By Stephenie Andal
Is Beijing in fact leading the way with its policies on “cybersovereignty?”
As the dust settles after the 2nd annual World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, media commentary outside of China has largely focused on President Xi Jinping’s opening statements about “cybersovereignty,” with scholars focusing on the suppressive censorship tactics that this policy is oft seen to represent in China’s domestic cyberspace.
Yet while control measures such as the Great Firewall (Beijing’s central censorship apparatus) remain a great source of concern for cyber scholars, the overwhelming focus on the domestic aspects of Chinese cyber policy dangerously ignore the broader, international implications inherent in China’s move towards cybersovereignty, which I argue, we should see as nothing less than an innovative and bold push to re-shape the global contours of cyberspace in China’s favour. We might do well to subvert our scholarly bias of China as playing second fiddle to other global power players (most prominently the United States) especially in areas of innovation, cyber policies, and digital communications, and explore the possibility of a China that, emboldened by perceived American hypocrisy post-Snowden, is playing a strategic “long game” with highly forward-thinking digital policies. This presents to us a much more complex and challenging picture of a China intent on “leading the pack” in a post-utopian cyber age, with thinking that may be as innovative as it is dangerous.
Read the full story at The Diplomat