Home › Features › Essays › China's Cyber-Strategy

China's Cyber-Strategy

Nina Hachigian
March/April 2001
Summary -- 

The Chinese Communist Party is simultaneously fostering the growth of the Internet and weaving a web of regulations to limit network content and use. But regulations cannot entirely block Internet communication, and the state's previously solid control over information is shifting to the citizens. If a future economic or political crisis spurs a challenge to party rule, this shift in information control may decide the outcome.

Nina Hachigian is Senior Fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles. From 1998 to 1999 she served on the staff of the National Security Council and from 1999 to 2000 was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow.

Login or Register to leave a comment.

DANGEROUS LIAISON

Often restrained in its enthusiasm for Western suitors, China has fallen in love with the Internet. Not only is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hailing the Internet's vast commercial potential, but it is also successfully exerting state control over the Chinese Web and its use. Recognizing that an unregulated network would shift power from the state to citizens by providing an extensive forum for discussion and collaboration, Beijing has taken care to prevent this commercial gold mine from becoming political quicksand. But a victory over cyberspace cannot be decisive, because the Internet cannot deliver its full commercial benefits under strict political control.

It will be some time, however, before the Internet becomes a political threat in China. In the near term, the Internet may in fact strengthen the party. The CCP's popularity now so depends on economic growth that its leaders are safer with the Internet than without it. And their three-part strategy for maintaining authority in a networked society -- by providing economic growth and some personal freedoms, managing the Internet's risks, and harnessing its potential -- will be effective for some time. The power shifts wrought by the Internet will surface clearly only during an economic or political crisis in a future China where the Internet is far more pervasive. At that time, the Internet will fuel discontent and could be the linchpin to a successful challenge to party rule.

LOVE AT FIRST SITE

China embraced the Internet later than did most developed nations, but it is quickly catching up. According to the state-affiliated China Internet Network Information Center, China's on-line population has mushroomed from fewer than one million users in 1997 to more than 22 million today, and some predict that number will rise to more than 120 million by 2004. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) technology could rapidly boost the on-line population by bringing the Internet to China's nearly 70 million cellular phone users; connections through cable to the 100 million cable TV customers are also currently in trials.

This is a premium article

You must be a Foreign Affairs subscriber to continue reading. If you are already a print subscriber, click here to activate your online access.

Buy PDF

Buy a premium PDF reprint of this article.

Related

Essay, Oct 1971
The Strategies of Peking
Michel Oksenberg

After a period of studied withdrawal from the world scene from 1966 to 1969, the People's Republic of China has returned to the international diplomatic and trading arenas with vigor and imagination. President Nixon's projected visit to Peking symbolizes the rapid turnabout. Three years ago U.S. bombs were falling within miles of the Chinese border and fears of a Sino-American war were rampant in the two countries. Indeed, in 1967-68, when China had only one ambassador abroad, its trade had dropped and its relations with its neighbors had reached all-time lows, many students of Chinese foreign policy (this author included) thought it entirely possible that Chinese leaders had become overwhelmed by domestic problems of an enduring nature. As a result, it was thought that China was turning inward and was unlikely to play an active role on the world scene in the early 1970s.

Read
Essay, Jan 1973
Who After Mao?
Mark Gayn

The great hurrahs of the Cultural Revolution, the slogans, the messianic fervor, the public humiliation of the heretics are all gone. A visitor to Peking is impressed by nothing so much as by the return to normalcy, by pragmatism and-if one could imagine it in a Spartan land-a feeling of relaxation. Indeed, one might easily think that there had never been the awesome upheaval of 1966-69 "to change men's souls." Human frailty is once again understood, and there is at least an implied recognition that man does not live by faith alone.

Read
Essay, Oct 1967
China's Next Phase
Robert S. Elegant

No people is fonder of reading the future from the past than the Chinese, perhaps because no other people possesses a past which has for more than three millennia been as minutely recorded and as consistently glorious. The Chinese passion for their own history has bred a propensity for repeating both past triumphs and past mistakes. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese were in many ways in thrall to their own voluminous and detailed chronicles. When the intellectual sat down to the obligatory study of those chronicles, the profuse commentaries thereon and other quasi- sacred works of great antiquity, he was quite consciously performing an act of affirmation. He was at once affirming his personal commitment to the spiritual and political values of the great central tradition and renewing that two-thousand-year-old tradition. He was excluding any radical change in those values or the society based upon them, and he was severely restricting the possibilities of evolutionary change. Alterations did, of course, occur, some of them quite sweeping. But they occurred within the framework of the central tradition-or, at least, the Chinese could pretend that they occurred within that framework. When they considered the probable shape of the future they could therefore assume that it would, with some variations, repeat the past in perpetuity.

Read
Cover image

In the Magazine

November/December 2009 / 6, 88
Essay
In the Quicksands of Somalia
Bronwyn Bruton

Washington's repeated attempts to bring peace to Somalia with state-building initiatives have failed, even backfired. It should renounce political intervention and encourage local development without trying to improve governance.
Read