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My Take | Did China just go after powerful Aussie think tank?

  • Hawkish Australian Strategic Policy Institute, whose chief complains about being targeted by state-backed hackers, is prone to exaggerating the ‘China threat’

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Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Shutterstock

As a long-time pundit, I am often disappointed that the worst punishment I ever got from the US government was extremely cordial and informative public relations chats with officials from the State Department and the US Agency for Global Media.

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Sometimes, I fantasise that Washington would single me out for criticism or even sanctions. That would raise my profile. Alas, I am just a small potato and hardly worth the trouble.

Now Justin Bassi is not a small potato. As the executive director of a well-known think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), he is more like a middle to moderately large-sized potato.

Maybe that’s why he has been in the cross hairs of Beijing, or so he claims.

Bassi has just written an op-ed in The Canberra Times, complaining that China is taking aim at the ASPI, and that “should be a wake-up call whether you [as an Australian] like, dislike or don’t know ASPI”.

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He claims that “China’s main security agency directed state-backed cyberhackers to target [them]”.

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