The China Conundrum and its implications for international cyber-security – 16

This is my sixteenth installment in an ongoing series on international cyber-security issues with a focus on China (see Ubiquitous Computing and Communications – everywhere all the time, postings 69 and scattered following.) And this is also a posting in at least partial response to a global phenomenon of social and political unrest. And I start with that half of that dual foundation for this posting.

• In the United States we have Tea Party politics, ideology, polemics and action, and we tend to view this simply as a phenomenon taking place within the United States. I have to add, of course, that Tea Party politics is being confronted with Occupy Wall Street politics in the United States so this is in no way a single ideological orientation phenomenon.
• Europe is facing crisis with Euro Zone national economies in grave trouble and with the economic distress faced by countries such as Greece spilling over into same-region countries with the strongest economies, such as Germany. And this is accompanied by growing civil unrest and in countries spanning this region.
• True, business people and economists in the US and other countries outside of the Euro Zone see and understand the connections between national and regional economies, and worldwide and as they impact upon each other. The Euro Zone crisis has had and will continue to have a real impact on the US economy for example, serving as a break slowing our economic recovery here.
• But just as telling are the connections between civil unrest and even societal rebellion as are found on both sides of the Atlantic. And that connection largely goes unnoticed except perhaps where economic weakness brings already developing trends to a head.
• And the Middle East is undergoing its Arab Spring and there is unrest in many places in Asia too.
• Beyond that, we are witnessing a truly global shift, and global patterns of unrest that are in fact all interconnected, even as we all tend to look at the separate parts and places where this is taking place as if in isolation from each other.
• And Asia is seeing this too, China in particular and with ethnic strife and with protests against central governmental use of eminent domain to seize land and often with little if any compensation to the erstwhile owners, and over problems of unregulated industrial pollution and the appearance of governmental corruption in facilitating that.

That emerging global pattern is where I really begin this posting, and by repeating a point I have made many times, but that I note again here because it helps to bring this specific story into clearer focus. We are all, collectively and globally coming together as a single overarching community, and our emerging global capacity for seamlessly interconnected ubiquitous computing and communications, everywhere and all the time are serving to make any and every local story a global story. These emerging capabilities bring us together where we can, do and will find each other making local issues national and national issues international. And this is changing everything.

China’s central government sees at least a part of this and it sees tremendous danger in it, and both for its own position and security, and for the overall stability of China as a whole. China’s history is long and there is precedent for its breaking up just as there is for its unification. I am fairly certain that I have already cited its Warring States Period in this regard, but I could just as easily cite much more recent periods of unrest and separation – from the Imperial Era but also from the Modern Era. And for the Modern Era, that includes the period out of which the modern Peoples Republic of China of today was formed, along with the break-away government on Taiwan: the Republic of China. And it is that breaking away with the wars and unrest leading up to that, that the Chinese Politburo fears most. It was born out of precisely the type and form of chaos it does not want to be challenged by through new unrest.

I have written about the demographics time bomb that China is facing (see Part 10 of this series) and of its responses to that, throughout this series. Rather than reiterating my basic lines of reasoning and evidence in support of that finding, or of China’s response to it (see for example, Part 11) I have decided to view and discuss this from the larger perspective of a global framework.

• I strongly suspect that the central Chinese government, its Politburo definitely included, looks at its own internal unrest and potential for unrest as if in a vacuum, and as if this was entirely an internal affair except insofar as external forces might seek to meddle.
• That perspective, and if you will that blindness more than anything else serves to shape China’s cyber policy and its operational and strategic approaches for enacting it. That means its inwardly facing Golden Shield Project and its ongoing outwardly facing cyber initiatives, a few of which I have been discussing in this series.
• But China will never be able to effectively come to grips with its current crises and potential crises, or even avoid turning potential into realized for them until it learns to view its current and developing situation from a wider perspective.
• The central Chinese government fears the danger inherit in its demographics, and both from it skewed age distribution across its population and from its gender ratio skew with tens of millions more male children than female. It sees real challenges and dangers in managing the potential for unrest between its varied ethnic groups and particularly as it sees disparities in wealth and opportunity developing with more than just an abstract potential for push-back from the have-nots. But its most dangerous set of issues that can and will come to haunt it is a none-of-the-above.
• And to understand that source of risk, China’s government is going to have to start looking at its unrest as a manifestation of a larger and in fact global phenomenon, and at China as a local manifestation of that.

I am going to discuss this emerging threat in some depth as a separate posting as the next installment in this series – and simply note that any real threat to any one country or region is increasingly a threat to all others too. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings at Ubiquitous Computing and Communications – everywhere all the time.