Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 4, August–September 2010, pp. 55–66
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Over the past four years concern has grown about what is perceived in the West to be an increasingly aggressive cyber threat emanating from China. Awareness of this threat dates back to the early years of the millennium. In 2003 the Pentagon began to register a series of cyber attacks against US government and contractor sites which have collectively been referred to as Titan Rain. In 2006–07, a number of Western European governments, including Germany and the UK, publicised the extent to which they too had suffered attacks, with the director-general of the British Security Service taking the unusual step of writing a letter to 300 chief executives and security advisers alerting them to the threat from China. Since then a number of other large-scale cyber-exploitation operations have been reported, amongst them GhostNet against the computer networks of the Free Tibet Movement, which involved attacks on over 1,200 computers in 103 countries. In a report prepared in 2009 for the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, researchers employed by Northrop Grumman list 35 instances of significant Chinese cyber activity against Taiwan and a variety of Western targets between 1999 and 2009.
The overall impression given by this coverage is that China, which now has close to 400 million Internet users, has become something of a cyber superpower. But while it is highly probable that the Chinese state is exploiting Western vulnerabilities in the cyber domain both to collect with minimal risk valuable scientific, technological and commercial intelligence and to explore weaknesses in military and critical infrastructure systems, this is not a one-way street. Beijing too has considerable anxieties and vulnerabilities with regard to the Internet. It is important for Western policymakers to keep in mind such concerns when dealing with the kinds of threats emanating from China.
The Internet has brought China considerable benefits, as has the introduction of modern PCs and laptops. One look at a traditional Chinese typewriter (essentially a mini-printing press which requires extensive specialist training to use) shows how significant the advent of the modern computer keyboard has been. But the hardware and software which collectively make up the Internet were developed by Western companies with Western users in mind. These systems are not that well suited to the needs of Chinese users. For example, commonly available systems for word processing in Chinese involve typing in Pinyin (the standard form of Romanisation for Chinese characters) with the computer offering a menu of characters potentially corresponding to the romanised text in descending order of probability. Since Chinese is a language with many homophones, these menus can be quite long, but predictive software minimises the time spent scrolling through lists. Type in the romanised word shi and the Microsoft word-processing system offers a menu of 209 possible characters. But type in shiqing – the Chinese word for ‘matter, affair’ – and the system will offer 事情as the first and most likely combination.
Most Chinese can type in Pinyin but many find it rather trying. And in recognition of that, indigenous Chinese Internet search engines – Sina, Sohu, Zhongsou and Muzi ...
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Nigel Inkster is Director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk at the IISS. He served in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1975 to 2006. He is a Chinese speaker and works, inter alia, on China’s security and defence policies.
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