China and the Technology Gap

The discourse on Chinese cyber security practices often fails to match the reality of actual behavior. This chapter examines how Beijing uses the digital domain in rival interactions. First, it unpacks the literature on how China uses cyber capabilities to shape the international system and enable its rise as a great power, highlighting how threat inflation crowds out empirical perspectives that demonstrate stability and predictability. Second, it situates Beijing’s approach to the digital domain in Chinese strategic theory, illustrating China’s early focus on innovation and preemption and its evolution toward using digital power to control the domestic population and seek information advantages. Third, it uses these insights to analyze empirically all publicly attributed Chinese cyber incidents. This portrait highlights the unique leverage, and limitations, of cyber espionage as a form of coercive bargaining between rival states.