The US-China Cyber Relationship

The U.S.-China summit has concluded and the announced results provided little good news on the cyber front, at least for us. Beijing certainly got what it wanted: no executive order sanctions against its officials and companies for benefitting from its planetary-scale cyber espionage campaign.  The Obama Administration apparently got what it wanted as well: a Chinese statement that state-sponsored or abetted industrial espionage is illegitimate. But now we are already hearing early reports from cyber security firms of strong evidence that the Chinese government hacking of U.S. firms has continued even after President Xi’s promises.

Pressure for real progress on U.S.-China cyber relations has been building for months, if not years. Chinese military strategists have been writing since the mid-1990s about how computer network attacks could be the key factor in deterring or degrading an American military response to a Taiwan scenario.  The first decade of their intrusions against U.S. government and military networks was intelligence preparation of that battlefield.