China's Cyber Power

Nigel Inkster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138466494
• eBook ISBN: 9780429627279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

China's emergence as a major global power is reshaping the cyber domain. The country has the world's largest internet-user community, a growing economic footprint and increasingly capable military and intelligence services. Harnessing these assets, it is pursuing a patient, assertive foreign policy that seeks to determine how information and communications technologies are governed and deployed. This policy is likely to have significant normative impact, with potentially adverse implications for a global order that has been shaped by Western liberal democracies. And, even as China goes out into the world, there are signs that new technologies are becoming powerful tools for domestic social control and the suppression of dissent abroad.

Western policymakers are struggling to meet this challenge. While there is much potential for good in a self-confident China that is willing to invest in the global commons, there is no guarantee that the country's growth and modernisation will lead inexorably to democratic political reform. This Adelphi book examines the political, historical and cultural development of China's cyber power, in light of its evolving internet, intelligence structures, military capabilities and approach to global governance. As China attempts to gain the economic benefits that come with global connectivity while excluding information seen as a threat to stability, the West will be forced to adjust to a world in which its technological edge is fast eroding and can no longer be taken for granted.

Chapter One
Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Freedom and Control

China has spent much of the last 150 years attempting to catch up with scientific and technical advances of the developed world, while maintaining a sense of national self-esteem commensurate with a state that, for most of recorded history, has regarded itself as culturally, economically and in every other way superior to other nations. From a technological perspective, China was for many centuries fully justified in this perception. By the early fifteenth century, the country’s advanced technology had brought it to the cusp of an industrial revolution; indeed, for Joseph Needham, a prominent historian of Chinese science, the great mystery was why such a revolution never occurred.

China’s sense of self-esteem was sorely tested in its early contact with Western nations, which had acquired a higher level of technology, and was further challenged when Meiji-era Japan, a country traditionally seen as a vassal state, proved an early and successful adopter of this technology. China struggled to make sense of the challenge of modernity, partly because its intellectual culture had focused on the cultivation of moral virtue in the service of governance and social harmony, often spurning mere technical capabilities. The ensuing intellectual turmoil gave rise to a range of responses, including efforts to rediscover the original purity of Confucianism and to reject the West; statesman Zhang Zhidong’s concept of zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong (Chinese learning for substance, Western learning for utility); and the iconoclastic ultra-modernism of early-twentieth-century polemicists such as Hu Shi.

Despite this intellectual uncertainty, which was accompanied by political instability that caused the collapse of the imperial system, China modernised to a greater extent than is often realised – although that process tended to centre on the cities of the eastern seaboard, largely excluding a rural hinter-land that resisted change. The drive for modernisation was set back significantly by the 1937–45 Sino-Japanese War and the civil conflict that preceded the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Mao Zedong’s China had a mixed record in scientific and technical development, but his government’s investment in basic preventative healthcare and literacy programmes laid an important foundation for future progress. In the 1950s, China derived significant benefits from Soviet technical assistance. And, for a short period following the 1958–60 Great Leap Forward, a return to economic rationality produced respectable annual growth figures of around 4–5%.¹ Nonetheless, intellectuals, particularly scientists, were distrusted for their bourgeois international outlook, and thus subjected to bouts of repression. Mao asserted the importance of both ‘redness’ – political reliability – and expertise, but his real preoccupation was with class struggle, in which China’s intellectuals fared poorly. During the anarchy and institutional degradation of the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution, many scientists were sent to the countryside to undertake manual labour, with the result that scientific research virtually ground to a halt, along with most formal education. The exceptions were nuclear-weapons development and computer science: researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) produced China’s first integrated circuit in 1968.²

New economic policy

Following the Cultural Revolution, China’s leadership struggled both to stabilise the country and to revitalise an economy that in many respects was functioning almost at subsistence level. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping, the country’s leader despite not being formally designated as such, resurrected the concept of the Four Modernisations – agriculture, industry, science/technology and national defence – with the aim of quadrupling China’s GDP by the end of the millennium and, ultimately, drawing level with the developed world. At the time, China had no personal computers and little understanding of the advances in computerisation being made in the United States. However, interest in the discipline grew rapidly as the trickle of Chinese students undertaking advanced studies in the West became a flood, and Western companies answered the call to begin investing in China. An important catalyst for the shift was the writing of the US futurologist Alvin Toffler, whose books Future Shock and The Third Wave were eagerly read in the early 1980s by Chinese intellectuals and leaders, reportedly including Deng and Premier Zhao Ziyang. Toffler was especially prescient in anticipating the transformational effects of information and computerisation on society and the global economy: ‘linked to banks, stores, government offices, to neighbours’ homes and to the workplace, such computers are destined to reshape not only business, from production to retailing, but the very nature of work and, indeed, even the structure of the family’, he wrote.³

Jiang Zemin, who would go on to become secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and president, emphasised the importance of computers in securing a competitive advantage during his 1983–85 tenure as Minister of the Electronics Industry. An engineer by training, Jiang talked of information and communications technology (ICT) as ‘the strategic high ground in international competition … the discrepancy between China’s level and the world’s advanced level is so great that we have to do our utmost to catch up’.⁴ Accordingly, Beijing decided in 1983 to prioritise China’s electronics industry and to increase its output eightfold under successive Five-Year Plans (double the target growth rate for the wider economy).⁵ Shortly thereafter, the CAS invested in a start-up company that evolved into the Legend Group and then Lenovo, now the world’s largest manufacturer of personal computers. In 1986 the government established the China Academic Network, linking China’s universities. In 1992 China designated the development of the information economy as an important objective; in 1994 it began to take steps towards connecting the country to the internet; and, two years later, it moved to extend internet access to the general population.

These developments took place amid ideological division within the Chinese leadership on the merits of openness versus social control, a debate that shaped and continues to shape the evolution of China’s internet. The violent suppression of the student movement in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall five months later, the subsequent overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union were seared into the collective consciousness of China’s leadership. The events led to a prolonged period of analysis and introspection in Beijing, as the CCP sought to determine what actions were needed to ensure that it would avoid the fate of its fraternal counterparts. A key conclusion was that the Soviet leadership had failed to satisfy the economic aspirations of its people, reinforcing the centrality of China’s drive for economic modernisation and with it the imperative to informationise^* (although, at the time, the latter was seen as separate to the equally important process of industrialisation). Tiananmen Square also strengthened the Party’s determination to remain in control no matter what, and this conviction applied to new information technologies. In contrast to the US government’s creation of an environment that enabled the private sector to develop internet technologies and services, Beijing conducted a series of top-down interventions that drove forward the development of the Chinese internet while seeking to strike a balance between the free flow of information and the dictates of national security.

The year 2000 proved galvanic in terms of China’s progress towards becoming an advanced informationised society. Following a decade of relative economic liberalisation, the country’s Politburo decided that year to make the development of such a society a priority policy goal. A key driver in the Politburo’s thinking was its recognition of the changes in China caused by the creation of ever greater quantities of information, and of the need to meet rising social expectations through improvements in transparency and accountability. The conviction that the internet and social media can be used to improve standards of governance, with the aim of nipping social dissatisfaction in the bud, has become an abiding principle of the Chinese leadership. This belief has played a large part in Beijing’s approach to information control and censorship. Jiang set the scene for such activities in a speech at the 2000 World Computer Congress widely circulated by state media, arguing that:

Virtual reality is profoundly changing the way we produce, learn and live … the speed and scope of its transmission has created a borderless information space around the world … The internet also brings problems that make people uneasy: anti-science, false science and information that is unhealthy to the point of being downright harmful.⁶

Jiang was undoubtedly referring to the phenomenon of Falun Gong, a sect based on traditional qigong martial arts and meditation practices, whose adherents had orchestrated the previous year a mass demonstration outside the walls of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing. The members of Falun Gong, many of whom were personnel from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the police, had used modern ICT to organise the event. Millenarian sects of this kind have frequently played a catalytic role in the overthrow of China’s ruling dynasties. Thus, for the CCP, Falun Gong was an existential threat.

During the early 2000s, the Chinese leadership made several major institutional changes. These included the establishment of the State Council Informatization Office, China’s Computer Emergency Response Team and the Internet Society of China, a supposedly non-governmental organisation comprising internet service providers, network carriers and various business and academic figures. In 2000 China for the first time sought to develop its information strategy in cooperation with the World Bank, which subsequently produced a series of frank, hard-hitting reports that identified the shortcomings of Beijing’s existing policies. The most recent of these reports, entitled ‘China 2030’, recommended a series of challenging measures that China would have to implement to become an advanced informationised society.⁷ In 2001 the government’s 10th Five-Year Plan identified informatisation as a strategic priority. Three years later, the CCP Central Committee published ‘Several Opinions on Strengthening the Exploitation and Development of Information Resources’, the key finding of which was that these processes should henceforth be driven by market forces. This period of relative liberalisation was reinforced by the 2006 National Informatization Plan, which emphasised, inter alia, the development of laws governing the internet.

These developments were accompanied by a raft of government initiatives in areas such as e-governance and e-commerce, and by a continuing push from then-premier Wen Jiabao to promote open government, using the internet and social media to expose corruption and malpractice among the authorities. This aspect of policy was highlighted in China’s first White Paper on the internet, published in 2010. The document spoke of citizens’ rights to speak freely, access information and exercise democratic supervision of the government, commenting that ‘the leaders of China frequently log onto the internet to get to know the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Freedom and Control
• Chapter Two Cyber Espionage
• Chapter Three Military Cyber Capabilities
• Chapter Four Battle for the Soul of the Internet
• Conclusion
• Index