China’s Strategic Thinking on Building Power in Cyberspace

I won't pretend to intimately understand the Chinese sociopolitical atmosphere, but it's clear to me that China wants to establish some form of international hegemony. This isn't an initiative focused on improving the country itself either through parity or bleeding edge advancement, which is the tone in many European countries and societies that have no aspirations to significantly influence world politics. For example, Czechoslovakia doesn't want to dominate the world culturally, economically, or politically. They mostly stick to making their country and people happy and prosperous.

China sees its 1.4 billion person population, and wants to extend itself across the world with a similar magnitude to the British Empire of old, or the American world order of the past 70 years. The translation of this Chinese publication is full of buzzwords and phrases that read like a McKinsey white paper, but with a distinctly Marxist bent (the Chinese are REALLY fond of their pithy phrases, they have many more phrase "memes" with significant time spans).

This is the difference between China and the late Soviet Union. China understands that the way to global power isn't a particular ideology - it's all about being big, big, big. Some choice quotes stand out to me: "Online positive publicity must become bigger and stronger, so that the Party's ideas always become the strongest voice in cyberspace."

"The online and offline worlds must form concentric circles, and, under the leadership of the Party, mobilize the people of all nationalities, mobilize all aspects of enthusiasm, to jointly realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the struggle for the China Dream."

The Chinese Dream in particular is something everyone who is interested in Chinese society should understand. It sounds like the American Dream, but it's markedly different. Global hegemony is an explicit goal. The Century of Humiliation is thought of as something that should be left in the past, yet is still repeatedly brought up whenever Western powers are perceived to have done something violating Chinese rights. China deserves to be great, from both hard work and its numbers.

Whether or not this works, time will tell. The internet as a practical invention is American. The production of silicon based computers, the microcodes they interpret, the languages that compile down to microcode, its all English. Global trade language is English. International politics is in English. To become a superpower in cyberspace implies that on some level, the default conversation and framework should be set by China in Chinese. They've got a long way to go.