Hybrid CoE Paper 21: China and space: How space technologies boost China’s intelligence capabilities as part of hybrid threats

Conlan Ellis, Theodora Ogden & James Black

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Introduction

Over the last decade, the People’s Republic of China has emerged as a strategic competitor to the United States, the European Union (EU), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), presenting a systemic challenge to the existing international order.1 This rebalancing of power is also acutely felt in the space domain, where China has invested heavily in developing a national space programme that aims to surpass Russia’s and rival that of the US.2 The dual-use nature of most space capabilities and China’s promotion of a ‘military-civil fusion’ (MCF) model – which promotes technology transfer between the military and civilian spheres3 – have raised concerns about the potential for China’s expanding space capabilities to contribute to hybrid threats.

As outlined by Hybrid CoE,5 hybrid threats are characterized by:

• Coordinated and synchronized actions that deliberately target the systemic vulnerabilities of democratic states and institutions through a wide range of means. 
• Activities that exploit the thresholds of detection and attribution, as well as the different interfaces (e.g., war-peace, internal-external security, local-state, and national-international). 
• Activities aimed at influencing different forms of decision-making at the local (regional), state, or institutional level, and designed to further and/or fulfil the agent’s strategic goals while undermining and/or hurting the target.