Crossing the River of Secrecy China's Cyber Strategy 2000s-2010s

Crossing the River of Secrecy China's Cyber Strategy 2000s-2010s

Since the 2000s, specialized units of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) have been infiltrating companies and government agencies to continuously acquire intellectual property and trade secrets. Targets were concentrated on a wide range of areas that affect industrial competitiveness, including aerospace, defense, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and advanced materials. These achievements supported both the strengthening of domestic industry and security policies.

The international community's view changed in 2013 with the release of a civilian investigation report that linked years of infiltration and theft of secrets to specific units and bases. The activities were not one-offs, but ongoing operations, with tactics tailored to each company. Once infiltrated, they maintained a long-term incubation period and quietly removed blueprints and research data. The intruders were also very careful to blend in with normal business communications in order to avoid detection.

On the law enforcement side, in 2014 the U.S. sent a deterrent signal by criminally prosecuting active foreign government officials for the first time for cyber theft for economic purposes, and in 2015 the U.S. and China reached an agreement not to support cyber theft for commercial gain, but the overall deterrent effect was assessed to be limited. Even as the number of visible attacks temporarily decreased, the modus operandi became more sophisticated and decentralized.

In 2018, a Ministry of National Security-affiliated operation was accused of hacking the supply chain, using cloud and managed service providers as stepping stones to spread horizontally to numerous downstream companies. The idea was to go beyond the boundaries of the companies themselves to target outsourcing partners and jointly used infrastructure, thus gaining access to intellectual property and customer data over a wide area in one fell swoop. This is an offensive line of attack in an age when cloud computing is becoming the norm.

Behind this is the industrial policy of making Japan a manufacturing powerhouse and the promotion of the fusion of the military and private sectors. Priority fields such as aerospace, machine tools, robotics, pharmaceuticals, and next-generation information technology were clearly identified, and a variety of acquisition methods were used to buy R&D time. Along with formal investment joint ventures and the invitation of human resources, the acquisition of technology via cyber was seen by many countries as a low-cost and asymmetric option.

International assessments have shifted from economic espionage to structural threats, and countermeasures have become multi-layered, particularly in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. The combination of zero-trust in key areas, strengthened auditing, judicial measures, sanctions, and export controls, as well as attribution sharing and simultaneous announcements between alliances, have become firmly established as both defense and deterrence measures. As a result, China's cyber strategy in the 2010s was designed as a long-term battle involving industrial policy, information operations, and supply networks, and countries will be forced to face permanent opposition in the 2020s and beyond.