In the past decade, we have seen a monumental rise in tech consumer products originating from China. The success of Chinese products can be accredited to a wide range of attributes like their relatively competitive pricing, overly aggressive marketing, lax intellectual property laws, and massive production capability. It is critical to observe and document this because they pose a huge potential threat to our data privacy and indigenous tech companies, not to mention a steady flow of cash to one of the most authoritarian and fascist governments on the planet, the CCP. This article shall discuss what are the exact threats that China’s rise in the tech world poses to the free world and discuss what the potential solution to this problem might be. China’s growing economic and military prowess means that we cannot turn a blind eye to them anymore.

India and USA have both banned and levied sanctions on multiple Chinese multi-billion-dollar conglomerates citing data privacy concerns and the Chinese’s blatant disregard of intellectual property violations. Though some of this animosity can be attributed to the White House’s political ambitions, there is no denying that China has played its part to earn its reputation. The British and other European governments have also taken overwhelming precautions against Chinese tech companies, prominently Huawei, gaining a strong foothold in the tech market in fear that sensitive data might get leaked from their country.

Also, claims that tech companies like Huawei and Alibaba are required to share their data with the CCP have further increased apprehension against China. However, the fact that they have control over almost every single supply chain in the world and the fact that China is the largest manufacturer means that we cannot simply circumvent or shun them, at least not in the current global scenario.

Official statements from Chinese tech companies (Huawei, Tencent, etc.) have also been taken into consideration to put forward their stance on the issues. The reader should note that since most of the articles have been acquired from Western media sources, more often than not they are overly critical of the CCP and its proceedings. Chinese media has also been taken into deliberation but considering the fact that all media is state-owned and the fact that they blatantly deny any and all allegations made against the CCP has compelled most of the world not to prioritize them over other, more credible sources. All the articles and papers used for reference are mentioned at the end of the document.

NOT SO HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

In the past decade, we have seen a monumental rise in tech consumer products originating from China. The success of Chinese products can be accredited to a wide range of attributes like their relatively competitive pricing, overly aggressive marketing, lax intellectual property laws, and massive production capability. China had invested heavily in the tech industry in the 2000s and 2010s in the form of Economic and Technological Development Zones and various National Programmes like the Key Laboratories Programme and the National New Products Programme. Today China is the world’s largest producer of silicon tech and networking equipment. The rapid adoption of the latest technology and massive backing from the CCP is clearly the main reasons why China is a global leader.

The acquisition of technology has always been a central part of China’s economic reform effort. But until recently this was mainly characterized by intellectual property violations and information theft from other countries. A 2005 report found serious shortcomings to China's national innovation system. There were problems with services to help turn S&T work into results and the allocation of national funding to support technology was far from optimal. Over the past decade, China has invested heavily in developing indigenous technology and this has largely paid off for them. Today, the Chinese software industry in 2010 had a higher than 15% share of the world's software and information service market and had been growing by an average of 36% each year during the previous decade.

CHINA, HUAWEI, AND 5G

The United States was the world leader in revolutionizing 4G LTE network coverage all over the globe and China wants to take the primary role in bringing 5G to the global markets under the Made in China 2025 program. The main concern of governments all over the world is that the Chinese manufacturers might install certain “back door applications” which might secretly leak and reveal sensitive information. Huawei, the biggest manufacturer of 5G equipment and the biggest smartphone manufacturer after Samsung, has denied these accusations and allegations repeatedly and stated that they have no ties with the CCP and that they work as an independent organization. These claims are hard to believe considering the fact that they were caught stealing information and equipment from major American companies like Cisco and Juniper and the information eventually made its way to the CCP. All the telecom providers in China are directly under the CCP’s control and are required to share all their data with the party. 5G adaptation in China has seen rapid growth, slightly hindered by only the Coronavirus crisis. All the major manufacturers 5G equipment in China are under the direct surveillance and control of the state and this has further increased apprehensions against buying Chinese equipment in fear of surveillance.

U.S. security concerns surrounding Huawei have pre-dated the current 5G-related controversies. The United States government claims that the Chinese government can force wireless infrastructure vendors to incorporate software backdoors or hardware that would allow China to spy on the U.S. or its allies. President Donald Trump's administration has also tried to put the brakes on China's 5G ambitions, mostly through curtailing Huawei, the world's leading supplier of 5G equipment. US officials have long worried that Huawei gear could be used to spy on US citizens and its allies. In Europe, most countries have banned Huawei from entering the telecom market due to political pressure from the White House and concerns over surveillance from the CCP. Nokia and Ericsson in Europe and Cisco, Juniper, Verizon, AT&T in the US have readily grabbed the opportunity presented to them and are rapidly developing the infrastructure required to do so. The White House also banned all Huawei devices in the networking and telecom sector and five other countries: Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, and New Zealand have also followed suit. Other US allies, such as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK, have said they plan to move forward with Huawei deployments but with some restrictions. While recently the Boris Johnson administration has reversed its stance and has banned Huawei from entering the UK telecom sector. The Iranian government is one of the first to have completely accepted Huawei and today Huawei is their single largest telecom provider.

Some experts say that the security threat posed by Huawei is largely hypothetical. It hinges on a mechanism in Chinese law that obliges all companies to comply with all requests from the Chinese government to assist in intelligence gathering. While major cybersecurity companies claim that the threat is, in fact, not being given enough importance. A major reason why governments are unable to trust Huawei is the fact that they maintain a very secretive relation with the CCP and never fully disclose the regulations and rules they need to follow under Chinese law. The Chinese government has clearly said that it won't ask companies to install backdoor but their infamous reputation of repeatedly stealing information means that we can attribute this claim to a grain of salt.

The Narendra Modi government has asked all the telecom providers in India to stop using Huawei and ZTE equipment recently over security concerns. Even though India lacks basic network coverage all over the country and banning Huawei and ZTE might be considered a haphazard move, experts claim that this will eventually pay off since the country won't be under direct risk from the CCP. But the fact remains that over 55% of BSNL’s infrastructure, the Indian state telecom provider, has been built by Huawei and ZTE, with ZTE alone consisting of over 30% of the 3G network infrastructure. Huawei over the past decade has established itself as a premier network service provider and the fact remains that Nokia, Ericsson, and other major providers have a tough time beating the scale and quality of Huawei. A complete ban on services from Huawei and ZTE means that Indian indigenous companies like Jio can take over their Chinese counterparts. In fact, it is predicted that Jio, which has already developed a homegrown 5G solution, will have a huge boost if this blanket ban indeed happens.

A critical argument for Huawei remains that they provide their services at a very low cost and in most cases at a superior quality as compared to their competitors and if Huawei manages to repeat what it has done with 2G, 3G, and 4G, they might emerge, once again, as the clear victor. As no clear evidence regarding any intentional harm by Huawei was ever proved on solid grounds, as the political scenario shifts we might see a change in trend and a worldwide adaptation of Huawei technology.

CHINESE CYBER-WARFARE

The director of the FBI has, on multiple occasions, said that China is the biggest long-term threat to the future of the US. He said that the FBI is opening a China-related counterintelligence case once every ten hours and almost half of the active counterintelligence cases in the US are related to China. It is not an understatement that China is a huge threat in the cyber world, their alleged “cyber-army” consists of around fifty thousand to a hundred thousand seasoned hackers. The Gulf War is said to be the point of infliction when the Chinese realized that they need reforms of their military to fight wars driven by technology. In the 1990s China changed its strategy to “Unrestricted Warfare” and the need to “fight the fight that fits one’s weapons”. Later in 2004, this strategy was changed to “winning local wars under conditions of informationization”, China also emphasized on the fact that “informationization has become the key factor in enhancing the warfighting capability of the armed forces.” Today, China has come an exceptionally long way and has established itself as a leading cyberwarfare capable nation challenging the likes of the USA and Russia.

China has been blamed for multiple acts of espionage including stealing the blueprints to the headquarters of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in 2013, stealing US’s weapons-related information in 2013, allegedly attacking the Indian National Security Council in 2008. It can be said with a fair amount of certainty that it is the USA that has taken the majority of the brunt of China’s cyber warfare that targeted the networks of the important American military, commercial, research, and industrial organizations. In 2015 the US was the victim of the largest cyber-attack by China on the US in which 5.6 million fingerprints of people were said to be stolen from The Office of Personnel Management. The main issue lies in identifying China’s malicious intentions behind these attacks. Leaked official documents reveal that the PLA and CCP have consistently advocated cyber warfare to achieve a range of operational objectives, such as targeting an adversary’s command, control, and communications and logistics networks to hamper its ability to generate combat power. The use of cyber-attacks with conventional attacks is also expected to further weaken their adversary during the early stages of a conflict.

India also had its fair share of cyber-attacks from China, the CCP’s main goal was to breach the defenses of the Government and the private sector and most of these attacks started taking place around 2010. Over 55% of China’s targets were private sector companies. It was also in 2010 when China launched its Stuxnet worm to cripple the Indian satellite system. China has repeatedly used Trojan horses (programs that seem legitimate but are in fact viruses) to attack the Indians during this period. The biggest ineptitude of both the Indian government and the American government lies in repeatedly underestimating the Chinese’s capabilities and at this stage, after repeated attacks on multiple critical organs of their respective governments, it seems as if its more incapability than ineptitude. One of India’s major attempts to combat Chinese cyber-warfare was to develop in-house chips and a proprietary Operating System called BOSS, but soon this proved to be a failure and they had to revert to Windows 7. In 2019, for three months India was the most attacked nation in the cyber-space with most of the malicious actors being traced back to China. One of the most interesting observations is that China’s own internet suffers a huge number of breach attempts per day (around 800 million DDoS attacks per day!) from various countries and intelligence agencies but the Chinese have proven themselves to be more than adept at dealing with these attacks, so much so that the Chinese servers have an infamous reputation of being notoriously difficult to hack into. The lack of a decent number of well-trained cybersecurity professionals is one particularly important reason why most of the countries are unable to combat the Chinese. Lax security protocols, especially within the Indian Government, can be attributed to successful attacks against India. However, after the recent developments during the COVID-19 pandemic, things have taken a turn for the better. Both India and the United States have significantly modernized their defenses and are significantly investing in the latest cyber-security technologies. As the famous Chinese adage goes: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second-best time is now”!

REFERENCES

bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53329755 carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/01/what-are-c.. intentions-pub-78734 indiatoday.in/world/story/inside-china-s-cy.. global-attacks-1708292-2020-08-06 indiandefencereview.com/news/chinas-cyber-w.. abc.net.au/news/2013-05-29/brandis-briefed-.. claims/4719886 articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-0.. independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/opm-s..? wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702046445045.. qz.com/india/1880747/ambanis-reliance-indus.. cnet.com/news/5g-will-change-the-world-and-..