Cyber warfare has long been recognized as a possible weapon of war. China appears to have attacked the United States and Britain in this manner. And neighboring Taiwan is already very familiar with attacks by the Middle Kingdom.
When secret services speak publicly, it’s a rarity. The interest and response from the public is correspondingly high. Now the US and UK domestic intelligence agencies have announced in a joint press conference that their countries are under attack from the People’s Republic of China.
Cyber warfare, i.e. war against a country’s technological and digital infrastructure, has long been seen as a possible weapon of war. Enemy countries like Russia or China can paralyze a country’s electricity or water supply. In doing so, they not only do maximum harm to people, but also put governments under pressure.
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In the course of the US presidential elections in the USA, Russian actors took advantage of the social network Facebook. They managed to manipulate selected groups of recipients with false messages. The People’s Republic is already launching such attacks on neighboring democratic Taiwan.
China’s goal is to polarize Taiwanese society. However, the latest studies have shown that the opposite is the case: China’s attacks are leading to greater unity and a desire for Taiwan’s independence across all party lines, as a study by Cambridge University shows.
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The FBI and MI5 can therefore back up their warnings with data and figures. Since 2018, the number of attacks on their two countries has increased sevenfold, they say. From this, the secret services conclude that China wants to increase the pace and pressure to manipulate and reshape the world in its interest.
For years there have been corresponding reports that the People’s Republic is also trying to undermine human rights through other channels: According to a report by “Spiegel”, China is trying to impose its own “view” on these human rights in the United Nations.
The world knows what it looks like: genocide is currently taking place in China against the Uyghur ethnic minority. Furthermore, people in Tibet, Hong Kong and Inner Mongolia are being deprived of their fundamental rights. Given these facts, no one in their right mind could wish for China to have more influence in the world.
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The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution warned German companies of hacker attacks from China as early as January. According to a report by Merkur, there are 20,000 such cyber attacks per day. This is said to be primarily economic and industrial espionage.
Before the last federal election, Russia specifically attacked the government and parliamentarians. The warning from the secret services is now aimed in particular at the economy, Beijing is said to have it in its sights. In this sense, it was also said at the press conference that an invasion of Taiwan would disrupt the world economy in an unprecedented way.
Since almost all chips that are found in cell phones and other electronics around the world are produced in Taiwan, this is a serious warning. The free world should, as is currently happening in Taiwan, agree on a strategy across party lines on how to effectively defend itself against the threats of dictatorships.
Alexander Görlach is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian teaches democratic theory in Germany, Austria and Spain as an honorary professor at Leuphana University. In the 2017-18 academic year, he was at National Taiwan University and City University Hong Kong to conduct research on China’s rise. He is currently researching new technologies at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute and how they are used in democracies and abused in dictatorships.
