For China, Cybersecurity Is Part of Strategy for Protecting the Communist Party

For nearly two years, cyberespionage has been a tense focal point of relations between the United States and China. On Wednesday, theCenter for a New American Security, a research group in Washington, released a paper written with the aim of understanding the motivations behind China’s cybersecurity strategy. Its conclusion: that the strategy, like China’s foreign policy, is driven mainly by the domestic political imperative of needing to “protect the longevity of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The paper is based on readings of Chinese-language sources and tries to lay out reasons for why state-supported actors engage in cyberespionage and other activities. The paper’s author, Amy Chang, a research associate in the center’s technology and national security program, argues that there are three main components of the cybersecurity strategy — economic, political and military — and that they are all aimed at ensuring the survival of party rule.

For example, Ms. Chang writes that maintaining economic growth and stability, which is critical to legitimizing the party in the eyes of ordinary Chinese, is a goal of industrial economic cyberespionage, which the White House has said is carried out at least in part by hackers employed by the People’s Liberation Army.

Read the full article at The New York Times.