Military portrays China as victim rather than perpetrator of cyber-attack and vows to strengthen online defences
China must bolster its online defences in the battle for public opinion, two military officers said on Friday as Beijing sought to portray itself as a victim rather than a perpetrator of cyberwarfare.
Two days after the US-based search engine Google revealed China was the origin of a high-profile hacking attack, senior colonel Ye Zheng and his colleague Zhao Baoxian of the People's Liberation Army emphasised the need for a robust internet strategy.
'Just as nuclear warfare was the strategic war of the industrial era, cyberwarfare has become the strategic war of the information era, a form of battle that is massively destructive and concerns the life and death of nations,' the strategists from the Academy of Military Sciences wrote in the China Youth Daily.
The article did not mention Google, but it comes amid a stream of angry rebuttals to the company's accusation that the hacking originated in China. The Chinese foreign ministry said on Thursday that the claims revealed 'ulterior motives'. An editorial in the nationalist Global Times newspaper went further, describing Google as 'snotty-nosed' and resentful about its failure to secure a larger share of the market in China.
Neither Google nor the US government has directly blamed Chinese authorities for the hacking incidents against several hundred senior US and South Korean officials, human rights activists and journalists.
But the search engine traced the attacks to Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong and home to a school that has previously been suspected of hosting hackers. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton described the allegations as 'very serious'.
Chinese officials acknowledged last week that their army – like that of several other nations – had established a cyberwarfare unit.
Known as the 'cyber blue team', the group of 30 officers is reportedly organised under the Guangdong military command in the south of China and has a multi-million pound budget, the Global Times reported.
'Cyber-attacks have become an international problem affecting both civilian and military areas,' China's defence ministry spokesman, Geng Yansheng, was quoted as saying at a rare media briefing. 'China is relatively weak in cyber security and has often been targeted. This temporary programme is aimed at improving our defences against such attacks.'
The unit and others are said to have already been engaged in simulations of cyberwarfare.
Rather than hacking attacks aimed at obtaining private or secret information, Ye and Zhao said China was threatened by psychological operations that used the internet to shift public opinion against governments. They cited the 'domino effect' seen in the Middle East and north Africa created by Facebook, Twitter and other social media that are banned by China's great firewall of censorship.
'Cyberwarfare is an entirely new mode of battle that is invisible and silent, and it is active not only in wars and conflicts, but also flares in the everyday political, economic, military, cultural and scientific activities,' the article went on to say.
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