Chinese loan apps and data mining actions are one more way of grey-zone activities by China and are a growing threat to not just India but many countries, Col Raymond Powell of Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation told CNN-News18 in an exclusive interview. An expert on China, he highlighted the grey-zone activities undertaken by Beijing in the South China Sea and their implications on the entire Indian Ocean region.
“Data mining is one more way of grey-zone activity. It is one level below an armed conflict. It takes advantage of those quiet places where nobody is noticing. We have a similar problem in the US. We are constantly faced with data breaches where we know that the Chinese state actor has come in and has stolen data, and has hacked the system. And yet we become used to it to a point that we almost don’t even notice it anymore. It might be a below-the-fold headline or something that is outside for one day. We say that that is what China does. We forget to outrage. That is how grey-zone actors’ technique works because they make you forget about the small things when there are other big things to look at and it has actually been successful,” he said. Powell was in India on the invitation of Mumbai-based think tank Bramha Research Foundation.
“China is certainly the largest and the most grey-zone actor the world has ever seen. China put out the latest map which suddenly absorbed more and more Indian territory up on the north-east border. Maps are very central to how China asserts its claims and in China’s corporate mind, in its national methodology, it was historically China anyway. So all that was historically China, eventually they intend to make current China. You see that with a nine-dash line in the South China Sea. We initially chuckled at it saying it is ridiculous how someone can claim so much of the sea. And yet, they have made it a reality. They have made vast island bases out of coral reefs. They have made a huge coast guard in maritime Malaysia and have sent them on military missions. Malaysia does not say a thing when there are Chinese patrolling in Malaysian waters,” he added.
When asked about the Indo-US defence partnership, especially in the background of China being seen as a common threat, he said, “It will continue to grow gradually. India has for a very long time valued its nonaligned status and it will continue to do so. The US recognises that and is not going to push India into some kind of an alliance. Because that is not what India is. The US will be foolish to expect it to be. But India and the US find themselves in a growing space of common interest and a very specific common threat. Those two things are going to put both the countries together.”
Recently, Col Raymond Powell’s SeaLight project gained recognition for its rapid growth, and for the way the Philippines took it up through a policy perspective. SeaLight uses commercially available technology to shed light on the maritime “grey zone”— things that happen at sea that someone would rather the public not know about.
“SeaLight has taken us by storm. We haven’t prepared for such rapid growth. I have to give a lot of credit to the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, which is the umbrella under which we work because they stress the entrepreneurial approach to solving national security problems, which led us to the idea that if you develop commercial information on what is happening in the maritime grey zone and expose that directly to the public, then you can have quite an outsized impact on the effects of these grey-zone activities which are intended by the perpetrators to remain under the radar. The second big element was the change in the Philippines’ policy perspective where the administration decided to embrace the idea of maritime transparency as a policy that led to quite a virtuous cycle where our organisation and the Philippines government were interested in maximum activity to increase maritime transparency has really taken off,” he said.
When asked about the implications of Beijing’s grey-zone activities in the South China Sea region on the Indian Ocean region, Powell said, “What makes the South China Sea so interesting is the way all these different tactics China uses. This will be important for countries outside the South China Sea, like India, to study how the grey-zone actor works. What they want to do is to slice away so you begin to forget that they are there and yet they are encroaching further and further on your own claims, territory, and national sovereignty. So it is the petri dish from which a lot of other things come. As applies to India, there are other kinds of grey-zone tactics already happening on your north-east borders; also in maritime space. Just on India’s coasts, outside India’s EEZ is the Arabian Sea. and at any given time there are hundreds of China’s distant water fishing fleets aggressively overfishing that area. That is a grey-zone action. There is technically nothing illegal about them being there, although their techniques are illegal. They are non-sustainable, almost rapacious in the way they just scoop up everything out of the sea so that there is nothing left. Those things over the long term will have an impact on India and other places.”
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