Articles by: "Geoff Wade"
State Grid and Australia’s national security interests

The State Grid Corporation of China (国家电网公司), the world’s largest electric utility company, is the monopoly power distributor across China in all but five southern provinces and a behemoth with an extensive network of subsidiary …

Sabah, the PLA Navy and Northern Australia

In a quiet but undoubtedly significant event, Admiral Wu Shengli (吴胜利), commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and a member of the PRC’s Central Military Commission recently visited Malaysia with an entourage of 10 …

Landbridge and the port of Darwin: a postscript

My Strategist post on Monday has stimulated considerable interest from readers in respect of the claimed People’s Liberation Army (PLA) connections with Landbridge. To provide further information and allow people to make their own assessments of the connections, …

Landbridge, Darwin and the PRC

Peter Jennings’ ‘Darwin: storm in a port’ has brought to broader attention the apparent nonchalance with which the lease of the port of Darwin by Chinese firm Landbridge  has been treated by many parts of …

Further Defence tasks outsourced

 The commercial woes of Qantas have blanketed the airwaves and newspapers of late, but the government’s intent to change the Qantas Sale Act to allow more foreign ownership of the airline seems unlikely to be …

World News Connection disconnected

The last day of 2013 marked more than the close of the year: it signalled the end of one of the most important global sources of publicly-accessible intelligence. Through a low-key notice, the United States …

Changing Asia: China’s high-speed railway diplomacy

A new term has become popular in Chinese political parlance over the last few years. This neologism—‘high-speed railway diplomacy’ (高铁外交)—is used to describe the mechanisms by which China’s burgeoning capacities in high-speed railway (HSR) construction …

China’s six wars in the next 50 years

In a recent post, I introduced a new PRC book entitled ‘China Is Not Afraid — New Threats to National Security and Our Strategic Responses’, (中国不怕——国防安全新威胁与我们的战略应对). I suggested that the volume is part of a …

‘China is not afraid’

The Chinese military has been doing some sabre-rattling lately. While PLA naval forces have been busy asserting China’s claims in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, there’ve been larger efforts in train …

Spying beyond the façade

The almost-eternal profession of covert intelligence collection and analysis (a.k.a. spying) has been much in the news of late, with the US National Security Agency and Australia’s own Signals Directorate sharing headlines across the region …