Tena koutou katoa.
Warm Pacific greetings from Tahuna, the traditional land of Ngai Tahu.
I'm going to give you a very short overview of the geopolitical context to China's political interference activities, which get called “united front work“. They can also be known as “grey zone” or “political warfare”.
I'm encouraging you to start calling them China's active measures, because when we talked about the Soviet Union's active measures, we understood that they included intelligence operations. They included united front work, which is a basic Soviet technique; it's not just unique to China. They included disinformation. They targeted the elite and they targeted diaspora dissident groups. Often when we talk about united front work, we can't really make sense of it, because we don't have an equivalent, but if we understand that what is going on is China's active measures, I think it will be very helpful.
Also, we're used to talking about the party-state system in China. I urge you to think about the party-state-military-market nexus to better understand those intertwined relationships, such as those with Huawei or in the ways that universities are doing the work of the PLA to access sensitive technology.
I'll go on to the backdrop. I have sent my PowerPoint presentation that I wanted to talk to. You are going to look at it later, and I understand it can't be seen because of your broadcasting.