Beijing makes great leap forward in cyber-warfare capabilities

The sobering article below is written by Willy Lam a Hong Kong-based China scholar and journalist specializing in Communist Party politics and foreign policy, and highlights the Chinese government’s intentions to become cyber-warfare dominant. Such dominance is part of an overaching war making strategy that stretched from under the sea into outer space, and of course cyberspace.

The international furor over Google’s threatened China pullout — and revelations of cyber attacks against not only Google and Yahoo but a host of multinationals based in the PRC — spotlights Beijing’s s capacity for Internet-based warfare.

In the past fortnight, the Obama administration has also condemned alleged attempts by China-based hackers to steal military and technological information from a host of U.S. government agencies and companies.

It is nearly impossible to pin down the sources of cyber-warfare of such magnitude. And it is no secret that civilian as well as military departments throughout China have in the past decade devoted unprecedented resources to nurturing cyber-warfare capabilities.

Less well known, however, are ways and means by which the Chinese Communist Party administration has since early 2009 vastly expanded the capacities of IT- and cyber security-related facilities of such units as the People’s Liberation Army, the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Public Security to counter Internet-based “subversion and infiltration” perpetrated by what it calls “anti-China forces in the West.”

A foremost priority for 2009 and 2010 has been to assemble a nationwide, multi-faceted prevention and control system (fangkong) to safeguard China’s cyber-security. Such fangkong activities include hacking into the e-mail accounts of dissidents and China-based Western journalists. Moreover, “moles” are believed to have been planted within the China-based operations of a dozen-odd U.S. and European IT companies.

The Hu Jintao leadership’s eagerness to push China’s cyber-warfare capacity to levels comparable to those of advanced countries such as the U.S. and Israel is evidenced by a recent speech by Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu.

“The Internet has become a major vehicle through which anti-China forces are perpetrating their work of infiltration and sabotage,” the police chief said. During a tour of the provinces in late 2009, Meng even called upon police officers to learn from and to boost cooperation with Chinese IT companies.

“We should make good use of the fruits of [domestic] IT research and development so as to provide our prevention-and-control system with strong technological support,” Meng said.

Given that the success of China’s global cyber gambit hinges on hiring the best IT talents, state security and military intelligence outfits have pulled out the stops to recruit the best graduates in such areas as computers, engineering, mathematics and foreign languages. Research units under the police and MSS departments have even placed advertisements for “qualified and patriotic hackers.”

A Beijing source close to the cyber-warfare establishment indicated that Chinese missions in the U.S. and other countries have in the past year taken advantage of the recession in the West to recruit hundreds of Chinese graduates from the best computer science departments in Western universities.

“Chinese IT graduates from top American universities are offered not only globally competitive salaries but fast-track promotion prospects,” the source said.

It is significant that President and Commander-in-Chief Hu has personally overseen the fast-paced development of China’s cyber-warfare prowess. Among Hu’s advisers is Jiang Mianheng, vice president of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences and the eldest son of former President Jiang Zemin. Jiang, who holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, has played a pivotal role in China’s IT industry, particularly in the cyber-security.

While touring Shanghai last week, Hu gave a pep talk to senior IT personnel. “We must win a prominent place in global telecommunications through acquiring core technologies that are based on domestic [Chinese] research and development,” Hu said. Jiang was among senior Shanghai cadres accompanying Hu on his tour.