Terabit Army: China Squares up on the Battlefield of Information

By Dean Cheng

Dean Cheng is the Senior Research Fellow for Chinese Political and Military Affairs at The Heritage Foundation and is the author of the volume Cyber Dragon: Inside China’s Information Warfare and Cyber Operations (Praeger Publishing, 2016). Prior to joining The Heritage Foundation, he worked for the Center for Naval Analysis, SAIC, and the US Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment.

The People’s Republic of China has not fought a war since 1979, but the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been a very close student of other peoples’ wars. They have carefully analyzed foreign, especially American, conflicts of the past several decades, and they have assessed the impact of information and communications technologies on overall national capabilities and on war-making. As a result, the Chinese have concluded that future wars—and international competition writ large–will turn on the ability to establish “information dominance.”

To this end, the Chinese see information extraction and information exploitation, both of which are central to establishing information dominance, as:

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