China: 2015 is the year of Chinese cyber power

In February 2014 Chinese President Xi Jingping declared his intent to do everything necessary for China to become a cyber power. Since again Xi and his government have been hyperactive on all relevant fronts: political, legal, economic, organisational and diplomatic. The Chinese leadership’s attention became even additional focused on cyber issues in May 2014 at the same time as the United States indicted five Chinese military personnel for cyber espionage involving commercial secrets of US-based corporations.

But, as documented in my 2014 book Cyber Policy in China, Xi’s cyber focus had been decades in the making. China has been struggling since 1983 to overcome its technological backwardness for the data economy and, since around 2000, for a potential cyber war.

Xi’s government has taken a lot of measures to turn China into a cyber power. In September 2014, Xi told the country that it needed a new cyber military strategy. In December 2014, the government introduced new regulations for cyber security intended to help promote the rapid increase of China’s domestic cyber-security industry. In May 2015, China issued a new military strategy in which the government declared for the initial time in such a document the idea that ‘[o]uter space and cyber space have become new commanding heights in strategic competition part all parties’.

As well in May, the National People’s Congress released a draft bill on National Security, which — according to Xinhua — gives cyber security a appropriate place in its provisions for strengthening government controls over foreign technologies and related investment in China. The bill passed in July 2015, the same month China released a draft law on network security with sweeping new provisions on control of foreign technologies and data management.

Accumulating reports of China’s continuing success in cyber espionage against the United States, such as the recent theft of private data held by the Office of Personnel Management on additional than 20 million U.S. citizens, may as well be taken as evidence of rapid evolution towards Xi’s ambition.

From presently on, at the same time as the World Economic Forum published its annual Network Readiness Index in April 2015 comparing the cyber capability of 143 nations, China was still sitting in 62nd place, the same spot it occupied the previous year. This was down from 36th place in 2011 and lower than nations like Jordan, Mauritius and Costa Rica. (China’s low position is due, in part, to the per capita comparisons in the index that distort the relative wealth and technological capabilities of nations.)

China has, of course, made great strides, but the United States, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Europe have raced ahead as well. As noted by China 2030, a 2012 joint statement by the World Bank and the Chinese government’s Development Research Center, ‘innovation at the technology frontier is completely different in nature from simply catching up technologically’.

From the techno-nationalist frame in which a lot of Chinese view cyber power, as do those in the West suspicious of China, these developments may seem ominous and a possible presage to some sort of confrontation between China and the additional powerful West. Chinese leaders have definitely become additional fearful of ‘hostile Western influences’ and are very anxious to overcome their technological inferiority through better indigenisation of cyber-related industries.

But this reading would not represent the totality of the Chinese leadership’s position on the balance to be struck between China’s aspirations for sovereign capabilities and a globalised cyber industrial complex.

On the one hand, even a superficial reading of new Chinese laws and draft bills on cyber policy, reveals unusual attention to the importance of international economic relations. Chinese leaders know that the country’s cyber sector will remain highly dependent on foreign technology transfer and investment from the majority advanced nations for a lot of years, probably decades.

On the other hand, in spite of reports of a blacklist of US-based companies that have been named publicly by Edward Snowden as participating in cyber espionage against China, China continues to solicit and accept massive investments from these companies. For example, during a June 2015 visit to China, Cisco’s incoming CEO, Chuck Robbins, announced that the company would invest US$10 billion in China — a move that was widely seen as an effort to rebuild trust with the country.

In 2015 China as well signed up (unofficially) to expansive new norms (or normative principles) elaborated by the UN Group of Governmental Experts on cooperative relations in cyber space. The political weight of China’s support for these prinicples is reflected in a formal agreement with Russia, in which the two nations acknowledge not to undertake actions like ‘unlawful use or unsanctioned interference in the data resources of the other side, particularly through computer attack’.

China’s formal position is that national security in cyber space can only be completed through international collaboration, not just with the 60 or so like-minded nations — such as Russia — that support Chinese positions in international forums, but as well with the technology-leading nations, like the United States and Japan, and their partners in Europe.