A recent report by Canada’s Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is seen as a watershed moment. The report, titled “China and the Age of Strategic Rivalry” is the result of an academic outreach workshop designed to compare the knowledge and positions of experts on the PRC from around the world with Canada’s own intelligence analysis findings.

The remarkable aspect of the 163-page report, in the eyes of those Canadian government and international academic specialists who spoke to AIN, is the overall conclusion that the PRC is at best an “artful partner” and at worst an “interfering partner” and is bent on a strategy of dominance that “appears relentless and irresistible.”

Canada, with its considerable Chinese diaspora, has for years been trying to maintain a balanced view of the PRC and had taken great pains in the past to avoid characterizing Beijing as an overly hostile actor. However, one chief conclusion of this study that the PRC’s current security policies integrate “aggressive diplomacy, asymmetrical economic agreements, technological innovation, as well as escalating military expenditures” is a departure from previous policy.

Nowhere is the marked increase in the PRC’s defense spending seen more than it is with the number of new aerospace platforms and weapons that continue roll off of production lines in the Middle Kingdom.

“China is intent on developing a new generation of military technologies that will surpass those of the United States and change the nature of warfare to China’s advantage. While the innovation strategy includes the absorption of Western technology, Beijing also emphasizes innovation and disruptive advances in artificial intelligence, unmanned weapons systems, and directed-energy weapons,” reads the report, and offers several specific examples:

• “The PLA has actively pursued advances in military robotics and unmanned systems. To date, the PLA has fielded a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), while also developing and, to a limited extent, fielding unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs).”
• “PLA researchers actively pursued a range of directed-energy weapons, including high-energy lasers, high-power microwave (HPM) weapons, and railguns. Reported advances in HPM weapons seem to be striking, relative to the decidedly mixed US record of progress in this domain. In January 2017, Huang Wenhua, the deputy-director of the Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology, received a first prize National Science and Technology Progress Award for his research on directed-energy weapons.”
• “Chinese defense industry has achieved significant advances in swarm intelligence, for example, and appears likely to continue doing so. In June 2017, CETC demonstrated its advances in swarm intelligence with the test of 119 fixed-wing UAVs, beating its previous record of 67. In one exhibit, China’s Military Museum depicts a UAV swarm combat system with swarms used for reconnaissance, jamming, and a “swarm assault” targeting an aircraft carrier.”  (CETC is the China Electronics Technology Corporation, one of the country’s main defense industrial groups.)

But a majority of the technologies that the PRC is using in developing these innovations is assessed as having been sourced from outside of China.  Much of the conventional military technology used in weapon systems has come from and continues to come from Russia. The expertise that the PLAN now claims to have in Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching Systems (EMALS) “have likely been made possible not only through robust, long-standing research, but also through the acquisition of Dynex Semiconductor, a British firm with particular expertise and capability in these technologies.”

At a recent international defense expo, a Russian engineer who spoke to AIN summarized the Chinese methodology as “like a meat grinder. They take technology, design techniques, components and mix them all up and process it into some weapon that they then proudly present and disingenuously claim as ‘all made in China.’”

One Canadian official noted that this is a change in orientation that has been a long time in coming—one that he and others in the defense community had been advocating for years. Up until now, however, few within the upper levels of the Canadian government took the threat from the PRC seriously.