Introduction

Abstract

The emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a global power has reanimated a central challenge for liberal democracies: how to protect both national security and political liberties when adversaries are willing and able to use one against the other. In President Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ of PRC power, politicians, pundits and the media in the UK, the US and Australia are paying increasing attention to the overseas political activities of Beijing and its supporters. Many such concerns are well founded. Covert and overt political activities are in the Leninist DNA of China’s ruling party, and communications technology has created new opportunities for authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent beyond their borders. On top of this, pro-Beijing patriots and wealthy lobbyists are advancing their views with increased confidence, and many influential economic actors involved in trade relations with China share significant overlapping interests with its party-state. Yet the need for policy responses to these developments also raises a further set of risks from within liberal democracies. These range from the polarisation of public discourse and the rise of alarmist rhetoric that fans xenophobia and harms social cohesion through to legislative encroachments on civil liberties and growing powers of national security agencies that operate with limited public oversight. Such dilemmas are not new. The onset of the Cold War in the mid20 century prompted painful choices and numerous missteps in liberal democracies. In the US, claims of widespread communist infiltration and subversion led to ‘McCarthyist’ political inquisitions and purges, along with legislation later deemed unconstitutional. The UK and Australia both saw a major expansion in the largely unaccountable powers of security agencies that historians have argued generated little useful