CYBER CAPABILITIES AND NATIONAL POWER: A Net Assessment 89
8. China
China’s leaders have moved decisively to embrace the
information revolution. They started from a position
of relative backwardness in electronics in the 1990s,
but with the advantages of a rapidly growing economy
and technology transfer from abroad. The country has
since established the world’s most extensive cyber-
enabled domestic surveillance and censorship system,
which is tightly controlled by the leadership. China’s
intention of becoming a cyber power was reected in
its military strategy released in 2015 and its rst for-
mal cyber-security strategy in 2016. The country has
ambitious goals for the indigenous manufacture of
the core internet technologies it relies on, aiming to
become a world leader in such technologies by 2030.
Its core cyber defences remain weak compared with
those of the United States, and cyber-resilience poli-
cies for its critical national infrastructure are only
in the early stages of development. China has been
locked in a bale with the United States and its allies
over global cyber governance since the early 2000s, a
contest aggravated by US determination to sanction
Chinese tech rms in response to China’s malicious
behaviour in cyberspace. Since the early 2000s China
has conducted large-scale cyber operations abroad,
aiming to acquire intellectual property, achieve politi-
cal inuence, carry out state-on-state espionage and
position capabilities for disruptive eect in case of
future conict. China is a second-tier cyber power but,
given its growing industrial base in digital technology,
it is the state best placed to join the US in the rst tier.
List of acronyms
BRI Belt and Road Initiative
CAC Cyberspace Administration of China
CCP Chinese Communist Party
ICT information and communications technology
MPS Ministry of Public Security
MSS Ministry of State Security
PLA People’s Liberation Army
SSF Strategic Support Force
Strategy and doctrine
China’s strategic approach to the security aspects of
cyberspace has been dominated by its perception of
the ideological, economic and military threat from the
United States: the early development of US military
cyber doctrine in the 1990s; the use of cyber in US mili-
tary campaigns in Kosovo in 1999 and Iraq in 2003; and
US support for the internet-based political revolts in
states in the former Soviet bloc and North Africa.
From the outset, China’s main strategic preoccupa-
tion in cyberspace has been domestic – to prevent the
spread of Western liberal thinking via the internet. From
2003 onwards, at the United Nations, it advocated the
principle of ‘cyber sovereignty’ whereby states would
be able to exert more control over their ‘sovereign’ por-
tion of the internet. It was also in 2003 that China began
implementing its ‘Golden Shield Project’, a programme
of internet-based internal surveillance and censorship
that became known as the Great Firewall of China – an
aempt to exert sovereign control. As part of this, from
2009 onwards China undertook eorts to block certain
US software applications (such as Facebook, Twier and
YouTube) because of conicts with its censorship laws.
