IV. Managing the Risks

Abstract

With Sino–American geopolitical rivalry escalating, PRC overseas political activities are presenting US-aligned liberal democracies with an array of complex, unavoidable policy issues. Alongside thorny technical questions of economic dependence, defence technology exports and PRC investment in strategic infrastructure, liberal democracies need to wrestle with how to properly manage the array of distinct political challenges presented by the CCP and its supporters’ overseas activities. Chapter I showed how faulty terminology has made the challenges difficult to define. Chapter II disaggregated their varying nature, causes, actors and relationship to liberal-democratic principles. Chapter III showed how the need to respond itself generates a further series of risks to social cohesion, civil liberties and national security. This chapter offers a set of policy suggestions based on a riskmanagement framework that takes the preservation and strengthening of three core liberal-democratic institutions – integrity of the political system, protection of civil rights of individuals and groups, and academic freedom in research and education – as the immediate and overriding goal of policy measures. As discussed in the Introduction, this contrasts with aggregative approaches that apply a singular national security lens to a wide array of problems, and often take suppressing PRC political activity, or the conduct of ‘political warfare’, as overriding goals. The disaggregation-based risk-management approach advocated here implies neither permissiveness towards PRC interference, nor neutrality in the incipient systemic competition between democracy and authoritarianism. It reflects instead an underlying assumption that the prospects for liberal democracy in the current global context depend on the strength of liberal-democratic institutions and consistency between liberaldemocratic principles and governments’ policies and practices. Common organisational risk-management practice involves a hierarchy of hazard control measures. If it is possible to eliminate a risk entirely, this is the preferred course of action. The next-best alternative is substitution, meaning replacement of the source with a less risky alternative. The third choice is control measures to maximise distance