The first satellites for China’s ambitious G60 mega-constellation are in orbit in preparation for offering global satellite internet services—and we should worry about how this will help Beijing export its model of digital authoritarianism around the world.

The G60’s inaugural launch on 5 August 2024 carried 18 satellites into low-Earth orbit (LEO) on a Long March 6A rocket. Led by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology and backed by the Shanghai Municipal Government, the project aims to compete in the commercial satellite internet market with SpaceX’s Starlink, providing regional coverage by 2025 and global coverage by 2027.

The G60 is one of three mega-constellations that China is planning, alongside the Guowang project, run by state-owned China Satellite Services, and the Honghu-3 constellation, led by Shanghai Lanjian Hongqing Technology Company. These constellations provide the infrastructure to support China’s rapidly growing commercial space sector, including its satellite internet initiatives which are making rapid advances.

China launched the world’s first 6G test satellite into LEO in January. GalaxySpace recently made headlines by deploying satellite internet services in Thailand, the first time Chinese LEO satellite internet had been deployed overseas. In June, the Chinese company OneLinQ launched China’s first civilian domestic satellite internet service, indicating it would expand through countries that had signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Yet through these efforts, China is not only securing its position in the satellite internet market but laying the groundwork for expanding its digital governance model far beyond its borders.

Central to China’s ambition is the concept of cyber sovereignty—the notion that each nation has the right to govern its digital domain. In practice, China has used this principle to build a heavily censored surveillance system supporting the Chinese Communist Party’s power, widely condemned for violating human rights.

China’s satellite internet services would enable other governments to adopt similar practices, as the nature of satellite internet makes it susceptible to state control.

Satellite internet is more controllable due to its centralised infrastructure, where data is routed through a limited number of ground stations or gateways. This enables censorship and surveillance as service providers and authorities can more easily monitor, block and filter content.

In contrast, traditional internet infrastructure relies on a decentralised network of sub-sea cables and terrestrial networks managed by many stakeholders with thousands of data exchange points. This decentralised structure makes it difficult for any entity to exert complete control over the flow of information, as countries such as Russia — which initially welcomed the open internet, unlike China or North Korea—have learned.

Countries that use China’s satellite internet service providers could more easily control what information is accessible within their borders, much as the Great Firewall of China operates domestically. This could mean blocking politically sensitive topics, monitoring user activity, or shutting down the internet during unrest. While satellite internet has often been hailed as a means for dissidents and activists to bypass restrictive governments, the reality under China’s model, which would place it in the hands of nation-states, would be starkly different.

China is already exporting its digital authoritarianism through such initiatives as the Digital Silk Road, providing technologies and governance models that enable censorship, surveillance and social control to other countries. These efforts come amid a rise in the global spread of authoritarianism as governments seek to exert control over online spaces. Adopting Chinese satellite internet services would accelerate this trend, empowering other countries to implement similar controls and restrict human rights globally.

Offering satellite internet worldwide has other benefits for Beijing. Countries relying on China’s infrastructure for connectivity may risk being pressured to comply with Beijing’s demands, including censoring content critical of China, sharing sensitive data or suppressing domestic dissent in China’s interests. For example, a journalist in a country that relies on China’s satellite internet services might find his or her connection reduced or severed when reporting human rights abuses in China.

The centralised nature of satellite internet may also make countries more vulnerable to cyber espionage by the Chinese government or malicious actors. Chinese satellite providers may also be subject to China’s stringent data localisation policies, such as the Cybersecurity Law, which requires companies to store data within China and make it accessible to the Chinese government. As China’s satellite projects are intended to provide global coverage, the data of international users—spanning communication, location, and internet activity—would be subject to Chinese data laws. Chinese authorities could potentially access any data transmitted through Chinese satellite internet services.

The global deployment of China’s internet satellite services is still some way off and faces significant challenges. However, if China’s satellite internet services are adopted, the world may witness the rise of a new digital Iron Curtain extending from space, dividing the free flow of information and imposing state control on a global scale.

In November 2021, almost one year after he had posted a computer-generated image on Twitter of a grinning Australian soldier appearing to slit the throat of an Afghan child, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian bragged about the success of his tweet at the inaugural China Internet Civilization Conference in Beijing.

‘With this tweet, we put Australia firmly in the dock and let the world know about the heinous crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan,’ Zhao told his audience.

The point of the seminar at which Zhao spoke these words was, remarkably, how China can create a ‘credible, lovable and respectable image of China’. That warm-and-cuddly sounding goal had been laid out by President Xi Jinping in May 2021 in a politburo study session about how China can improve its external propaganda.

But any suggestion that it signalled that Xi was putting his wolf-warrior diplomats on a leash was soon put to rest. Zhao told his audience that his tweet was an example of Beijing ‘taking the initiative to set issues’ and fighting an ‘active war’ for international public opinion.

‘The Prime Minister of Australia held a press conference after we posted the tweet and asked us to apologise and to delete the tweet. He also asked Twitter to delete it,’ Zhao boasted.

‘Instead of deleting the tweet, I pinned it. Twitter didn’t delete the image and text, but they hid it behind a warning, which only made people more curious to know what the hidden image was.’

There’s scant evidence that the aggressive approach of China’s wolf-warrior diplomats changes any hearts and minds outside mainland China. Quite the opposite, in fact. Yale scholars Daniel Mattingly and James Sundquist exposed more than 3,000 English-speaking web users in India to real messages from Chinese diplomats and found that the more aggressive posts didn’t have broad appeal.

But from Zhao’s perspective, the tweet was a resounding success. In addition to causing Australia’s prime minister to publicly and, as it turned out, impotently protest the tweet, Zhao told his audience in Beijing that it went on to prompt three days of questioning from the media at the daily Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conferences.

The point of Zhao’s tweet was to distract, and it succeeded. As Zhao told his audience, it’s better for Beijing to set the terms of the debate rather than fall into any rhetorical traps laid by its perceived opponents. In this case, Zhao was mounting a counterattack against allegations of human rights abuses in China, particularly in Xinjiang.

Instead, it was Prime Minister Scott Morrison who fell into Zhao’s rhetorical trap. Eventually, Morrison did parry back with a message he should have led with in the first place. In a post on his WeChat account (note, this was before it was hijacked), Morrison said that Australia was a ‘free, democratic’ country and was using an ‘honest and transparent process’ to deal with the allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan.

‘Where there are alleged events that have taken place that require action, well we have set up the honest and transparent processes for that to take place. That is what a free, democratic, liberal country does,’ he wrote.

The message was censored on WeChat soon after in a move that still hasn’t been adequately explained by its parent company Tencent, though the article lives on to this day on the Australian embassy’s Weibo account.

The approach Morrison eventually took reflects a way of communicating with the Chinese public that some foreign diplomats working in Beijing call the ‘mirror technique’. It’s a strategy that involves holding a mirror up to yourself and being open and honest about your country’s own shortcomings.

It’s a technique that Ashley Rogers, head of communications at the British embassy in Beijing, has deployed several times in articles that he has written for the embassy’s Chinese social media accounts on democracy, media freedom, Xinjiang and LGBTQ+ issues.

The oblique approach is aimed at creating less heat and more light in an information environment that’s cut off from the rest of the world and primed with a nationalistic ideology. Instead of the comments section filling up with knee-jerk jingoistic responses, the hope is that there’s a chance for genuine discussion with and reflection from the Chinese audience.

‘We know that with our public Chinese audience, they will respond negatively to any direct criticism of the Chinese government,’ Rogers told me via email this week.

‘Therefore, we avoid communications that can be seen as lecturing or finger-pointing. Instead, we aim for a tone that is more conversational and creates space for discussion on these issues. Instead of talking about problems in China, we talk about problems the UK has faced and how we have been able to overcome these and make progress as a society.’

In my 2018 research on Weibo diplomacy and censorship, I discovered posts from the US embassy that prompted reflection from Chinese readers even when it seemed that wasn’t the intention of the post. A January 2018 post from the US embassy informing readers that they wouldn’t be able to continue posting to Weibo and WeChat during a government shutdown went viral, especially after state media gloated about it as yet another sign of American decline.

But even that post had to be censored after online discussion moved on from mere schadenfreude to a serious discussion comparing the US government with China’s own government.

As Rogers pointed out to me, China’s strict censorship regime means that the embassy’s audience is adept at reading between the lines. They don’t need the commentary to explicitly point to issues in China; they can figure it out themselves.

While some (but not many) other embassies commemorated the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre with posts of flickering candles that were very quickly censored this year, the UK embassy took a different approach, no doubt informed by the backlash it received the last time it posted its own flickering candle.

Instead, the embassy posted an article, penned by Rogers, about the Peterloo massacre which took place in Britain in 1819. The article was censored, but after being live for five hours, Rogers notes—the first time that one of their articles that didn’t refer to China had ever been censored.

‘Within this time, it had been read around 50,000 times (10 times the readership for a normal WeChat article published on our channels) and sparked conversations across social media including on the Reddit: China_irl Chinese channel for Reddit,’ Rogers told me. ‘The comments were overwhelmingly positive.’

When Zhao posted the image of the Australian soldier and the Afghan child, he was sharing a piece of agitprop inspired by testimony uncovered through the Brereton war crimes inquiry. The Chinese Communist Party, by contrast, would never countenance any public inquiry into the Tiananmen Square massacre or, as Australians know too well, an inquiry into the origins of a global pandemic that has wracked the world.

The damning inquiry uncovered something terrible about our country, but it should be something that, unlike the CCP, we’re able to talk about, with humility in a way that shows we’re prepared to hold up a mirror to our own failings. As Rogers reminded me this week, as an open society, this is one of our real strengths and we should play to it.

To watch the Chinese censorship apparatus working in overdrive in the past 48 hours has been to see it reach its reductio ad absurdum in real time.

So sensitive are the proposed changes to the Chinese constitution—which clear the way for President Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely—that even arguments made by social media users in favour of the change were caught in the censor’s net. ‘I’m not sure if Germany counts as a democracy,’ hazarded one Weibo user in a tepidly supportive post, ‘but their presidency doesn’t have any term limit.’ The post, like thousands of others, was promptly whacked by Chinese censors.

While some offered opinions, others sprang into action, prompting more action from the censors. Almost immediately after the constitutional announcement, queries for the word ‘emigrate’ spiked on Chinese search engine Baidu. Soon after, the word was blocked online altogether.

By Monday morning, ‘emigrate’ was only the 10th most censored search term on Chinese micro-blogging site Weibo. Outranking it were words one might expect—‘constitution’, ‘amend the constitution’, ‘Xi Jinping’ and ‘ascend to the throne’. But others, more obscure, were also blocked as censors scrambled to stamp out the memes and coded language that Weibo users were creating on the fly in an attempt to circumvent the censorship.

Some of the top words to face the chopping block on Monday morning included ‘Winnie’ from ‘Winnie the Pooh’, who has, since 2013, been used to mock Xi’s appearance. With it banned, censors then had to block references to ‘Disney China’, the company that owns the rights to the famously cuddly bear.

Chinese netizens then began to plumb the depths of both low and high culture to find new allusions—using screenshots as varied as those from popular TV shows featuring characters calling for the death of the emperor to direct references to historical figures like Yuan Shikai, the first president of the Republic of China who proclaimed himself emperor.

As the news spread, the list of banned words blew out to a ridiculous degree, to include ‘I disagree’, ‘boarding a plane’ and the title of George Orwell’s dystopian classic, Animal farm. Even the Roman alphabet letter ‘N’ was blocked.

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. Behind the gallows humour is growing despair. Those Chinese internet users looking for ways to emigrate surely know in their bones what Jerome Cohen, a Chinese legal expert and New York University professor, wrote in a blog post yesterday: ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s proposed abolition of China’s presidential term limit means that it has forgotten one of the main lessons of Mao’s long despotism. [The two-term limit’s] abolition signals the likelihood of another long period of severe repression.’ He goes on: ‘It will enable [Xi] to move more boldly and increases the risk of his acting arbitrarily and perhaps mistakenly in international relations.’

Aside from the geopolitical risks, it pays to consider this censorship spree as an object lesson in how arbitrary the Chinese Communist Party’s restrictions on free speech can be, and how readily the party can overreach.

Readers may well shrug their shoulders and ask what this has to do with them. So let’s be clear: China’s censorship apparatus is no longer just a boutique concern of China-watchers; it affects all of us.

During the Bennelong by-election in December last year, political parties courted the crucial Chinese–Australian vote in the electorate through the Chinese messaging app WeChat. The discussions that took place on that app between candidates, elected representatives and their constituents were therefore subject to CCP censorship by default.

What if some of those constituents wanted to ask a sensitive question about China’s foreign policy in the South China Sea? What if they wanted to discuss one of the ‘forbidden three Ts’—Tiananmen, Taiwan or Tibet? Would those messages have reached the candidates? How would we know?

We can be sure that views approved by the CCP will be allowed to flourish. While liberal voices have been systematically silenced online, illiberal voices have taken full flight, drowning out discussions domestically and taking aim at foreign targets on the other side of the Great Firewall.

Australian Twitter users got a taste of this treatment in 2016 when thousands of trolls attacked Australian Olympic swimmer Mack Horton and his supporters after Horton called his Chinese rival Sun Yang a ‘drug cheat’.

One by one, big Western companies like Apple, Daimler, Marriot International and Yum Brands are being cowed by hordes of nationalistic trolls for the crime of crossing patriotic red lines. The more abject the apologies, the more the trolls feel empowered and able to move on to bigger targets.

To what extent are our own companies, politicians, journalists and academics already self-censoring for fear of offending Xi’s China?

Foreign government efforts to undermine Australian democracy have been making headlines in the past few weeks, but we’re missing things.

In announcing new legislation to ban foreign political donations, Prime Minister Turnbull told us: ‘Foreign powers are making unprecedented and increasingly sophisticated attempts to influence the political process, both here and abroad.’

The 2017 foreign policy white paper signalled a protracted battle with foreign interference, stating: ‘The Government is concerned about growing attempts by foreign governments or their proxies to exert inappropriate influence on and to undermine Australia’s sovereign institutions and decision-making.’

And then, of course, there have been the shady examples of influence-buying.

While the recent focus has been on political donations and ‘how China’s spies operate in Australia’, one area of interference in the cyber domain has been overlooked: how Beijing can exert influence through the penetration of Chinese social media platforms in the Australian market.

A 2017 Deloitte survey suggests about 1 in 7 Australians source their news from social media. For around 1.5 million Chinese-speaking people in Australia, that includes the Chinese social media platform WeChat. That’s a problem because WeChat takes direction from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which means Australians who source their news through WeChat are having their news diet dictated by a foreign authoritarian state.

Research conducted by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has documented the extensive but subtle censorship imposed on WeChat users by the Chinese authorities. That includes blocking messages that contain censored keywords (such as Tiananmen massacre or Radio Free Asia), links to banned websites (including news sites critical of the Chinese government) and images with banned political content (such as images associated with controversial events like human rights crackdowns).

This censorship can be tricky for users to detect. For example, when a user sends a message with a censored keyword, they are not advised that their message was blocked; the message just doesn’t appear on the receiver’s end. The censorship regime is also far stricter in group chats than in private messages, suggesting an effort by the authorities to prevent mass dissemination of messages potentially damaging to the CCP.

Through rigorous testing, the Citizen Lab was able to demonstrate that users who originally sign up with a mainland Chinese mobile number, then later switch to an international number, remain under the same censorship as they would back in China. This has the potential to sweep up Australian holidaymakers, migrants of Chinese descent (more than half a million Australians were born in China), students, academics and business people. While users who establish a new account from Australia can avoid keyword censorship on WeChat, they still have some websites blocked and are subject to any future changes imposed by the CCP as it continues to tighten censorship at home.

This reach into Australian society should be of concern to Australia. WeChat has several potential pernicious applications. It is being used to limit the material Chinese Australians can read about issues that the CCP deems sensitive. It could also be used as a vehicle for monitoring dissident students in Australia who use the platform.

This is worrying because, as the white paper tells us, by 2030 in purchasing power parity terms, China’s economy will be nearly twice that of the United States, and China is already challenging the US for dominance in our region. As Hugh White outlines in his new Quarterly Essay, China is likely to use that power to push us into some uncomfortable territory. Its ability to shape Australian debate by exerting control over a major media channel like WeChat is one important way it could influence outcomes in Australia.

This has the potential to erode one of our key national strengths. As White also observes, in confronting the challenge of China’s rise ‘we have some real and growing assets, including over 1 million Australians of Chinese descent. It is too easy to overlook the vital and obvious contribution they will make to helping us find our way in a Chinese-dominated East Asia.’

There’s nothing wrong with Australians choosing to use WeChat, and all Australians are fortunate enough to have a diverse range of news sources they can access. But we deserve to know what is and isn’t being censored from our news diet, especially when it comes to dominant market platforms. Australia can’t stop the CCP from censoring WeChat, but it could require that all social media companies publish their censorship rules as a condition of operating in Australia (as companies like Facebook already do). That would at least allow us all to see what we’re missing out on and make it easier to pressure for change.