Australia's international spy chief has suggested a growing number of Chinese officials are feeding information to Australian intelligence agencies because they are unhappy with the Chinese Communist Party's increasingly authoritarian trajectory.
Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) director-general Paul Symon made the comments on Tuesday during a rare speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney to mark the agency's 70th anniversary.
Mr Symon painted a fairly bleak picture of Australia's strategic outlook and said that countries hostile to Australia were not just engaging in spying but also "seeking to weaken our institutions and bend our values".
But he also suggested that authoritarian countries were becoming increasingly brittle — and exposed to Western intelligence agencies – as they clamped down on internal dissent.
"ASIS benefits from espionage opportunities that emerge from the suppressed dissent within authoritarian states," he said.
"This provides us an edge."
Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2018 abolished the two-term limit on the presidency, paving the way for him to remain in power for years.
Mr Symon said authoritarian states "engineer their own trust deficit" by regarding all relationships as transactional.
He said so-called "Wolf Warriors" – hawkish Chinese officials who publicly berate other countries — "misjudge the intelligence of citizens around the globe".
And he suggested that moves by strongman leaders to stifle internal opposition opened up new opportunities for ASIS agents in those countries.
"Increasingly, officials [and] individuals unhappy with the trajectory of closed societies are willing to speak up and take risks," he said.
"In China, we have an ancient culture but [now] there's an enforced monoculture.
"We don't yet know exactly how that will play out but what we see are more and more signs of officials and individuals interested in a relationship [with us].
"That's not coercion [by us], that is very real concern about their culture, the lack of diversity in their culture and the direction they're heading in."
Solomon Islands China pact 'a big deal for the region'
The director-general trod carefully when asked about the Solomon Islands-China security pact, which the federal government fears could be used to establish a Chinese military presence in the country.
Mr Symon travelled to Honiara last month with fellow intelligence chief Andrew Shearer as part of an ultimately unsuccessful push to convince Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to ditch the agreement.
He said that it was up to Solomon Islands to decide its own future and did not directly criticise Mr Sogavare.
But Mr Symon also said that the Australian intelligence community would do "everything it can" to "share information and intelligence with Solomon Islands … to have them know and understand that what's going on at the moment is a big deal".
"It's a big deal for Australia, it's a big deal for the region, and I think for … many of the citizens of Solomon Islands, it's a very big deal too."
He also said that a "small" ASIS team was on the ground in Afghanistan to assist the Australian airlift out of the capital Kabul when the Taliban seized control.
Mr Symon declared that the agency had to take advantage of the technological advances which were offering authoritarian regimes a "heyday" in the new "technological sandbox".
"The analogue systems and process which spies of the past took for granted have been relegated to history, and we now live in a fundamentally digital era where covert activities are increasingly discoverable," he said.
And he warned that "democratic systems in our near region" could be "manipulated" by other countries, although he did not name any individual nations.
"Political leaders can be subverted, can be directed and controlled [and] can take advantage of largesse showered upon them," he said.
"Our job is to help government know and understand exactly what's going on."
