The Quest for Cyber Power: The Evolution of China’s Cyber Strategy

There is evidence of a shift in Chinese grand strategy starting in the late 2000s from a defensive to an offensive posture. More recently, cyberattacks attributed to the People’s Republic of China have impacted its neighbour, South Korea, placed the disputed territory of Taiwan on high alert, and resulted in the theft of millions of US government records. How does the empirical evidence support the rise of China as a cyber power? This article investigates whether there is an offensive shift in China’s cyber posture consistent with its overall grand strategy and explores three critical cases of cyberattacks to explain whether they constitute offensive cyber power. Using an offensive realist lens and balance-of-threat theory, this article extends the concept of power maximisation to the cyber realm. It assesses whether the Chinese leadership is seeking cyber hegemony based on threat perceptions. Using process tracing and case studies, this work finds that Chinese cyberattacks have been highly ambitious, constituting a form of power maximisation in a bid for cyber hegemony, and consistent with a shift in Chinese grand strategy from a defensive to an offensive posture.