New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xvii, 375 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-19-020127-2.
China and cybersecurity are hot buzzwords in current global affairs, especially in Asia Pacific affairs. From the onslaught of sensational American news headlines about Chinese cyber espionage on the US to National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s bombshell revelations about US cyber espionage just three days before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s US visit in June 2013 to the September 2015 historical US-China agreement concerning economic espionage, no topic seems to be more complex, convoluted, and controversial than China and cybersecurity. At the same time, few topics are as at once elusive and emotive as China and cybersecurity. It not only concerns grand topics such as war and peace, and global power shifts, but also concerns everybody’s daily activities from web surfing to credit card purchasing.
It is thus to the credit of the editors and authors of this book that they have put together such a comprehensive, informative, and timely study on this topic. Originating in a pair of 2012 conferences, this volume offers a very ambitious and far-ranging overview of the multifaceted dimensions of China and cybersecurity. This is no easy task, not only because of the opaque nature of the subject, but also because of its paradoxical high visibility, not to mention its fluidity. As the book appropriately acknowledges at the onset:
“[T]he relentless pace of current events have both challenged our contributors through the course of many revisions and strengthened our belief in the need for an objective analysis of the political and institutional foundations of cybersecurity in China” (vii).
The book is indeed rather resourceful in analyzing the political and institutional dimensions of cybersecurity in China. However, whether it is possible to achieve any degree of “objectivity” on a topic as highly charged as this is perhaps beyond the point. In fact, given the prominent role of the US-China cybersecurity relationship in the volume—it appears not only as the proverbial big elephant in the volume, but also as its indisputable overriding policy focal point—one wonders whether even the book’s very title “objectively” captures its main thrust, and how the omission of this dimension in the title is itself an indication of a tension in the book’s underpinning empirical anchoring and analytical framing. That cyber espionage on the US constitutes “the greatest transfer of wealth in history”—a claim made by US General Keith Alexander, former command of US Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency—was reiterated three times in the first three chapters and only to be reaffirmed in the conclusion is certainly not an indication of sloppiness in copy-editing for an Oxford University Press volume. Rather, it is probably more illustrative of the challenges of pursuing any “objective” scholarship on a topic that has been so powerfully framed by high-flying political accusations and alarmist media headlines. Given that the book’s extraordinary ensemble of contributors includes not only civilian scholars from the American, Chinese, and Canadian academy, but also those who have past or current positions in such state and private institutions as US and Chinese military academies, the British Secret Intelligence Service, the Project 2049 Institute, and the Defense Group Inc., “objective analysis” is perhaps better understood and appreciated in terms of the broad range of topics, the diversity of perspectives, as well as the multiplicity of research methodologies on the offer.
And this is indeed one of the book’s merits. Its thirteen chapters, including an introductory chapter by Jon R. Lindsay and a concluding chapter by Jon R. Lindsay and Derek S. Reveron, are organized into four parts. Part 1, “Espionage and Cybercrime,” provides overviews of Chinese state intelligence gathering, economic espionage, internal political control, and the scale and scope of China’s online underground economy. Part 2, “Military Strategy and Institutions,” zooms in on the Chinese military, the PLA, with chapters exploring its strategy and doctrine, its intelligence gathering networks and units, as well as the PLA’s understandings of cyber warfare and its potential mobilization of information warfare militias. Part 3, “National Cybersecurity Policy,” moves to the policy plane to explore Chinese and American perspectives on cyber policy making and governance. Part 4, “Practical and Theoretical Implications,” concludes with one chapter offering policy suggestions for the US, and another offering theoretical reflections on international relations, the study of technology, as well as area studies.
A number of chapters are highly descriptive, predictable, and even a bit stretched in the analysis. Others are quite insightful and constructive in terms of their strategic and policy implications. Chapter 4, “Investigating the Chinese Online Underground Economy,” meticulously researched and rigorously written by Zhuge Jianwei, Gu Lion, Duan Haixin, and Taylor Roberts, stands out for providing a fascinating and well-structured reading into the wild world of underground online crime in China, with illustrative mapping of four distinctive value chains, and vivid capturing of the jargon of the cyber-crime world. This chapter, which focuses on the civilian and Chinese domestic dimension of cybersecurity, contributes significantly to the book living up to its title. Meanwhile, chapter 5, “From Cyberwarfare to Cybersecurity in the Asia-Pacific and Beyond,” by PLA Senior Colonel Ye Zheng, not only productively engages with, and in some cases even offers a counterbalance to, the chapters written by outsiders on the PLA, but it also spells out a set of “principles of cybersecurity” so as to avoid cyber conflicts and a “virtual arms” race.
Given the high stakes and enormous gaps between Chinese and American understandings and agendas on cybersecurity, and with the above two chapters as examples, Lindsay and Reveron are certainly justified in concluding that the book “exemplifies” cooperation to improve understanding. It will be worthwhile reading not only for China scholars and cyber-security experts, but also for international relations and communications scholars.
Yuezhi Zhao
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 872-874