by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 29, 2016 | News
Chinese President Xi Jinping has named Xu Lin to become the government’s new head Internet regulator, succeeding Lu Wei.
Mr. Xu has vowed to maintain the ruling Communist Party’s tight grip over cyberspace, which is overseen by the Cyberspace Administration of China.
The Chinese government has long imposed controls over the Internet, in part to stifle political dissent, and is codifying that policy in law. Officials assert that such restrictions are needed to ensure security in the face of such rising threats as terrorism. However, most of China’s crackdown seems directed against speech that, however carefully, criticizes the Communist dictatorship.
For the Reuters article on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 20, 2016 | AI World Society Summit
China is pressing ahead with efforts to make it easier for dictatorships like that of Chinese President Xi Jinping to censor information on the Internet under the guise of “cybersovereignty’’. Cybersovereignty is a concept used to try to maintain the power of dictatorships through the suppression of opposition voices.
Stephenie Andal warns in The Diplomat: “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 reshape the global contours of cyberspace in China’s favor. 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…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.’’
She concludes:
“China’s drive for cybersovereignty should be seen as a calculated power play by Beijing to seize on the moment of transition that the global Internet is in at present, a time when growing geographical and political cleavages in the global cyber terrain are becoming increasingly apparent. The inclusion of the term ‘multilateral’ (in reference to Internet governance) in an outcome document approved recently at the U.N. General Assembly, reflects China’s growing power on the global cyber stage and its sway over future approaches to how to govern and shape the global Internet….’’
To read Ms. Andal’s column in The Diplomat, please this this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 17, 2016 | Initiative
The New York Times reports that “there is a widespread recognition that the Western alliance has yet to develop a strategy” to counter Russia’s increasingly aggressive actions against NATO members in cyberspace.
“While there are frequent conferences and papers, there are no serious military plans, apart from locking down the alliance’s own networks. Russia, China and Iran have increasingly sophisticated offensive cyberforces; NATO has none, and no established mechanism to draw on United States Cyber Command or its British equivalent.”
To read the entire story, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 12, 2016 | Event Updates
Do the actions of the G7 nations meeting at their May 26-27 summit in Japan suggest that Russian aggression against Ukraine and Chinese aggression in the South China Sea will not succeed in the long run because of pushback from the G7 industrialized democracies? Joshua W. Walker of the German Marshall Fund discusses this in The National Interest.
He concludes:
“The significance of this year’s G7 in Japan in advance of the G20 in China in September will be judged by which summit ultimately sets the tone for either the enduring nature of the liberal international order or sweeping tide of revisionist authoritarianism. Obama’s historic Hiroshima and Vietnam visits were symbolic of the legacy he hopes to leave. Yet, symbolism risks complacency without action. The G7’s latest initiative for global infrastructure development confirmed the member countries’ internationalist commitment but whether they can remain unified in the face of Chinese and Russian revisionist alternatives such as OBOR {One Belt, One Road} or the {Russiian-led} Eurasian Economic Union will have to be seen. As Japan passes the G7 baton to Italy next year, the world anxiously expects the world’s seven most advanced democracies and economies to lead toward the triumph of internationalism over revisionism.’’
To read the article, hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 8, 2016 | AI World Society Summit
(June 13th, 2016) Bloomberg Video: Why China’s economy will be so hard to fix. Hit this link.
