China and Cyber Corporate Espionage

Nuclear weapons wreak the same destruction wherever they are dropped. But cyberweapons are very different, writes David Sanger in his book on cyber warfare titled Perfect Weapon. From the last blog, you’d remember:

“The US went for what the Iranians valued most – their nuclear program – and Iran went for what America valued most: its financial markets.”

 

China was using cyberweapons in a different way. Since everything is manufactured in China, it was possible (and suspected) that they’d be installing spyware on electronic devices shipped world-over. This is incidentally the reason why the US is so paranoid about Chinese companies like Lenovo and Huawei. The Chinese consider this hypocrisy: don’t Google, Facebook and Apple turn over data to the US government? America claims that’s only done when backed via a court order (in other words, there are rules and checks), but the Chinese don’t trust any such measures.

 

Until about a decade back, there was another key difference between the US and China. American intelligence agencies did not believe in hacking into Chinese companies to steal their corporate secrets and then pass them onto American companies. But China made no such distinction: to them, “economic advantage” and “national security advantage” were indistinguishable. After all, in China with its huge PSU’s, how/where do you draw the line between national good v/s corporate good?

 

Then, about a decade back, when Xi Jinping took over, China agreed to a treaty with the US whereby the Chinese government wouldn’t hack into American corporations to steal material that would then be shared with Chinese companies. Why the change of heart? Because China believed it had reached a point where its own industrial technologies and secrets were becoming so advanced and valuable that they would become the target of American cyber-espionage!

 

So while a treaty was signed between the Chinese and the Americans, the reasons mentioned above also meant that the deal between the US and China on the rules of cyber warfare would never draw in other countries. Other countries, still way behind both the US and China in technological terms, have no intention to stop stealing corporate secrets from those two countries!