reviewed journal articles. And, just sort of on a whim, I found out what database the study was using, and I typed in the names of some Chinese military scientists and some Chinese military research institutions. It pulled up hundreds of papers that members of the Chinese military had written with scientists from Australia, the U.S., U.K., and all around the world. 

At first, Clive and I wrote about just a couple of specific cases. But what I wanted to do with this report for ASPI was try to look at it systematically and work out what was driving it on the Chinese side. How big of a program was this and how big was it internationally? I was really surprised by the scale of the problem. At first, I assumed that maybe the Chinese military had sent a couple hundred scientists overseas. But it turned out at the time that they’d sent around 2,500 in a decade. 

Where overseas were these military scientists going?

They were mostly going to the UK and the United States. After that, Singapore, Australia, and Canada are the main destinations for PLA scientists. Another really exciting thing that I found was that some of them were claiming to be from totally made up or fake institutions. Many were upfront and said, “I’m from the National University of Defense Technology” [a real military university in China]. But there were a couple instances I looked at where they were saying that they’re from, for example, the Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute. I started looking at all the people claiming to be from there, and none of them had institutional email addresses. None of them. And there was no website. I couldn’t find any information about this institution, except for papers written by people who claimed to be from it. And then I looked a bit more closely, and every single person claiming to be from this institute was actually working at the PLA Information Engineering University, which is their sort of [signals intelligence] training institution. And they were going overseas. For example, one of them went to Carnegie Mellon University to study voice recognition technology.

And you were able to document all this?

Yes. And sometimes the deception was really brazen. There were papers written in Chinese, but the abstract and some of the metadata with the key information was translated into English. And on those papers, sometimes they’d say in Chinese that they’re from this PLA institution, and then in the English [abstract] they’d list a totally different affiliation on the same paper.

Was this illegal? What are the rules, if any, regarding military scientists working at Western universities?

There were some precedents in the United States. The U.S. has some legal provisions or some legislation on what’s called ‘the provision of defense services.’ That has been used to stop, for example, collaboration with Taiwanese military scientists in the 1970s. But this [deception] was something that people hadn’t really considered before. They didn’t expect it. And it was a shock to me that the Chinese military would be successfully sending so many scientists to some of the countries that it was preparing for war with, in a worst case scenario.

Did any universities respond to your report, or even ask questions about it?

No. It’s been quiet from the universities. But it’s certainly gotten a bit better recently. Before I published “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” I reached out to my alma mater but also Universities Australia, which is a representative body for our universities. And I couldn’t get meetings with either of them. I wanted to put these issues to the universities before the report came out and get their thoughts. I managed to talk to a few scientists, but that was all.

What type of research were these PLA scientists engaged in?

 It was a really broad range of almost entirely dual-use technologies with clear military applications. So, there were people working on hypersonic aircraft, people working on signal jamming for communications, people working on radar technology, and supercomputers. In Australia, for example, there’s a scientist who trained about a dozen people from the PLA’s supercomputer program. They were working with [Chinese] generals who are in charge of those supercomputers, which are among the fastest in the world and used for simulating nuclear explosions and simulating wind tunnel testing for aircraft.

Isn’t some of this classified or top secret research?

Well, no because a lot of it is still at the level of basic research. It’s often fundamental research, and Australian universities, for example, don’t carry out classified research. A lot of scientists in the U.S. don’t either. Also, many Western governments do have export control regimes that prevent people from accessing and exporting some of these technologies that I just mentioned to people outside of the country. But in every country, except for the U.S., those restrictions only apply to exports. So, what this actually means is that universities can train people in technologies that they can’t export to them.

But they take the ideas out. They can just come in and export it in their brain, right?

That’s right. So you can train someone to build something that you couldn’t export to them. And right now, that’s still legal in every country except the United States.

Did you hear from any U.S. universities?

I briefed quite a few universities in America. I briefed the Association of American Universities, the AAU. It’s a bit better in the U.S., but some universities are still focused on trying to deal with it as a PR issue, rather than a really serious security and research integrity problem. I haven’t had universities come in and want to build a really effective partnership with other universities that helps them and other universities get ahead of government policy. The best thing would be if the universities could do this on their own, and the government didn’t have to come in with legislation that could end up breaking stuff. Ultimately, universities should understand their research partners best, but in practice, they don’t always fully understand who they are working with. They haven’t invested enough resources in thinking through those problems and getting proactive and not just waiting for government policy to force them to do something.

While I was based in China for The New York Times, our publication — indeed my own email account — was hacked by PLA Unit 61398. Were those hacking units also involved in these overseas programs?

There was a little bit there. You could see people going overseas from the PLA Information Engineering University, which is the dedicated university for training hackers. All of them were going overseas and studying things like cryptography and cybersecurity. And in my more recent report, “The China Defence Universities Tracker,” I looked at a lab at Wuhan University that’s been accused by both Taiwanese and U.S. government officials of carrying out cyber attacks for the PLA. They’d been sending visiting scholars to Australian universities from the specific lab that has been linked to the PLA.

From my understanding, some global technology companies collaborate with some of the leading Chinese universities, which in turn often have some affiliation with the PLA. Is that right?

It’s not on my radar, but it has come up a couple of times. A lot of these universities that work hand-in-hand with the PLA on sensitive things, including cyber attacks, are among China’s best universities. And Western companies have really tried to build close ties with a lot of them. In one case I looked at, a defense technology lab at Tsinghua University looked like it was basically another name for a more innocent sounding lab that had been funded by the World Bank. You’ll often see these layers of deception where people will use different affiliations or they’ll have two labs with slightly different names. One is clearly defense focused and one looks a bit more normal, but in practice, all the personnel look to be the same.

ASPI has also done some work mapping China’s tech giants. Were you involved in that effort?

Yes, a little bit. I worked on Huawei and CETC, the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation.

Can you tell us a little about CETC because not many people have ever heard of this company. 

CETC is sort of the Chinese military’s electronics company. And it’s also just one of China’s leading companies for communications technology and electronics. But it was formed on the basis of defense research institutes, and it’s still a state-owned defense conglomerate that has been going overseas quite a lot. They invested in an Australian University. They’ve got a sort of European headquarters in Austria. At the same time, they’re developing quantum radar for the Chinese military. 

Do they reach ordinary consumers? Isn’t this a company with 80,000 employees? 

Most people [around the world] have been watched by security cameras made by CETC because they own HikVision, which is one of the world’s largest, if not the largest supplier of security cameras around the world. 

Okay, HikVision is on the U.S. Entity list and banned from getting U.S. parts, but not CETC, right? 

Yes, it’s a funny situation where only parts of CETC are on the U.S. Entity List; some specific research institutes, but not the whole company. 

Do you have anything to say about Huawei or ZTE from your research, either into the military or into what’s going on in Australia?

It’s not really my area, to be honest. But one of the takeaways from Australia’s response to Huawei, at least to me, is that small countries can lead the way on foreign policy around the world on these issues. Because we were one of the first countries to block Huawei from building our 5G network. There are a lot of areas where Australia has really been ahead. We raised the alarm on foreign interference operations, for example. And recently, we pushed the global effort for independent inquiry into the [origins of the] coronavirus. 

The first time I heard about you, you were being interviewed by the program 60 Minutes Australia about the Crown Casino scandal. Tell us a little about that.

So far, my work on military-civil fusion and Chinese defense research has gotten the most attention. But I’ve actually always been a lot more interested in political influence and Chinese intelligence work. And that’s what I got back into with my recent report on the United Front [a coalition of entities working towards the CCP’s goals]. 

With the Crown story, it turned out that a lot of people they were looking at in these organized crime networks also had political links and were tied to the United Front system. So it was a fascinating example of people popping up in this investigation who I had previously mentioned because they were running United Front groups. And it turned out they weren’t just doing that. They were also doing money laundering. They were schmoozing with politicians. They were hanging out with Xi Jinping’s cousin. And they were running massive gambling junkets.

You also were interviewed about a major spy case in Australia last year, involving an alleged Chinese spy who defected to Australia named Wang Liqiang. There was a bizarre story surrounding his life in Hong Kong, his influence operations, his ties to military businesses, and his identity. China even publicized video of him on trial inside China. A lot of people, in the end, were skeptical about whether this guy really is a spy who defected. What do you say?

As the months have gone on I’ve only become more convinced that it’s genuine. It’s really interesting because the story challenged so many people’s assumptions about how the Chinese military worked and how Chinese military intelligence operations worked. That’s what a lot of people struggle with. But what I found was that the guy Wang Liqiang named as an alleged Chinese military intelligence officer absolutely had ties to Chinese military intelligence; he had changed his name before going to Hong Kong. He did have ties to these senior Chinese generals who were involved in stealing technology from overseas. It all fits together with the picture of the Chinese military, and particularly Chinese military intelligence, in the 1990s that people like James Mulvenon have written about, where it was extremely corrupt, messy, totally wrapped up with business activity and making a buck. And using Hong Kong as a launch pad for doing things around the world.

Was there anything that made you uncomfortable with Wang Liqiang and his story, such as his background as an art student. A lot of people picked on all of these little things. They said there were discrepancies about his passport or different things. What do you say?

A lot of suspicions people had about him were based on a misreading of some of the reports about him and just false assumptions about the Chinese military and Chinese military intelligence. One of the main questions was how can this 26 or 27 year old who studied visual arts become an assistant to this guy that he claims is a spymaster, a senior intelligence officer in the Chinese military? But it actually makes a lot of sense, because the guy he worked for had been sent to Hong Kong almost three decades ago, and since then, China’s gone through three leadership changes. PLA intelligence has been totally reorganized. And this guy’s original patrons in the military intelligence system are now dead or retired. So he’s almost a relic of the period when the PLA was like this, and it still is to some extent, you know, incredibly corrupt and wrapped up in business activity. And that’s especially the case with its intelligence work. He would have had to recruit his own subordinates to maintain that kind of behavior, and he himself had been recognized for his talent within the Chinese military at a very early age.

You must be worried a little about your safety, especially since you started publishing.

I think the Chinese government hacked the Lowy Institute, which is a similar think tank to us in Sydney. So far we haven’t detected that we’ve been hacked. But I remember when I launched “Picking Flowers,” there was someone looking really suspicious in the audience who we’d seen at a couple of events. She’d been relaying everything I was saying to somebody else through WeChat messages. And she was taking photos of the audience, which included Chinese students and dissidents and also a lot of government officials. That’s fairly standard for anyone who works in this area.

Do you have any plans to travel to China?  

If you work on such a sensitive topic, you have to make a decision. The Chinese government just sentenced an alleged Australian drug smuggler to death, and it’s kind of looking like what they were doing to Canada. I feel like they might be looking to arrest an Australian Michael Kovrig [a Canadian former diplomat who was detained and indicted for espionage by the Chinese government]. So I just made a decision to accept that I can’t go back.

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