ChinaFile: A Clash of Cyber Civilizations

Various cultures are emerging on the internet, and “as the international system slips away from American unipolarity, a competing model of cyber sovereignty has emerged in China that seeks to bind cyber borders to online censorship and surveillance,” writes Geoffrey Hoffman for ChinaFile. Distrust also emerges, and he questions if the two models can coexist. China enforces cyber borders and that helps with cyber-defense, while the Western model lends influence to critical news and research sites that avoid the problems associated with self-censorship. “It is too early to tell whether cyber borders or cooperation will be more effective at combining security, access to necessary information, and control over potential threats, or whether the models will instead stabilize into a bipolar parity,” Hoffman notes. “Cyber defense norms, treaties, and institutions may yield enough common ground to mitigate, somewhat, the inevitable conflicts over censorship in the years ahead.” Governments, businesses and individuals around the world make decisions daily on whether to cooperate or refrain from engagement based on these models. – YaleGlobal