Cyberspace Cooperation

This year is the 20th anniversary of the first meeting between Bill Gates, then the Microsoft boss, and a General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, at the time Jiang Zemin. This meeting, one of several between the pair, was a launch pad for a deeper American involvement in the development of China’s cyber power. For all of the techno-nationalist heat coming out of both the United States and China on issues of cybersecurity in recent years, the two countries have in the main benefited from a deepening relationship in the ICT sector for more than two decades.China cannot achieve its ambitions of becoming and advanced information society by 2050 unless it nurtures this relationship. Leading American corporations see China as an essential part of their future. Miscrosoft’s Asia Pacific R&D lab, set up in Beijing in 1998, is now its biggest such center outside the United States. Yet to date, the level of dependence of China on the United States has been higher than in the reverse direction.

Without U.S. good will and open trade in most high technology products with China, the latter’s cyber power would be much more backward than it is today. Yet there is little analysis in detail of the interdependence between the two countries in the cyber domain. The relationship is not just about buying and selling, but about the business regimes, legal structures and international norms under which technology transfer occurs. In this regard, it may be tempting to focus on the issue of industrial espionage from China on U.S. corporate secrets. That is an important issue but it is only a small part of a much bigger and on the whole more positive story. This more upbeat story is not necessarily one that involves a smooth ride. The history of U.S. transfer of information and communications technology to China has been a very bumpy and challenging road, and that remains the case. In 2014 alone, Microsoft has become the target of a number of administrative and legal actions inside China.

There is an organization in Beijing little known outside specialist circles which has been a forceful influence on China’s ability to work with U.S. corporations in this sector. The organizations stands as a metaphor of the success of the relationship. It is the United States Information Technology Office, formally registered in China in 1995 as a non-profit organization. (It was established in part with a U.S. government grant.) It is a membership- based lobby group representing four industry peak bodies in the United States (semiconductors, information technology, software, and communications) and an additional 50 individual firms with business interests in the ICT sector in China. One of its main missions, apart from promoting the opening of the China market to U.S. technology, has been to promote the development in China of appropriate laws for open commerce, including intellectual property rights protection. USITO comments regularly on draft domestic legislation in China and is the main policy interface between the ICT sector in the United States and Chinese agencies. The claim on its website to be a trusted organization is one that can be taken at face value in part because of the depth and consistency of its engagement, including on sensitive negotiations with China’s Ministry of Public Security on cryptography and source codes.

News this week that China will soon release a new operating system with the aim of quickly displacing foreign models sounds like the entrenchment of a techno-nationalist vision that portends the decline or weakening of China’s dependence on the United States in the ICT sector. There is however considerable countervailing news, including a new partnership, also announced this week, between China Telecom and IBM on cloud computing services. Based on UN figures for 2012, China (including Hong Kong) led the world in ICT exports (41 per cent share by value), but it also led the world in ICT imports (29 per cent share by value). These gross figures disguise a multitude of detail and subtlety. But the real measure of trade in those things on which cyber power depends cannot be measured just by statistics on traded goods in that sector. Cyber power depends on the computer technologies in a variety of modern equipment in many sectors (health, agriculture, transport, and aerospace to name a few) that are not included in ICT trade statistics. Moreover, as the IBM/China Telecom agreement suggests, trade in services, including education services in information technology, from the United States to China remains essential for the latter’s modernization. As Xi Jinping said in February on 214, when he became the first General Secretary to head the appropriate Leading Group, “there can be no modernization without informatization”.

The intent of raising this question of interdependence is to highlight the proposition that in spite of large differences in policy preferences between China and the United States on management of cyberspace, the two countries have a relationship of dependence in the technologies (knowledge as well as equipment or infrastructure) that needs to be better understood. As argued in my new book released this month, Cyber Policy in China (Polity Press, Cambridge UK), the government of Xi Jinping may actually need to increase its dependence on the United States, and adopt more “information friendly” values if it wants to increase its cyber power.

Read the original article here, on China-US Focus. 

"It's a cat and mouse game—the hackers make a move, we defend [ourselves] against it, and then they make another move," says McConnell. "It's very easy to get into the business of hacking these days—the barriers to entry are low, and it's a constant struggle."   

Click here to watch the video. 

EWI’s Piin-Fen Kok was interviewed for Politico’s June 5 story, “China skips Track Two U.S. cybersecurity event,” which reported that Chinese officials had missed an informal cybersecurity meeting hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington last week. Representatives from more than a dozen governments participated, including officials from the U.S. State Department.

A few days later, the U.S. State Department sent a senior official to attend a meeting in Beijing that was sponsored by the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the UN Regional Centre for Peace and Development. Representatives from more than 25 countries were at this event titled “Towards a Peaceful, Secure, Open and Cooperative Cyber Space.” China’s Arms Control and Disarmament Association and the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs also hosted the meeting.

The two meetings occurred after the U.S. accused the country of cyber hacking. Politico reported, “Officials in Beijing have denied the Chinese government engages in economic cyberespionage while simultaneously trying to shift the debate to revelations about the U.S. government’s digital snooping from NSA leaker Edward Snowden.”

Politico asked experts to discuss possible reasons for China’s decision to skip the Washington event. The director of CSIS’s Strategic Technologies Program, James Lewis, explained that there had been a scheduling conflict, which led to China’s absence.

He also remarked that China’s reaction to the hacking indictments will depend on the broader U.S.-China relationship, saying: “They’re probably having fits over the Hagel speech and the Tiananmen commemoration, and don’t know how to respond …They’re not very flexible when it comes to foreign policy and the cyber stuff will depend on the larger context”, referring to a speech made in June 2013 by US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, regarding China’s position as an ‘aggressor’ in Asia, and the memorials in honor of the 1989 student protests against the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square.

Kok told Politico that it will be interesting to see whether China uses its status as host of the meeting in Beijing to criticize U.S. actions or whether it will focus on promoting its own views on international cyber cooperation. “China wants to change the public’s notion that it’s a bad guy on cyber issues,” and this upcoming conference will give them a chance to do so.

Three years ago, China co-proposed an “international code of conduct on information security,” which would allow for more government control of the Internet. The U.S. has not shown support for the initiative and continues to support the current system.

At the workshop in Beijing, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Baodong Li “called out ‘a certain country’ for ‘double standards on the cyber issue,’ saying it had ‘concocted ‘regulations’ only applicable to other countries,’ though he did not name the U.S.” Outlining principles to guide Internet governance globally, Li mentioned peace, sovereignty, multilateral governance and universal benefit.

Following the hacking indictments, China suspended its participation in its bilateral cyber working group with the United States. Kok said that multilateral events such as the Beijing conference would allow for U.S. and Chinese officials to continue interacting on cyber issues. “It’s important to keep these channels open,” she said.

“Online voting is fraught with danger. Hackers could manipulate enough votes to change the results of local and national elections. And a skilled hacker can do so without leaving any evidence,” McConnell and Smith state in their article.

For full article, click here (paywall).

Click here to read a write up on the piece on ZDNet. 

The EastWest Institute’s event report presents highlights of the World Cyberspace Cooperation Summit IV, which took place in Silicon Valley on November 4-6, 2013. With the goal of forging clear paths ahead, more than 360 participants from 37 countries from business, government, technology, policy and law enforcement participated.

Minister Cai Mingzhao of the State Council Information Office of China opened the summit by calling for strengthening international cooperation on cybersecurity measures. “The United States and China are Internet giants,” Cai said. “We share many common interests and there is enormous scope for cooperation.”

In panels and breakthrough groups, top cyber experts pointed to encouraging signs of progress in international cyber cooperation, but stressed that there is still very far to go, pointing to the importance of continued momentum. Summaries of key breakthrough groups and publications are included in this report.

Larry Mantle and Gady discussed justifications for the Justice Department's charges alleging that Chinese hackers targeted U.S. corporations. "Both China and the U.S. have an interest in de-escalating tensions in cyberspace," said Gady.  

Listen to the full interview here on 89.3 KPCC. 

Photo credit: Chuck Hagel via Flickr.