By Franz-Stefan Gady
China still needs to overcome a number of challenges before it becomes a first-rate military power in cyberspace.
In a lecture on January 7 in Beijing, a senior PLA officer and professor at the PLA National Defense University called on “PLA troops to enhance their capability of winning informationalized warfare,” according to an article on the Chinese Ministry of Defense website. The article goes on to summarize the lecturer’s principle point: “Zhu Chenghu said the future war will be information-based local wars, featuring unprecedentedly high levels of intelligence. As a result, there will be no concept of front or rear. Space, air, sea, ground, cyberspace, and even electromagnetic pulse space can be the target to strike. The information security will become the most vulnerable area for China.”
This is nothing new. Many senior Chinese officers have repeatedly emphasized the need to bolster the country’s cyber capabilities, since they provide some asymmetric compensation at a comparatively low cost for the relative backwardness of the Chinese military vis-à-vis the U.S. military and its regional allies.
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