Naval personnel stand at attention as a Great Wall - 218 submarine docks at Qingdao Port on April 22, 2009. (Getty/Guang Niu)
A US government leak to a newspaper exposes a Chinese secret and reveals the new world of intelligence.
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Chinese subs and American spies both get that sinking feelingChinese subs and American spies both get that sinking feeling
Earlier this year, the eagle-eyed American observer of China's military, Tom Shugart, spotted some unusual activity at a Chinese shipyard. Tom is a former US Navy submariner who these days spends a lot of time examining satellite photos and then piecing these together with other bits of evidence appearing on the internet to form sharp judgments about the rapid modernisation of China's military. You can get a sense of Shugart's work through this paper he wrote for the Lowy Institute in 2021.
In this case, the satellite photos appeared to show a number of crane barges clustered around a submarine that was docked at Wuchang Shipyard, where China is known to build diesel-electric submarines and surface ships for its navy.
The incident occurred in May. The reason to mention it now is that The Wall Street Journal has just run a story with quotes from anonymous US government sources claiming that the submarine in question sank while pier-side. The activity spotted by Shugart therefore may have been a salvage operation.
There are some unusual elements to this story, the main one being that the submarine in question is a previously unheard of new design called the Type 041, which according to the US government source is nuclear-powered. Yet the Wuchang Shipyard isn't known for producing nuclear-powered submarines. Also, can a submarine even sink in what are apparently very shallow waters? The Journal story says "American officials haven’t detected any indication that Chinese officials have sampled the water or nearby environment for radiation."
Observers are already speculating about what this means for China's effort to modernise its submarine fleet, with this article playing down the broader significance. India's Observer Research Foundation recently published an analysis of a new shipyard in China that will pump out new designs at a more rapid pace than the United States can match. We might see this incident as evidence that China's military is suffering under the weight of corruption. Then again, submarine accidents are not unheard of, even in the most competent military forces.
It's also worth considering the motives behind the US government's decision to release this information to The Wall Street Journal. Who gains? Certainly, it creates embarrassment for China, but it may also be that, in this case, the United States has adopted a "use it or lose it" approach to its intelligence. As Interpreter contributor Ben Scott argued in March:
...the age-old trade-off between preserving and using intelligence is shifting in favour of use...The United States and United Kingdom...sought to operationalise intelligence in the lead-up to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, declassifying and disseminating material with extraordinary speed and breadth.
The shift in favour of operationalising intelligence is driven by both intensifying geopolitical competition and the rapidly evolving information environment. The digital revolution is disrupting “business as usual”, including by breaking down Cold War categories of “secret” and “open-source” information. Secrets have a reduced shelf life.
Because open source intelligence is now so ubiquitous (including satellite imagery of a standard that was once the sole province of intelligence agencies), governments are erring further on the side of disclosure to maximise the political impact of their secrets.
Finally, it's worth noting that Chinese netizens are claiming the entire story is bogus. That may yet turn out to be true, but this would be a high-risk strategy on America's part. The "operationalising" of intelligence only works if the media organisations you are leaking to actually believe you. The declassification of Russia's invasion preparations was a success for the US because it turned out to be accurate, so the US would seem to have good reason to avoid releasing information that can be easily falsified.
About the author
Sam Roggeveen
Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.
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