Study Times, a journal run by the Party School of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, published in its May 1, issue an article titled “National Security in the Information Age.” The author, Gen. Xiong Guangkai (Ret.), is president of the China Institute for International Strategic Studies. Xiong is also the former deputy chief of the general staff of the PLA and, as military intelligence chief, helped shape China’s security policy. To American readers, Xiong is perhaps best known for his 1995 threat to use nuclear weapons on Los Angeles if the United States intervened to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion; however, there is some indication that the substance of the conversation was simply misreported. Xiong begins his Study Times article with the statement “information security has become an integral part of comprehensive national security,” and adds “the development of information technology… has presented national security–perhaps even international security–with many challenges.” He cautions that “the abuse of the information network is likely to affect the political stability of the nation” and “ethnic separatists and religious extremists are using the Internet wantonly to provoke incidents and seriously jeopardize regional security.” Xiong ends with a call for “greater international cooperation to ensure information security.” He proposes that the following steps be taken: 1) Promote the establishment of a “new order for international information security” based on equality and mutual benefit; 2) Promote the formation of international laws and regulations that can be applied widely; 3) Promote the building of a long-term, effective mechanism for international cooperation in information security. China watchers in Hong Kong have noted that coming from someone with Xiong’s clout, these statements likely signal Beijing’s intention to pursue a greater global leadership role in information technology. This is consistent with the September 2006 announcement in People’s Daily that “China has successfully built its next generation Internet with Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), replacing Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), to become the world leader in this field.” In March 2006, while reporting that China was creating a new set of domain names based on Chinese characters, People’s Daily suggested that the move would mean “Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States.” Industry experts contend that China’s Next Generation Internet (CNGI), to be showcased at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is the centerpiece of China’s plan to take leadership away from the United States in Internet development. In fact, CNGI has been written into China’s 2006-2010 Five-Year Plan. Of course, China’s status as the world’s leading threat to information security may cause some to wonder if this is about “greater international cooperation,” or just another in a series of sophisticated public relations campaigns to come out of Beijing.
