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HOW TO THINK ABOUT CYBER SOVEREIGNTY 1!
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How to Think About Cyber Sovereignty: The Case of China1
Yu Hong2 and G. Thomas Goodnight3
Abstract
The cybersphere constitutes a global disagreement space where the contested, ongoing
ties that link states and the internet come into being. In this paper, a critique of
sovereignty and political economy is offered to evaluate contemporary controversies
concerning authority, independence, regulation, and access to communications as matters
of relationality, materiality, and disagreement. We review China’s promotion of cyber
sovereignty as a complicating episode that reflects the development stresses of the
sphere. China wishes to establish guardrails for the practices of multipolar global digital
capitalism; yet, it has ushered in a variety of internet-related global issues, including in
security, privacy, material well-being, developmental justice, and planetary futures.
These complex aims invite and expand the dialectical spaces animating the cybersphere.
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1!Research for this article was supported by the Chinese Social Science Fund
(18AXW009). We would like to thank anonymous reviewers and Professor Dan Schiller
for their critical comments of the article.
2!Corresponding author: hong1@zju.edu.cn
Yu Hong joined Zhejiang University as a “ZJU 100-Talents” Young Professor (Level A)
and serves as the director of the Institute of Communication Research at the College of
Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University. She is the author of Networking
China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy and has expertise in political
economy and policy studies of communication. !
3!G. Thomas Goodnight is a professor at the Annenberg School of Communication,
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles California. He has directed Doctoral
Studies there and at Northwestern University. Goodnight is developing approaches to
Advanced Studies in Communication. He initiated and leads a group at USC
that works on geo-diplomacy, material networks and political economies
of communications.
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Keywords: China; geopolitics; internet governance; cyber sovereignty; political economy;
disagreement space; cybersphere; global communication
How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty: The Case of China
The contestation over cyberspace and information and communications
technologies constitutes an important vector in the renewed global scramble for
command and power. The Chinese state has taken a number of actions announcing claims
to China’s cyber sovereignty. China-watchers and internet pundits ask: how will claims
to sovereign governance facilitate or hinder China’s global integration? To what extent
do such claims portend the “nationalization of the internet” (Herold, 2011)? Meanwhile,
other states grow inclined to territorialize cyberspace. The US has developed a National
Cybersecurity Division within its Department of Homeland Security, the UK has set up
the National Cyber Security Center, and French President Macron has launched the
“Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace.” In the absence of authoritative global
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institutions, states develop parallel but different premises, protocols, and apparatuses of
governance.
Despite these verifiable trends, the “strong and persistent tension between state
sovereignty, which is territorially bounded, and the non-territorial space for social
interaction created by networked computers” remains unresolved (Mueller, 2010, p. 1).
Cyberspace is no longer presumed a “natural” environment that would portend certain
governing principles. Internet scholars debate about good or bad governance amidst
unfixed values, shifting contexts, and changing applications (DeNardis, 2014). Still, the
tendency is to regard the internet as an autonomous global polity clashing with interests,
processes, and structures that predate networks, especially national systems, inter-state
treaties, and local norms.
Based on liberal values, this framework has a lacuna of political economies and
therefore risks totalizing the internet. Other than rehearsing binary constructs between
material and virtual, state and market, liberal and authoritarian, national and international,
it has little to say about the varied but related forms of state sovereignty. In this paper, we
intend to move the debate forward by weakening the binary and noting the emergent
geopolitical nature of the internet. We show how continuities and discontinuities among
networked political economies can be mapped through discourses and that internet
governance has “expanded beyond operational governance functions” to an expanded
geopolitics (DeNardis, 2014, p. 222). The case of China and internet governance is
assembled from the construction of political economy events and the critique of
contesting discourse vectors.
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The theoretical part of this paper de-reifies the popular constructs of the internet,
of the state, and of sovereignty so as to recognize cyber sovereignty as a common but
varied practice. For this purpose, we develop the concept of the cybersphere as a socio-
technical and ultimately geopolitical environment; outline contested yet living roles of
nation states in constituting what is environed; and identify entanglements of geopolitics,
sovereignty, and communications as features of the multipolar political economy. The
cybersphere comprises materialized political economies where presumably independent
stakeholders mingle, align, and delink in ways that re-work relationships among, and
sometimes transcend, conventional typologies.
China is known as a major advocate of cyber sovereignty, and we propose
viewing the Chinese variant of cyber sovereignty as part and parcel of the cybersphere as
a complex, emergent whole. The empirical part of this paper, which combines discourse
inquiry with political economy and policy analysis, examines this cyber sovereignty in
action so as to detect possible directions. With the focus on the ambiguous contested
central term, discourse inquiry sets the stage for reading the relationships driving political
economies; however, relationships registered by the discourse are not all the connections
with and within political economies. Thus, we also move beyond generalizing the term
context to interpret sphere dynamics of political economies in stress, development, and
controversy within and against the setting-up of state discourse. We ask: what does the
Chinese state seek to accomplish, and what has it accomplished? We find that,
constructed dynamically through words and actions, cyber sovereignty shifts from a
territory-based anchor into a global assembly of developmental devices. On the grounds
that the old information order is fragmented and lacking equal access, the Chinese vision
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embraces the unmet longings of the developing global South. The vision frames
sovereignty as a state’s responsibility for collective rights, but not exactly in terms of
Westphalian autonomy.
The Chinese state is not the only governing subject in the cybersphere, and its
actions are subject to disagreement and contestation. For this reason, it works to forge a
state-led multi-stakeholder model and expresses boundaries both as its preference and
compromise. Thus, the interactions between traditional sovereignty and its digital
configurations are likely to induce a dialectical oscillation of policies. Policies vary
between inward-looking unilateralism meant to consolidate the party state and outward-
looking advocacy for a multilateral, global internet order. In the longer term, we suggest
that China’s assertions of cyber sovereignty are likely to further global entanglements.
The result is a contested space of an international sphere where the rules of the road are
formally and informally produced, materialized, tested, and settled—and then perhaps
again disrupted.
Beyond Dichotomy: China and the Cybersphere
China’s stance on cyber governance marks a different way of thinking and praxis,
but it should be viewed not in a binary relationship to the Global North but as intertwined
with historical, geopolitical, and epistemological power relations (Wasserman, 2018).
Borrowing from postcolonial infrastructure studies, critical algorithm studies, and
internet histories, we use the cybersphere—defined as a historical ensemble of material,
organizational, regulatory, and socio-cultural layers of communicative relations among
populations, machines, and institutions developed across scales—as a substitute for
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cyberspace, to challenge the digital sublime and to underscore its emergent geopolitical
nature.
The digital sublime, whose influence has waned but is not finished, sees
cyberspace as a de-territorialized virtual global village (Johnson & Post, 1996). Its
mistake lies in exaggerating the social freedom to link and to exchange by rendering
cyberspace as a natural given, rather than a geopolitical sphere. Enacted as a top-down
model, cyberspace has been used to smuggle in universal norms that do not recognize
historical struggle. The cybersphere, however, entails both materiality and relationality
(Cooren, 2018). It entails not just virtual reality but material grounding. Power bases,
storage, and server locations are one thing; the interconnection of information and things
added by 5G mobile networks, quite another. Furthermore, the cybersphere shapes, and is
shaped by, relational dynamics. It mediates labor relations, production chains, innovative
resources, knowledge production capacities, and human relations with environment
(Aouragh & Chakravartty, 2016; Murdock, 2018; Srinivasan, 2017). Extending political
economies and expressing power relations, the sphere has selectively amalgamated
national, material, and territorial spaces on the one hand, and virtual networks of digital
data exchange on the other. It features both interdependence and discontinuity, blending
functional flows, spatial fragments, and social segments (Castells, 2010).
In the cybersphere, the continuity and discontinuity of political economies are
named and arranged by discourse for exchange, forming disagreement spaces that
“express differences, disrupt convention, and field imagined alternatives” (Jackson, 2015;
Liu & Goodnight, 2016). Notably, the assemblage of policies, organizations, and material
structures that underpin the socio-spatial logic of networks and networking is such a focal
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site of struggles over ideas, interests, and power across scales and units. If the old
romantic thinking of cyberspace as a separate realm subject only to community-supported
self-regulation has long lost its force (Goldsmith & Wu, 2006), the multi-stakeholder
model that has ever since prevailed evokes pluralistic participation but evades national
sovereignty and hierarchical power (Mueller, 2010), even implicitly extending Northern
bias against redistributive and developmental deficits (Chakravartty, 2007). Such failure
ignites alternative politics centered on sovereign authorities, after decades of neoliberal
regulatory reforms.
Instead of being a natural space of unity or inevitability, the cybersphere—which
entangles political economies and disagreement spaces, national and international
relations, virtual and material ties—has evolved into an expanded geopolitics. Its
boundaries and sources of authority are fought over by different groups and are therefore
intrinsically political (Kristof, 1960). Various spaces have already shaped but do not
define the cybersphere. History shows that states and societies make their own
interpretations amidst global techno-economic trends—depending on their values,
interests, and capacities. The most notable is the Sino-US digital interdependence and
discontinuity. The US has made foreign policy efforts to extend the liberal capitalist
model to cyberspace, but China has preserved some crucial political-economic and
ideational foundations for self-determination despite its steadfast global digital
convergence (Kiggins, 2012; Hong, 2017).
Still, beneath the foreground of apparent variation lies the shared background of
material ties and relational dynamics that defy binary distinctions. China’s internet has
been conventionally rendered in the state territorial imaginary (Shen, 2017). By
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portraying a contest-and-conquest relationship between the state preoccupied with regime
insecurity and varying social usages, the dual foci implicitly frame the Chinese Intranet
against the globalist internet (King, et al., 2013; Rauchfleisch & Schäfer, 2015). Whereas
the latter associates its governance with the presumably pluralistic, fragmented, and
competitive societies of Western democracy, the former illustrates the will of the state
and the structures of state control. Indeed, although contested and compromised, the
efficacy of state control has legitimized deploying the Great Firewall as a synecdoche for
China’s internet governance (MacKinnon, 2011; Wei, 2017).
Political economy frames a different cyber imaginary, one that loosens this stark
dichotomy. Critical studies suggest that states co-exist with non-state agents in shaping
the global internet and that the influence of ownership, policies, laws, and commercial
interests renders the idea of a “singular virtual space” misleading (Graham, 2013). Cast in
light of the cybersphere, China’s so-called Intranet also reveals entanglements with
foreign capital, foreign technology, foreign markets, and foreign labor. Rather than hold
up “highly conservative” telecoms policy or exemplify “cyber-conservatives” (Zeng,
Stevens & Chen, 2017; Mueller, 2010), the state has unleashed different sequences of
liberalization, decisively exposing its share of the cybersphere to the dynamics of global
digital capitalism (Hong, 2017; Schiller, 2014). Symbolic, cultural, and social dimensions
are also folded into the cybersphere. From blogging to social networking to e-commerce,
the platformization of cyberspace is structured by bottom-up vitalities, which sustain and
derail top-down governance (Yang, 2003; Yu, 2017).
Shaping and shaped by actors of the political economy, including states, markets,
and societies, the cybersphere continues to extend social relations and material structures
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across boundaries, be they spatial, temporal, material, corporeal, or social. Its ubiquitous
expansion, accelerated by the Internet of Things, the Internet of Bodies, and 5G mobile
networks, has enmeshed the state in a “variable geometry” of wills, interests, and values
and even overwhelms it with torrents of capital, technology, information, and
communication (Castells, 2010, p. 53). If it is true that “statism disintegrated in contact
with new information technologies,” as Manuel Castells wrote in the Information Age
trilogy, does the exercise of cyber sovereignty mark an orchestrated reaction of the state?
What kind of state? And how? This brings back the state as a strategic actor in the
generally “stateless” internet studies (Flew, 2018).
Rethinking the State in Transnational Digital Political Economy
China’s official vision regarding the state’s authority over internet-related public
policy differs from the Western liberal model, and not only in the sense of opposing
individualist democracies and authoritarian states. China’s communication policies
persist as a dialectic between incumbent powers that own, regulate, and change the
organizational apparatuses and material structures of communications and emergent
powers that use, extend, and innovate counter-orders. Thus, the approach here is not to
dissolve the state-centric framework, nor do we suggest an economic cosmopolitan
account to replace the national framing. However, as an alternative to the ontological
fracture between the state as a mutually exclusive territorial monopoly on the use of
force, on the one hand, and market forces and individual rights that can be universally
applied, on the other, we do want to de-abstract the state—to see the state as mutually
constituting, and frictionally meshing, with a broader network of power materialized by
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the cybersphere. This statement, along with the replacement of cyberspace by
cybersphere, has implications for the theory of the state.
A decades-long debate between liberal and Marxist strains of state theories has
bearing on the state’s positioning in the cybersphere. Embedded in social science
disciplines from the postwar era, the liberal theory of politics posits that power in
Western democratic societies is diffused enough; the state responds to competing
demands, rendering Marxist class-based notions, such as ruling class and corporate
power, irrelevant (Miliband, 2009). Having rightfully constructed a liberal critique of
traditional authoritarianism and even networked authoritarianism, this “class-less”
thinking of pluralistic politics nevertheless leads to the obfuscation of state-society
interlinks and thus unduly precluding capitalist, developmental, and legitimacy-seeking
logics of the state—before and after the arrival of the networked digital age.
At the international level, liberal and realist theories treat states as unitary and
autonomous actors. In the case of China, national factors still offer compelling
explanations for its performance—as the Chinese state rejected the outright Washington
Consensus and has paced global integration. Still, this state-led global convergence
created unexpected results and has fostered transnational imperatives from inside.
Therefore, instead of deducing the logic of state actions from its arguably timeless
essence of security and control, it is imperative to see the state’s wills, interests, values,
and practices as relationally intertwined with global and market-based structures of
power and to appreciate the crosscutting of state agendas by various transnational
interests across multiple scales. The neoliberal turn from the 1970s advanced the notion
that it is desirable, and even feasible, to separate politics from economics, states from
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markets (Panitch, 2009). This fracture reflects neither the intervention-and-investment the
US government makes in the internet nor the accommodations the Chinese state makes
toward global techno-economic trends.
Meanwhile, postwar neo-Marxist state theory has resisted reducing state interests
and capacities to servitude for capital and instead notes the historical make-up of social
forces and recognizes the state’s relative autonomy (Starrs, 2017). Extending this critical
perspective, the political economy approach to communication examines historically
specific relations between states, markets, and social actors and explores how these
factors parlay into structural, institutional, and discursive transformations of
international/national policy-making (Charkravartty & Sarikakis, 2006). The cybersphere
adds a new twist to the dynamics of the state. To reckon the recursive relationship
between the state and the cybersphere, a holistic conception and historiography of the
state should be framed.
The transition literature on China notes that the formerly Leninist state has
internalized a liberal orientation and even moved to a globally integrated model of policy
process (Fewsmith, 2010). The state-led capitalist socio-economic transition has
accelerated in and through the cybersphere but spurs intensive social dissent, which
invites an ever-expanding state information control regime (Zhao, 2008). Thus, after
having alternately unleashed, shaped, and stalled the cybersphere that extends change and
disturbance, the party state becomes a major contested site as well as a contesting subject.
Notably, the party state can adapt, contract, or expand its power over the
cybersphere. The state under Xi’s leadership generates sweeping transformative
initiatives, holding China at an “inflection point”: the post-WWII capitalist order is mired
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in chronic crises; the party state-led China continues to grow stronger, after weathering
market reforms; therefore, the responses to global crises must be organized to achieve the
millennial mission of national rejuvenation (Economy, 2018). Pivoting to developing
digital economy, digital government, and digital society, the state attempts to re-organize
the symbolic protocols, social norms, or economic organizations that have hitherto
defined the cybersphere, taking cyber sovereignty as a salient position.
Despite the state’s transformative agency, a more fundamental dialectic between
geopolitics and globalization has been at work, altering the state’s will and dispersing its
capacity. As the driver of globalization, capitalist development transcends national
boundaries through the cybersphere, inducing states to facilitate internet development and
commercialization (Simpson, 2004). However, globalization as such, mediated by states
and geopolitics, is never a completely finished set of projects. Developing states are
strategic actors in contesting the global order—increasingly in and through the
cybersphere (Desai, 2013). Still, states cannot afford alienating capitalist logic too much,
as contemporary geopolitics is increasingly tied with inter-capitalist competition
(Woodley, 2015).
The cybersphere also deepens the state’s entanglement in the multilateral order of
interdependence. While the state can act on its transformative initiatives, it is variably
involved in ad hoc networks with subnational, national, and international actors and must
“ensure the balance and power of the network state to which they belong” (Castells,
2010, p. 361). When the US government asserts unilateralism over bilateral and
multilateral issues at the cost of losing global moral appeal, and when the field of internet
governance features layered, diffuse, and even privatized control of power (DeNardis,
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2014), China’s position is likely to oscillate between reclaiming state sovereignty and
supporting shared sovereignty.
Thus, the internet is a new sphere, where the state extends political authority,
prioritizes certain rights, responds to capitalist cycles, and enters a multilateral
interdependence. It endorses and acts on contradictory initiatives, mostly within the
capitalist global order. These range from subsuming the directionless logic of capital to
the territorial logic of the state to facilitating transnational capital accumulation; from
strengthening the social and symbolic foundation of the party’s rule to encouraging the
digital turn of globalization; and from promoting itself as a champion of globalization to
sponsoring regional factions and domestic protectionism. The mixture is an empirical
question, which nevertheless cannot be exhausted by the control protocols of the state—
authoritarian or liberal democratic—but is conditioned by the dialectics between the
intra-national needs the state prioritizes and the global legitimacy and sphere
sustainability the state seeks. The following section addresses how to qualify, rather than
reify, the cyber sovereignty mandate.
Cyber Sovereignty in Historical Perspectives
Sovereignty, in its modern conception, “implies a theory of politics which claims
that in every system of government there must be some absolute power of final decision”
(Crick 1968). Territoriality strongly defines sovereignty (Betz & Stevens, 2011), but this
definition obscures the fact that sovereignty is both territorially and non-territorially
circumscribed. From a standpoint of political economy of communication, the status of
sovereignty works, out of and against, a disagreement space crossing boundaries and
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denotes the state with questions of who has standing and controls resources for decisions
over senders, receivers, codes, messages, channels, audiences, and feedback.
Claims to sovereignty offer an index of power relations among nations and
register the spread of capitalism, as well as the geopolitical pressure and popular
resistance that follows (Desai, 2013). A historical association of communication with
capitalist states means that the principle of territorialized sovereignty, when put in
practice, has incorporated the need to trade, to flow, and to invest. Hence, globalization
from the 1990s has not linearly undermined the state but has further complicated the
relationship between a bounded physical territory and the state as the presumably
supreme authority therein—as sovereignty operated through multiple spatial modes, and
non-state actors even shared the operation of sovereignty (Agnew, 2009). This
proposition applies to China. Despite its stance to push against hegemonic intervention,
sovereignty is in no way unyielding in the post-Mao era (Carlson, 2005).
A new school of international relations, intent to qualify the diluted but still
crucial role of sovereignty-based states in the age of globalization, disaggregates
sovereignty into multiple components, foregrounding multiple yet inconsistent practices
of redefining sovereignty (Biersteker & Weber, 1996). As the cybersphere extends
globalization, how does it redefine sovereignty? Adopting Krasner’s concepts (1999),
Betz & Stevens (2011) argued that the internet compromises the regulation of cross-
border flows, or so-called “interdependence sovereignty,” which further weakens
Westphalian constructs and domestic authority; yet, it does not affect the legal integrity
of states in international law, which means that states persist.
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Still, if the cybersphere is not universally experienced, the re-configuration of
sovereignty is not a homogenous process either. Two trends vie for acceptance. First,
sovereign relations are being worked out with a great range of variation. The US
government has supported a presumably benevolent and borderless corporate-run
cyberspace. However, its security rhetoric, which transcends the distinction between
inside and outside, legitimizes an empire model, wherein military capacity is kept
constant and co-extensive with its global networks (Hardt & Negri, 2004; Katin-Borland,
2012). Still, even a US-based Leviathan is not immune from cyber-attacks. As fake news,
internet-enabled theft and disruption, and cyber weapons have shaken the American
internet, a Foreign Affairs commentary proclaimed that “state sovereignty is alive and
well on the Internet” (Flournoy & Sulmeyer, 2018, para. 4). In an emergent counter-
position, the EU uses privacy as a lever to rein in Silicon Valley-originated platforms
(Dijck, 2013). However, this rights-based cyber sovereignty in no way negates strong
strategic purpose (Pohle, 2019).
If the tension between users and corporations obscures the roles of states in liberal
democratic contexts, the Chinese state plays a salient role in ousting Western platforms,
blocking IP addresses, silencing dissent, and orchestrating propaganda campaigns to the
extent that Western security and policy studies conveniently equate a cyber-sovereignty
position with coherent statist control (Tai, 2017; See Harold, et al., 2016). Yet, despite
the state’s sustained efforts to control the flow of information to its people, the bigger
picture is more complex. To participate in the cybersphere, the state both practices
negative proscription, such as censorship, and makes proactive moves to legalize non-
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state forces. To the extent that states unleash the cybersphere, states and the cybersphere
then become co-constituting (Kohl & Fox, 2017).
A state generally deploys its sovereign power to project national interests and to
bolster certain values, interests, and projects. The cybersphere modifies this equation to
the extent that sovereign power is no longer a status that states can either own or not.
Vulnerability and interdependence are built into a cyber-committed nation. First, as the
internet’s choke points often transcend state jurisdictions, it is inconceivable to squeeze
the transnational nature of technical standards, supply chains, material and virtual
architectures, and multidirectional communicative activities all into traditional
jurisdictions (Kohl, 2007). Second, if internet governance is mostly enacted through
technical design, private corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (DeNardis,
2014), the specific governance structure in China expresses its unique global history.
Still, the Chinese state must negotiate with supranational entities, corporate
infrastructures, and networked publics. Third, the prosperity of a digital ecosystem driven
jointly by expressive, productive, and commercial energy challenges the ability of the
state to define information flows in distributed networks (Navarria, 2016).
Embedded in this sphere, state policies are subjected to ideational, institutional,
and material contestations—within the country and without. On what terms, then, and in
what mode can states seek to redefine cyber sovereignty? Ideally, as the cybersphere has
become the dominant medium of global and public communication, the deployment of
cyber sovereignty as a heuristic device would reveal, and even encourage, a disagreement
space for peaceful negotiation among states, whose networking, competition, and
collaboration inevitably interact with the non-traditional power structures made up of
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private companies, expert groups, civic organizations, and institutional and individual
users. As the Chinese state advocates cyber sovereignty and globalization at once, how is
it expressing this set of goals through concrete constructing practices? In the following,
we examine China’s institutional and normative vocabularies that organize material
governance of cyber sovereignty, trace these into the international realm as a case for
global connectivity and relationship development, then review domestic, negotiated
policies designed to work through disagreements, leveraging domestic ends against
China’s standing in a global cybersphere.
The Discursive and Institutional Constructions of China’s Cyber Sovereignty
Again, China and the cybersphere are a set of intertwined engines that render the
party state contesting and contested in a volatile political economy within which Xi’s
leadership aims to better harness the internet for navigating the turbulence and to push
through the party’s self-appointed mission. Issues of global politics, developmental
sustainability, and social welfare emerge as questions of domestic network development.
The project of the party state is both: to project outwards ideational and material
influences and to seek inward-looking power consolidation through techno-economic and
ideological steering. Still, problematic socio-economic structures constrain governance
and complicate state initiatives—although without obscuring the state’s intent and
impact.
This section maps the state’s cyber sovereignty-constructing words and practices
as part and parcel of the global topography of the disagreement space constituted by
varied norms and institutions. A qualitative discourse and thematic analysis of statements
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retrieved from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) website is offered first. Of
the total of 397 data pieces from commentaries, speeches, and interviews retrieved up to
October 2017, all contain mention of cyber sovereignty in the full text. The majority—
160 pieces—are written by the CAC, People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and New
Media, a journal run by CAC.4 These official and semi-official discourses are intended
for forming opinions on the domestic and global levels. To interpret these political/policy
discourses, defined as “thematically connected and problem-related semiotic
occurrences” that serve particular political functions (Reisigl, 2008, p. 99), we first used
an inductive category development approach (Elo & Kyngäs, 2007; Hsieh & Shannon
2005). Through a cyclical procedure of open coding, categorization, and abstraction until
the point of saturation, a family of thematic categories was distilled and hierarchically
arranged: i.e., who speaks, to whom (opponents vs. allies), when, and where (local,
national, regional, and international); problems, causes, and solutions; self-presentation,
action, and justification; and lastly, proposition, action, results. These coding schemes
were used individually and collectively to organize and analyze the texts and, ultimately,
to interpret explicit and latent communication as registering and pivoting to the contexts
of political-economic practices. Special attention was paid to the usage of cyber
sovereignty in relation with means (i.e., border, authority, communication) and strategic
and normative goals, on the one hand, and systems, processes, and disagreements said to
cue the workings of communications within and across political economies, on the other.
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4!The rest are from a variety of state media, including but not limited to Guangming
Online, Zhejiang Daily, Beijing News, Youth.cn, ChinaNews.com, Huanqiu.com, China
Daily, and China Military, with each outlet contributinging one or two articles. !
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As discourse analysis already extends to a critical reading of political-economic
practices, manifest and latent, we further note that, institutionally, cyber sovereignty
entails enacting a domestic authoritative structure for demarcating control over activities
within and across borders. Thus, we examine policies that the CAC enacted from 2014.
Our analysis reveals some dimensions of domestic cyber sovereignty, dialectical policy
vectors, and how they are tied to the negotiation of boundaries. Together, the analysis
sets the stage for reading trajectories of policy and the vectors of political economy.
Disagreement spaces are thus uncovered in the emergent mixes of contestations or in the
cybersphere.
We found that cyber sovereignty first speaks to issues of external sovereignty.
Recognition/equity on the international stage is asserted. The state’s capacity and ability
for self-determination and development is defended, because of acknowledged global
structural imbalances. This defensive concern positions national security as the primary
motivation for installing cyber sovereignty; however, the arguments quickly morphed
into a globalist developmental ethos. Network sovereignty constituted a feature of
building an international “community of common destiny,” meant to counter the US-led
top-down model and to widen global interdependence at the same time. This view
constructs a “cosmopolitan turn of reshaping global communications,” an outlook that
embraces cross-cultural differences and prioritizes global harmony (Shi, 2017). Cyber
sovereignty also serves to institutionalize the cyber power of the party state at home. Still,
the demarcation of pubic authorities is intended to decenter rather than remove
preexisting external actors from domestic authority structures. The practice of discourse
and policy asserts positive state power, but it also places China in a reactive position.
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Enacting Material Governance and Countering US Hegemony
The cybersphere features dialectical and even multiple relations among states—
and among the different yet interrelated political economies and crises through which
states operate; thus, positive assertions of state power are complemented by reasons to
resist U.S. claims to global internet hegemony. In light of the Edward Snowden
revelation and, ultimately, the US unilateral control over crucial internet resources, the
Chinese statements in 2014 compared the cybersphere to a war zone and China to a
“tenant” in a space controlled by superior powers (Xie, 2014). The recognition of cyber
sovereignty, in this light, is a reactive step towards containing external threats instigated
by techno-economic weakness and, just as importantly, towards correcting the unjust
global order.
The defensive proposition defined cyber sovereignty in territorial terms, extended
analogously to traditional and potential allied partners. China is to lead the effort to
recoup developing countries’ rights and benefits in a so-called imperialist and
monopolistic cyberspace. Renowned cyber security experts, including the architect of the
Great Firewall, Fang Binxing, asserted the territoriality of the internet and defended the
necessity for border controls (Wang, 2014b). Notably, despite this emphasis, the policy-
making circle conceived of cyber security as a global issue from the outset. They
attributed the difficulty of drawing borders to the “transnational” nature of the
cybersphere—the fact that private companies own and manage internet gateways where
the state has limited role (Wang, 2014a).
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Also, while conceding that external authority overrides domestic authority in the
cybersphere, official and semi-official discussions proposed to establish an independent
global authority (Qian, 2014). At the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN)’s high-level government meeting in 2014, Lu Wei, former director of
the CAC, described ICANN as “indispensable” for global internet governance before
promulgating self-determination, equity, and broad-based participation as some missing
norms (Liu & Feng, 2014). Lang Ping, of the Institute of World Economics and Politics
at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, contended that global governance, which is
premised on cyber sovereignty and is a battleground for national interests, in essence
entails “giving up” (rang du) on some sovereign rights (Wang, 2014a).
China’s diplomatic stance was deemed by many an outright statist offense to the
global status quo. Pushback ensued. At its inaugural Wuzhen World Internet Conference
(hereafter, the Wuzhen Summit) in 2014, the Chinese state attempted but failed to
convince participating American companies to sign a declaration to “respect the internet
sovereignty of all countries” (Makinen, et al., 2015). At the end of 2014, the International
Telecommunication Unit (ITU) Plenipotentiary Conference concluded that ITU should
not expand its role into internet issues (“Remarks,” 2016). In 2015, during the ten-year
review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), China, along with the
Group of 77, sought to push words such as “multilateral” and “sovereign rights of states”
into the outcome document. However, the WSIS reaffirmed the existing multi-
stakeholder model and advised states to “avoid” actions (Levin, 2015).
Diplomacy stumbled; yet, the state initiated outward-looking remarks and actions,
especially on bilateral fronts such as the One Belt One Road initiative (now the Belt and
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Road Initiative [BRI]). At the inaugural China-ASEAN Forum on Cyberspace in 2014,
the Chinese representative praised the ultimate value of cross-border connectivity and
information flow from the standpoint of integrating markets, only paying lip service to
security (“Lu Wei zai,” 2014). Tacitly defying the US paradigm at the 7th Sino-US
Internet Forum, the Chinese representative held up interstate differences as a basis for
bilateral trust and collaboration (Yuan, 2015). Notably, political culpability and
ideological finger-pointing took a back seat to preserving China’s contested convergence
with the US-led global internet.
Sovereignty, Relationships, and Global Connectivity
In light of the diplomatic stalemate and internal pressure for widening
globalization, the state moved to transcend the opposition between border-reinforcing and
opportunity-seeking imperatives. The discursive justification of cyber sovereignty shifted
from defending national security to achieving positive goals. Opportunity, development,
and innovation in and around the internet were featured. The move was made from
reacting to an external adversary to addressing transnational connectivity and shared
collectiveness. The contours of this discourse shift were indicated by changes regarding
self-perception, causes for action, conception of Border 2.0, and construction of global
authority.
The idea of “building a cyberspace community of shared destiny,” introduced in
2015 by President Xi at the Second Wuzhen Summit, entails establishing a multilateral
governing structure and turning the internet into development opportunities commonly
shared by people across nations. It is a vision for reshaping transnational structures of
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communicative relations, opportunities, resources, and protocols. Claiming that China
has become a “big internet nation” in the world—thanks to the efforts of all stakeholders
and to the integration of advanced technologies and ideas from around the world,
commentaries contrast the ideal of shared development with the reality of domination and
monopoly and oblige internet superpowers especially the US, to fulfill the promise of
global justice (Wei, 2015).
To break away from the US-style technocratic corporatist dominance of global
communication, the discourse justifies component principles of cyber sovereignty: i.e.,
non-transferable rights to development, governance, and participation, regardless of one’s
techno-economic capacities, for redressing crises in the political economy stemming from
the “law of the jungle.” The trope of common prosperity, or internet-enabled
development across borders and divides, turns cyber sovereignty from a territory-based
device into a global developmental vision. In turn, the realization of sovereignty, defined
as encompassing security, connectivity, and development, is cast in transnational and
multicultural terms. Ultimately, cyber sovereignty is implied not as a return to absolute
autonomy—membership in the cybersphere has already eroded Westphalian sovereignty
in the first place—but proposed as a viable option of global governance for shielding the
state capacity necessary to fulfill economic and social responsibilities.
While projecting a countervision that embraces the developing world’s unmet
developmental need, the Chinese state is not without strategic considerations. It takes
upon itself to drive the global digital economy. In 2014, it denounced protectionism and
demanded law harmonization for integrating online marketplaces (“Guowuyuan,” 2014).
In 2015, the construction of four cross-border cables connecting China and ASEAN
Comment [.1]: Is!this!what!you!mean?!If!so,!
internet&superpower&may!be!a!more!sophisticated!
term!to!use!instead.!
Comment [Y2]: Keep!the!original!!
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countries and the regional business partnerships it spurred were praised as highlights of
the year (“Lu wei,” 2015). The discursive gesture, and the state-led wave of investment,
represents a profound reaction by the Chinese state to the new requirements of a
globalizing cyber economy originating in China, a reaction with the basic purpose of
helping break barriers against China-based techno-corporate forces and gaining a more
commanding position in the global order of communication. Notably, these actions invite
disagreement and complicate regional relations, not least because China’s rise has
disturbed the hegemonic position of the Global North and has complicated the category
of the South (Wasserman, 2018). Recent data shows that Chinese companies’
investments tripled in developing Asian countries, but growing criticism that BRI
increased debt burdens have pressed the Chinese authorities to limit overseas investments
as part of the state initiative for the first time (Kynge, 2019; “China moves,” 2019).
Sovereignty in Action: Disagreement and Porous Borders
In China’s countervision, the fixed and reliable notion of borders remains
important, but complex relationships of state and private governance, national and
international standards, emerge. The lexicon of internet sovereignty, for instance, has
evolved more de-territorialized and flexible notions of security, such as confrontational
capacity, capacity frontier, authorization power, and relative security (Li & Li, 2017). At
the Third Wuzhen Summit in 2016, Xi also affirmed internet development as
“borderless.” He advised his rank-and-file cyber administrators that cyber security could
only be improved in an “open” environment—through more “communication,
collaboration, and contention” (“Xi Jinping zai,” 2016). This reflects a new thinking
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among Chinese policy makers. Cyber sovereignty is not to be clawed back through rigid
control over a bounded territory; instead, political economies of communication power
are to be built by transcending and uniting the domestic and global, central and
peripheral, and state and market binaries.
This stance leads to institutional and material thrusts of cyber sovereignty, which
trigger conflict and complicity, opposition and alliance, and ultimately dispersed and
contestable dominance. The party state’s mission, in Xi’s view, requires “solid,
domestically developed technology, rich and comprehensive information services, a
prosperous cyber culture, a robust infrastructure, high-caliber experts in internet security
and information, as well as international cooperation” (Herold, 2018, p. 57). Thus,
domestic authority is enacted over and through varied degrees of privatization,
liberalization, and globalization in the cybersphere. However, as these efforts may
contradict liberal values and compromise neoliberal interests, they make strides at the
cost of facing consistent pushback and reversed allegations.
The National Cyber Security Law passed in 2016 installs in legal terms various
dimensions of domestic sovereignty, including authority over cyber activities at home,
control over cross-border flows, jurisdiction over foreign entities operating in China, and
authority to block out unwanted information from overseas (Wu, 2016). How to parlay
legal principles into practices is subject to contention, however. As Wang Yukai,
professor from China National School of Administration, advised, the law needs a viable
method for implementation, or else will backfire on the international scene (Wang, 2015).
Notably, tension and caution run through three main policy areas: platform liability for
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speech and actions of netizens, transnational supply chain management, and data
collection and transmission.
To buttress the legitimacy of the party state against so-called “digital storms,” the
state attempts to re-organize non-traditional power structures enabled by the internet.
This is done focally through the privatization of internet content control—without
contesting transnational ownership or mass self-communication capacity. The Provision
on Management of Instant Messaging Services (2015) obliges platform providers to
screen institutional accounts, authorizes them to shut down accounts if the latter violates
political bottom-lines, and mandates a reporting relationship between platform providers
and the supervisory authority. Online news providers, including online intermediaries
authorized only to convey news, are required to have an editor-in-chief for overseeing
content previews, whose nationality must be Chinese, so as to facilitate law enforcement.
Still, when institutional accounts exceeded 20 million on Tencent’s WeChat alone, the
power of digital re-mixing, translating, and sharing became too diffuse to be contained.
Thus, despite intensified efforts to clean up the Internet, a public opinion cycle has
shaped up as acknowledged by an authoritative source, with a singular scandal leading to
investigation of similar cases and then breaking into generalized critiques of the
establishment (Peng & Che, 2018).
The state also attempts to rein in various transnational supply chains by installing
virtual and physical borders. Yet this attempt, along with the formative domestic
authority structure that supports it, continues to contend with global authorities that
represent the interests of the transnational internet industry. The “Network Products and
Services Security Inspection Measures” (2017) stipulates that critical network products
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and services must pass a national security check before being put to use. However, the
inspection excludes technologies and services that only pertain to public interests, due to
US government pressure (“Xi Jinping fangmei,” 2015). In another example, when the
National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee issued about 300
cyber security-related standards, the Chinese authority was made to disclose required
standards to the World Trade Organization and, to avoid backlash, downgraded 1,000
such standards from required national standards to recommendations (Sacks & Li, 2018).
The state also demarcates authority claims over cross-border data flows,
stipulating that data collected in real-time on cloud-service platforms at the behest of
state agencies belongs to state agencies. Boundaries are further demarcated through
territory and population, as data contitutes digital traces of populations and their conduct.
In principle, data collected within physical national borders should be stored and
processed locally, subject to security assessment. However, leeway is available—the
“Measures of Security Assessment for Offshore Personal Information and Critical Data
Storage (draft)” set up thresholds below which businesses can exercise independent
discretion. Although making rules for itself rather than promoting the model through
trade diplomacy, China’s unilateral stance on data localization has hampered digital
flows. This triggered US unilateralism in the ongoing trade negotiations, forcing China to
reconsider its cloud-market access policy and to delay the final verification of the draft
measure (Kubota & Wei, 2019; Yang, 2019).
The Chinese state is asserting sovereign rights and securing new borders, but its
independence is circumscribed, and its interdependence constantly felt. To prevent a
delink from the global internet system and to avert stoking domestic disagreement and
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global confrontation, the formative Border 2.0 is porous rather than solid, as long as
jurisdiction over security throttles is ensured. One may still read the state’s words and
actions in the traditional manner: as for internal political-security reasons and/or as
protective techno-economic policy. It is imperative to add, however, that the state is a
major site of struggle in global domestic politics, as the internet enabled by the state has
materialized China’s integration and struggle with the global capitalist system. Thus,
even when the state’s actions and reactions express its own wills for control or reflect the
interests of domestic constituents it prioritizes, the state must mind global legitimacy and
sphere sustainability in its words and actions. Indeed, in transforming the cybersphere
into non-traditional structures of power, the state’s sovereign authority is contested. Its
assertion of authority and boundary expresses both preference and compromise.
Discussion and Conclusion
Sovereign relations are being worked out in various fashions. To make sense of
contested yet ongoing ties between states and the internet, we use the cybersphere to
conceptualize a layered, varied, and evolving network-enabled ensemble of production
chains, techno-economic infrastructures, and legal-political arrangements that translate
socio-cultural vitality and channel communicative flows. The cybersphere is global in its
scope, unifying uneven engagements, different trends, and numerous venues. Its new
centrality in the ever-expanding scope and depth of communication has further animated
disagreement over political economy and governance. The entanglement of political
economies and disagreement spaces transforms the cybersphere into an expanded
HOW TO THINK ABOUT CYBER SOVEREIGNTY 29!
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geopolitics where competing narratives, categories, proposals, and arrangements emerge,
clash, work out, or transcend difference.
We reviewed the Chinese state’s agentic power at a critical moment when China
and the cybersphere, a set of intertwined engines in the global political economy, render
the party state at once both a contesting subject and a contested object, especially its bid
for cyber sovereignty. The state’s construction of cyber sovereignty is intended to
safeguard the multipolar direction of global digital capitalism and to extend contestation
over cyberspace governance beyond issues of security and privacy to those of material
wellbeing, developmental justice, and alternative planetary futures. Notably, the state
functions both a driver and barometer of disagreement. It has come to heed the risk of
using sovereignty and territoriality interchangeably and is turning the concept from a
territory-based device into a global developmental rhetoric. At home, the state is
demarcating boundaries through authority, territory, and population in the transnational
structures of the cybersphere, leaving loopholes, decentralization, and diffusion as
normality under the pressure of discord and defiance. Notably, when cyber sovereignty
embraces the cybersphere and critiques the crises it amplifies, this “embrace plus
critique” gesture is made up of three competing visions and practices: a
counterhegemonic order, a defender of the globalization order, and a unilateral
reorganization of non-traditional structures of power.
Looking forward, heated contests for the future global internet governance will be
torn by inter-hegemonic rivalries, but controversies over development and justice will
become increasingly embroiled in tensions between sustaining global interdependence
and asserting national interests. To prevent a slide into decision-making patterns driven
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by power interests, it is the case that the “ideal” cybersphere for different
national/international projects is differently envisioned but that the political economy of
practice (adjusting inside and out by nation states and international groups) is a necessity.
With adjustments tacit and voiced, secret and open, a sphere of engagement,
entanglement, and regulatory/performance rules is put into place, contested, and revised.
Following the traditional praxis of critique, we hold accountable practices and structures
developed during an era of prevailing communication flows from center to periphery.
This paper ultimately offers a step towards laying the foundation for open public debate
over a global digital cybersphere order and for considering anew the internet and
governance.
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