Chinese Cybersecurity and Cyberdefense

Introduction

Regardless of the origins of cyberspace (those who designed it, the founding fathers of computing, of telecoms, of the Internet, the first to give financial backing to these projects, etc.), what is important to look at in today’s world is the current configuration of cyberspace, and its possible future. Whilst a map of the under-sea cable networks shows the Internet as being rather US-centered, or at least organized around the triad of the USA, Europe and Asia, with the other regions of the world appearing to lie on the periphery, this centrality of infrastructures (root name servers, computation capacities, data flux, etc.), but also of investment, research, users, etc., is in the full throes of evolution. Technology and knowledge are now being disseminated throughout the world. Where it is impossible to install hardwired technologies quickly enough, mobile telephony is becoming an important means of access to the Internet. Poorer populations are beginning to gain access to a Web connection. Thus, modern technologies are able to make their effects felt even in territories where they are not as omnipresent as in the United States. The technology is becoming more widely available, and we can see that the barriers to development are not economic or technical, but often political: the development of cyberspace, and the form that it takes, are subject to the will of the political authorities.

Whilst the United States still seem, at present, to be the dominant force in ...