How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty: The Case of China

How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty: The Case of China1 Yu Hong, Zhejiang University, [email protected] G. Thomas Goodnight, University of Southern California, [email protected] Article accepted by Chinese Journal of Communication (upcoming 2020) Abstract The cybersphere constitutes a global disagreement space. There, the contested, ongoing ties that link states and the internet come into being. A critique of sovereignty and political economy is offered to evaluate contemporary controversies concerning authority, independence, regulation, and access to communications as matters of relationality, materiality, and disagreement. We review China’s promotion of cyber sovereignty as a complicating episode that expresses development stresses of the sphere. China wishes to establish guardrails for the practices of multipolar global digital capitalism; yet, it has ushered in an Internet keyed variety of global issues--security, privacy, material well- being, developmental justice, and planetary futures. These complex aims invite and expand the dialectical spaces animating the cybersphere. Keywords: China; geopolitics; internet governance; cyber sovereignty; political economy; disagreement space; cybersphere; global communication 1 Research for this article was supported by the Chinese Social Science Fund (18AXW009). We’d like to thank anonymous reviewers for their critical comments. 1 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty: The Case of China The contestation over cyberspace and ICTs constitutes an important vector in the renewed global scramble for command and power. The Chinese state has taken a slew of actions announcing claims to China’s cyber sovereignty. China watchers and internet pundits ask: how will claims to sovereign governance facilitate or hinder China’s global integration? To what extent do such claims portend the “nationalization of the internet” (Herold, 2011)? Meanwhile, other states grow inclined to territorialize cyberspace. The US has developed a National Cybersecurity Division within its Department of Homeland Security. The UK set up the National Cyber Security Center. French President Macron launched the “Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace.” In the absence of authoritative global institutions, states develop parallel but different premises, protocols, and apparatuses of governance. Despite these verifiable trends, the “strong and persistent tension between state sovereignty, which is territorially bounded, and the non-territorial space for social interaction created by networked computers” remains unresolved (Mueller, 2010, p. 1). Cyberspace is no longer presumed a “natural” environment that would portend certain governing principles. Internet scholars debate about good or bad governance--amidst unfixed values, shifting contexts, and changing applications (DeNardis, 2014). Still, the tendency is to regard the internet as an autonomous global polity clashing with interests, 2 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty processes, and structures that predate networks, especially national systems, inter-state treaties, and local norms. Based on liberal values, this framework has a lacuna of political economies and, therefore, risks totalizing the internet. Other than rehearsing binary constructs between material and virtual, state and market, liberal and authoritarian, national and international, it has little to say about the varied but related forms of state sovereignty. In this paper, we intend to move the debate forward by weakening the binary and by noting the emergent geopolitical nature of the internet. We show how continuities and discontinuities among networked political economies can be mapped through discourses, and that internet governance has “expanded beyond operational governance functions” to an expanded geopolitics (DeNardis, 2014, p. 222). The case of China and internet governance is assembled from the construction of political economy events and the critique of contesting discourse vectors. The theoretical part of this paper de-reifies the popular constructs of the internet, of the state, and of sovereignty so as to recognize cyber sovereignty as a common but varied practice. For this purpose, we develop the concept of the cybersphere as a sociotechnical and ultimately geopolitical environment; outline contested yet living roles of nation states in constituting what is environed; and, identify entanglements of geopolitics, sovereignty, and communications as features of the multipolar political economy. The cybersphere comprises materialized political economies where presumably independent stakeholders mingle, align, and delink in ways that re-work relationships among, and sometimes transcend, conventional typologies. 3 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty China is known as a major advocate of cyber sovereignty—we propose to see the Chinese variant of cyber sovereignty as part and parcel of the cybersphere as a complex, emergent whole. The empirical part of this paper, which combines discourse inquiry with political economy and policy analysis, examines this cyber sovereignty in action so as to detect possible directions. With the focus on the ambiguous contested central term, discourse inquiry sets the stage for reading relationships driving political economies; but, relationships registered by the discourse are not all the connections with and within political economies. So, we also move beyond generalizing the term context to interpret sphere dynamics of political economies in stress, development, and controversy within and against the setting up of state discourse. We ask, what does the Chinese state seek to accomplish and what has it accomplished? We find that constructed dynamically through words and actions, cyber sovereignty shifts from a territory-based anchor into a global assembly of developmental devices. On the grounds that the old information order is fragmented and lacking equal access, the Chinese vision embraces the unmet longings of the developing global South. The vision frames sovereignty as a state’s responsibility for collective rights, but not exactly in terms of Westphalian autonomy. The Chinese state is not the only governing subject in the cybersphere, and its actions are subject to disagreement and contestation. So, it works to forge a state-led multi-stakeholder model and expresses boundaries both as its preference and compromise. Thus, the interactions between traditional sovereignty and its digital configurations are likely to induce a dialectical oscillation of policies. Policies vary between inward-looking unilateralism meant to consolidate the party state and outwardlooking advocacy for a multilateral, global internet order. In the longer run, we suggest 4 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty that China’s assertions of cyber sovereignty are likely to further global entanglements. The result is a contested space of an international sphere where rules of the road are formally and informally produced, materialized, tested, and settled—and perhaps then again disrupted. Beyond Dichotomy: China and the Cybersphere China’s stance on cyber governance marks a different way of thinking and praxis, but it should be viewed not in a binary relationship to the Global North but as intertwined with historical, geopolitical, and epistemological power relations (Wasserman, 2018). Borrowing from postcolonial infrastructure studies, critical algorithm studies, and internet histories, we use the cybersphere—defined as a historical ensemble of material, organizational, regulatory, and socio-cultural layers of communicative relations among populations, machines, and institutions developed across scales—as a substitute for cyberspace, to challenge the digital sublime and to underscore its emergent geopolitical nature. The digital sublime, whose influence has waned but is not finished, sees cyberspace to be a de-territorialized virtual global village (Johnson & Post, 1996). Its mistake lies in exaggerating social freedom to link and to exchange by rendering cyberspace as a natural given, rather than a geopolitical sphere. Enacted as a top-down model, cyberspace has been used to smuggle in universal norms that do not recognize historical struggle. The cybersphere, however, entails both materiality and relationality (Cooren, 2018). It entails not just virtual reality but material grounding. Power base, storage, and server locations are one thing; the interconnection of information and things 5 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty that 5G mobile networks are adding, quite another. Furthermore, the cybersphere shapes, and is shaped by, relational dynamics. It mediates labor relations, production chains, innovative resources, knowledge production capacities, and human relations with environment (Aouragh & Chakravartty, 2016; Murdock, 2018; Srinivasan, 2017). Extending political economies and expressing power relations, the sphere has selectively amalgamated national, material, and territorial spaces, on the one hand, and virtual networks of digital data exchange, on the other. It features both interdependence and discontinuity, blending functional flows, spatial fragments, and social segments (Castells, 2010). In the cybersphere, the continuity and discontinuity of political economies are named and arranged by discourse for exchange, forming disagreement spaces that “express differences, disrupt convention, and field imagined alternatives” (Jackson, 2015; Liu & Goodnight, 2016). Notably, the assemblage of policies, organizations, and material structures that underpin the socio-spatial logic of networks and networking is such a focal site of struggles over ideas, interests, and power across scales and units. If the old romantic thinking of cyberspace as a separate realm subject only to community-supported self-regulation long lost its force (Goldsmith & Wu, 2006), the multi-stakeholder model that has ever since prevailed evokes pluralistic participation but evades national sovereignty and hierarchical power (Mueller, 2010), even implicitly extending Northern bias against redistributive and developmental deficits (Chakravarty, 2007). Such failure ignites alternative politics centered on sovereign authorities, after decades of neoliberal regulatory reforms. 6 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty Instead of being a natural space of unity or inevitability, the cybersphere—which entangles political economies and disagreement spaces, national and international relations, virtual and material ties—has evolved into an expanded geopolitics. Its boundaries and sources of authority are fought over by different groups and, therefore, are intrinsically political (Kristof, 1960). Various spaces have already shaped but do not define the cybersphere. History shows that states and societies make their own interpretations amidst global techno-economic trends—depending on their values, interests, and capacities. The most notable is the Sino-US digital interdependence and discontinuity. The US has made foreign policy efforts to extend the liberal capitalist model to cyberspace, but China preserved some crucial political-economic and ideational foundations for self-determination despite its steadfast global digital convergence (Kiggins, 2012; Hong, 2017). Still, beneath the foreground of apparent variation lies the shared background of material ties and relational dynamics that defy binary distinctions. China’s internet has been conventionally rendered in the state territorial imaginary (Shen, 2017). By portraying a contest-and-conquest relationship between the state preoccupied with regime insecurity and varying social usages, the dual foci implicitly frame the Chinese Intranet against the globalist internet (King, et al., 2013; Rauchfleisch & Schäfer, 2015). Whereas the latter associates its governance with the presumably pluralistic, fragmented, and competitive societies of Western democracy, the former illustrates the will of the state and the structures of state control. Indeed, although contested and compromised, the efficacy of state control has legitimized deploying the Great Firewall as a synecdoche for China’s internet governance (MacKinnon, 2011; Wei, 2017). 7 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty Political economy frames a different cyber imaginary; one that loosens this stark dichotomy. Critical studies suggest that states co-exist with non-state agents in shaping the global internet, and that the influence of ownership, policies, laws, and commercial interests renders the idea of a “singular virtual space” misleading (Graham, 2013). Cast in light of the cybersphere, China’s so-called Intranet also reveals entanglements with foreign capital, foreign technology, foreign markets, and foreign labor. Rather than hold up “highly conservative” telecoms policy or exemplify “cyber-conservatives” (Zeng, Stevens & Chen, 2017; Mueller, 2010), the state has unleashed different sequences of liberalization, decisively exposing its share of the cybersphere to the dynamics of global digital capitalism (Hong, 2017; Schiller, 2014). Symbolic, cultural, and social dimensions are also folded into the cybersphere. From blogging to social networking to e-commerce, the platformization of cyberspace is structured by bottom-up vitalities, which sustain and derail top-down governance (Yang, 2003; Yu, 2017). Shaping and shaped by actors of the political economy, including states, markets, and societies, the cybersphere continues to extend social relations and material structures across boundaries, be they spatial, temporal, material, corporeal, and social. Its ubiquitous expansion, accelerated by the Internet of Things, the Internet of Bodies, and 5G mobile networks, has enmeshed the state in a “variable geometry” of wills, interests, and values and even overwhelms it with torrents of capital, technology, information, and communication (Castells, 2010, p. 53). If “statism disintegrated in contact with new information technologies,” as Manuel Castells wrote in the Information Age trilogy, does the exercise of cyber sovereignty mark an orchestrated reaction of the state? What kind of 8 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty state? And how? This brings back the state as a strategic actor in the generally “stateless” internet studies (Flew, 2018). Rethinking the State in Transnational Digital Political Economy China’s official vision as to the state’s authority over internet-related public policy differs from the Western liberal model, not just in the sense of opposing individualist democracies and authoritarian states. China’s communication policies persist as a dialectic between incumbent powers that own, regulate, and change the organizational apparatuses and material structures of communications and emergent powers that use, extend, and innovate counter-orders. So, the approach here is not to dissolve the state-centric framework, nor do we suggest an economic cosmopolitan account to replace the national framing. But, alternative to the ontological fracture between the state as a mutually exclusive territorial monopoly on the use of force, on the one hand, and market forces and individual rights that can be universally applied, on the other, we do want to de-abstract the state—to see the state as mutually constituting, and frictionally meshing, with a broader network of power materialized by the cybersphere. This statement, along with the replacement of cyberspace by cybersphere, has implications for the theory of the state. A decades-long debate between liberal and Marxist strains of state theories has bearing on the state’s positioning in the cybersphere. Embedded in social science disciplines from the postwar era, the liberal theory of politics posits that power in western democratic societies is diffused enough; the state responds to competing demands, rendering Marxist class-based notions, such as ruling class and corporate power, 9 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty irrelevant (Miliband, 2009). Having rightfully constructed a liberal critique of traditional authoritarianism and even networked authoritarianism, this “class-less” thinking of pluralistic politics nevertheless leads to the obfuscation of state-society interlinks and thus unduly precluding capitalist, developmental, and legitimacy-seeking logics of the state—before and after the arrival of the networked digital age. At the international level, liberal and realist theories treat states as unitary and autonomous actors. As in the case of China, national factors still offer compelling explanations for its performance—as the Chinese state rejected the outright Washington Consensus and has paced global integration. Still, this state-led global convergence created unexpected results and has fostered transnational imperatives from inside. So, instead of deducing the logic of state actions from its arguably timeless essence of security and control, it is imperative to see the state’s wills, interests, values, and practices as relationally intertwined with global and market-based structures of power and to appreciate the crosscutting of state agendas by various transnational interests across multiple scales. The neoliberal turn from the 1970s advanced the notion that it is desirable, and even feasible, to separate politics from economics, states from markets (Panitch, 2009). This fracture reflects neither the intervention-and-investment the US government makes in the internet nor the accommodations the Chinese state makes toward global techno-economic trends. Meanwhile, postwar neo-Marxist state theory has resisted reducing state interests and capacities to the servitude for capital and instead notes the historical make-up of social forces and recognizes the state’s relative autonomy (Starrs, 2017). Extending this critical perspective, the political economy approach to communication examines 10 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty historically specific relations between states, markets, and social actors and explores how these factors parlay into structural, institutional, and discursive transformations of international/national policy making (Charkravartty & Sarikakis, 2006). The cybersphere adds a new twist to the dynamics of the state. To reckon the recursive relationship between the state and the cybersphere, a holistic conception and historiography of the state should be re-framed. The transition literature on China notes that the formerly Leninist state has internalized a liberal orientation and even moved to a globally integrated model of policy process (Fewsmith, 2010). The state-led capitalist socio-economic transition has accelerated in and through the cybersphere, but spurs intensive social dissent, which invites an ever-expanding state information control regime (Zhao, 2008). Thus, after having alternately unleashed, shaped, and stalled the cybersphere that extends change and disturbance, the party state becomes a major contested site and a contesting subject as well. Notably, the party state can adapt, contract or expand its power over the cybersphere. The state under Xi’s leadership generates sweeping transformative initiatives, holding China at an “inflection point”: the post-WII capitalist order is mired in chronic crises; the party state-led China continues to grow stronger, after weathering market reforms; therefore, the responses to global crises must be organized to achieve the millennial mission of national rejuvenation (Economy, 2018). Pivoting to developing digital economy, digital government, and digital society, the state attempts to re-organize symbolic protocols, social norms, or economic organizations that have hitherto defined the cybersphere, taking cyber sovereignty as a salient position. 11 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty Despite the state’s transformative agency, a more fundamental dialectics between geopolitics and globalization has been at work, altering the state’s will and dispersing its capacity. As the driver of globalization, capitalist development transcends national boundaries through the cybersphere, inducing states to facilitate internet development and commercialization (Simpson, 2004). Globalization as such, mediated by states and geopolitics, is never a completely finished set of projects though. Developing-country states are strategic actors in contesting the global order—increasingly in and through the cybersphere (Desai, 2013). Still, states cannot afford alienating capitalist logic too much as contemporary geopolitics is increasingly tied with inter-capitalist competition (Woodley, 2015). The cybersphere also deepens the state’s entanglement in the multilateral order of interdependence. While the state can act on its transformative initiatives, it is variably involved in ad hoc networks with subnational, national, and international actors and has to “ensure the balance and power of the network state to which they belong” (Castells, 2010, p. 361). When the US government asserts unilateralism over bilateral and multilateral issues at the cost of losing global moral appeal, and when the field of internet governance features layered, diffuse, and even privatized control of power (DeNardis, 2014), China’s position is likely to oscillate between reclaiming state sovereignty and supporting shared sovereignty. Thus, the internet is a new sphere where the state extends political authority, prioritizes certain rights, responds to capitalist cycles, and enters a multilateral interdependence. It endorses and acts on contradictory initiatives, mostly within the capitalist global order. These range from subsuming the directionless logic of capital to 12 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty the territorial logic of the state to facilitating transnational capital accumulation; from strengthening the social and symbolic foundation of the party’s rule to encouraging the digital turn of globalization; and from promoting itself as a champion of globalization to sponsoring regional factions and domestic protectionism. The mixture is an empirical question, which nevertheless cannot be exhausted by the control protocols of the state-authoritarian or liberal democratic—but is conditioned by the dialectics between intranational needs the state prioritizes and global legitimacy and sphere sustainability the state seeks. The following section addresses how to qualify, rather than reify, the cyber sovereignty mandate. Cyber Sovereignty in Historical Perspectives Sovereignty from its modern conception “implies a theory of politics which claims that in every system of government there must be some absolute power of final decision” (Crick 1968). Territoriality strongly defines sovereignty (Betz & Stevens, 2011), but this definition obscures the fact that sovereignty is both territorially and nonterritorially circumscribed. From a political economy of communication standpoint, the status of sovereignty works, out of and against, a disagreement space crossing boundaries and denotes the state with questions of who has standing and controls resources for decisions over senders, receivers, codes, messages, channels, audiences and feedback. Claims to sovereignty offer an index of power relations among nations and also register the spread of capitalism as well as geopolitical pressure and popular resistance that follows (Desai, 2013). A historical association of communication with capitalist 13 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty states means that the principle of territorialized sovereignty when put in practice has incorporated the need to trade, to flow, and to invest. Hence, globalization from the 1990s did not linearly undermine the state, but has further complicated the relationship between a bounded physical territory and the state as the presumably supreme authority therein— as sovereignty had operated through multiple spatial modes and non-state actors even shared the operation of sovereignty (Agnew, 2009). This proposition applies to China. Despite its stance to push against hegemonic intervention, sovereignty is in no way unyielding in the post-Mao era (Carlson, 2005). A new school of International Relations, intent to qualify the diluted but still crucial role of sovereignty-based states in the age of globalization, disaggregated sovereignty into multiple components, foregrounding multiple yet inconsistent practices of redefining sovereignty (Biersteker & Weber, 1996). As the cybersphere extends globalization, how does it redefine sovereignty? Adopting Krasner’s concepts (1999), Betz & Stevens (2011) argued that the internet compromises the regulation of crossborder flows, or so-called “interdependence sovereignty,” which further weakens Westphanlian constructs and domestic authority; yet, it does not affect the legal integrity of states in international law, which means that states persist. Still, if the cybersphere is not universally experienced, the re-configuration of sovereignty is not a homogenous process either. Two trends vie for acceptance. First, sovereign relations are being worked out with a great range of variation. The US government has supported a presumably benevolent and borderless corporate-run cyberspace. But its security rhetoric, which transcends the distinction between inside and outside, legitimizes an empire model, wherein military capacity is kept constant and co- 14 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty extensive with its global networks (Hardt & Negri, 2004; Katin-Borland, 2012). Still, even a US-based Leviathan is not immune from cyber attacks. As fake news, internetenabled theft and disruption, and cyber weapons have shaken the American internet, a Foreign Affairs commentary proclaimed “state sovereignty is alive and well on the Internet” (Flournoy & Sulmeyer, 2018, para. 4). In an emergent counter position, EU uses privacy as a lever to rein in Silicon Valley-originated platforms (Dijck, 2013). But this rights-based cyber sovereignty in no way negates strong strategic purpose (Pohle, 2019). If the tension between users and corporations obscures the roles of states in liberal democratic contexts, the Chinese state plays a salient role in ousting Western platforms, blocking IP addresses, silencing dissents, and orchestrating propaganda campaigns to the extent that Western security and policy studies conveniently equate a cyber-sovereignty position with coherent statist control (Tai, 2017; See Harold, et al., 2016). Yet, despite the state’s sustained efforts to control the flow of information to its people, the bigger picture is more complex. To participate in the cybersphere, the state both practices negative proscription, such as censorship, and makes proactive moves to legalize nonstate forces. To the extent that states unleash the cybersphere, states and the cybersphere then becomes co-constituting (Kohl & Fox, 2017). Generally, a state deployed its sovereign power to project national interests and to bolster certain values, interests, and projects. The cybersphere modifies this equation to the extent that sovereign power is no longer a status that states can either own or not. Vulnerability and interdependence are built into a cyber committed nation. First, as the internet’s choke points often transcend state jurisdictions, it is inconceivable to squeeze the transnational nature of technical standards, supply chains, material and virtual 15 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty architectures, and multidirectional communicative activities all into traditional jurisdictions (Kohl, 2007); second, if internet governance is mostly enacted through technical design, private corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (DeNardis, 2014), the specific governance structure in China expresses its unique global history. Still, the Chinese state has to negotiate with supranational entities, corporate infrastructures, and networked publics; third, the prosperity of a digital ecosystem driven jointly by expressive, productive, and commercial energy contests the ability of the state to define information flows in distributed networks (Navarria, 2016). Embedded in this sphere, state policies are subjected to ideational, institutional, and material contestations—within the country and without. Then, on what terms and in what mode can states seek to redefine cyber sovereignty? Ideally, as the cybersphere has become the dominant medium of global and public communication, the deployment of cyber sovereignty as a heuristic device would reveal, and even encourage, a disagreement space for peaceful negotiation among states, whose networking, competition, and collaboration inevitably interact with the non-traditional power structures made up of private companies, expert groups, civic organizations, and institutional and individual users. As the Chinese state advocates cyber sovereignty and globalization at once, how is it expressing this set of goals through concrete constructing practices? In the following, we examine China’s institutional and normative vocabularies that organize material governance of cyber sovereignty, trace these into the international realm as a case for global connectivity and relationship development, then review domestic, negotiated policies designed to work through disagreements leveraging domestic ends against China’s standing in a global cybersphere. 16 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty The Discursive and Institutional Constructions of China’s Cyber Sovereignty Again, China and the cybersphere are a set of intertwined engines that render the party state contesting and contested in a volatile political economy within which Xi’s leadership wants to better harness the internet for navigating through the turbulence and to push through the party’s self-appointed mission. Issues of global politics, developmental sustainability, and social welfare emerge as domestic network development questions. The project of the party state is both: to project outwards ideational and material influences and to seek inward-looking power consolidation through techno-economic and ideological steering. Still, problematic socio-economic structures constrain governance and complicate state initiatives—although without obscuring the state’s intent and impact. This section maps the state’s cyber sovereignty constructing words and practices as part and parcel of the global topography of disagreement space constituted by varied norms and institutions. A qualitative discourse and thematic analysis of statements retrieved from the CAC website is offered first. Within the total of 397 pieces of commentaries, speeches, and interviews retrieved up to October 2017, all contain mention of cyber sovereignty in the full text. The majority, or 160 pieces, are written by CAC, People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and New Media, a journal run by CAC2. 2 The miscellaneous rest are from a slew of state media including but limited to Guangming Online, Zhejiang Daily, Beijing News, Youth.cn, ChinaNews.com, Huanqiu.com, China Daily, and China Military, with each outlet offering one article or two. 17 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty These official and semi-official discourses aim at domestic and global formation of opinions. To interpret these political/policy discourses defined as “thematically connected and problem-related semiotic occurrences” that serve particular political functions (Reisigl, 2008, p. 99), we first used an inductive category development approach (Elo & Kynga¨s, 2007; Hsieh & Shannon 2005). Through a cyclical procedure of open coding, categorization, and abstraction until the point of saturation, a family of thematic categories was distilled and hierarchically arranged, i.e., who speaks, to whom (opponents vs. allies), when, and where (local, national, regional, and international); problems, causes, and solutions; self-presentation, action, and justification; lastly, proposition, action, results. These coding schemes were used individually and collectively to organize and analyze the texts and, ultimately, to interpret explicit and latent communication as registering and also pivoting to the contexts of politicaleconomic practices. Special attention was paid to the usage of cyber sovereignty in relation with means (i.e., border, authority, communication) and strategic and normative goals, on the one hand, and systems, processes, and disagreements that are said to cue the workings of communications within and across political economies, on the other. As discourse analysis already extends to a critical reading of political-economic practices, manifest and latent, we further note that institutionally cyber sovereignty entails enacting a domestic authoritative structure for demarcating control over activities within and across borders. So, we examine policies the CAC enacted from 2014. Our analysis reveals some dimensions of domestic cyber sovereignty, dialectical policy vectors, and how they are tied with the negotiation of boundaries. Together, the analysis sets the stage for reading trajectories of policy and the vectors of political economy. 18 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty Disagreement spaces are thus uncovered in the emergent mixes of contestations or the cybersphere. We find that cyber sovereignty first speaks to issues of external sovereignty. Recognition/equity on the international scene is asserted. The states capacity and ability for self-determination and development is defended—because of acknowledged global structural imbalances. This defensive concern features national security as the primary motivation for installing cyber sovereignty; but, arguments quickly morphed into a globalist developmental ethos. Network sovereignty constituted a feature of building an international “community of common destiny,” meant to counter the US-led top-down model and to widen global interdependence at once. This view constructs a “cosmopolitan turn of reshaping global communications,” an outlook that embraces cross-cultural differences and prioritizes global harmony (Shi, 2017). Cyber sovereignty also serves to institutionalize the cyber power of the party state at home. Still, the demarcation of pubic authorities is intended to decenter rather than remove preexisting external actors from domestic authority structures. The practice of discourse and policy asserts positive state power, but it also positions China in a reactive move, too. Enacting Material Governance and Countering US Hegemony The cybersphere features dialectical and even multiple relations among states— and among different yet interrelated political economies and crises states operate through; so, positive assertions of state power are complemented by reasons to resist U.S. claims to global internet hegemony. In light of the Edward Snowden revelation and, ultimately, the US unilateral control over crucial internet resources, the Chinese statements in 2014 19 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty compared the cybersphere to a war zone and China to a “tenant” in a space controlled by superior powers (Xie, 2014). The recognition of cyber sovereignty, in this light, is a reactive step towards containing external threats instigated by techno-economic weakness and, just as important, towards correcting the unjust global order. The defensive proposition defined cyber sovereignty in territorial terms, extended analogously to traditional and potential allied partners. China is to lead the effort to recoup developing countries’ rights and benefits in a so-called imperialist and monopolistic cyberspace. Renowned cyber security experts, including the architect of the Great Firewall Fang Binxing, asserted the territoriality of the internet and defended the necessity for border controls (Wang, 2014b). Notably, despite this emphasis, the policymaking circle conceived cyber security as a global issue from the outset. They attributed the difficulty to draw borders to the “transnational” nature of the cybersphere, the fact that private companies own and manage internet gateways where the state has limited role (Wang, 2014a). Also, while conceding that external authority overrides domestic authority in the cybersphere, official and semi-official discussions proposed to establish an independent global authority (Qian, 2014). At the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)’s high-level government meeting in 2014, Lv Wei, former director of CAC, described ICANN as “indispensable” for global internet governance before promulgating self-determination, equity, and broad-based participation as some missing norms (Liu & Feng, 2014). Lang Ping, of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, contended that global governance, which is 20 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty premised on cyber sovereignty and is a battleground among national interests, in essence entails “giving up” (rang du) on part of sovereign rights (Wang, 2014a). China’s diplomatic stance was deemed by many as an outright statist offense to the global status quo. Pushback ensued. At its inaugural Wuzhen World Internet Conference (Wuzhen Summit hereafter) in 2014, the Chinese state sought but failed to get participating American companies to sign a declaration to “respect the internet sovereignty of all countries” (Makinen, et al., 2015). At the end of 2014, the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference concluded that ITU should not expand its role into internet issues (“Remarks,” 2016). In 2015, during the ten-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), China along with the Group 77 sought to push words such as “multilateral” and “sovereign rights of states” into the outcome document. But the WSIS reaffirmed the existing multi-stakeholder model and recommended states to “avoid” actions (Levin, 2015). Diplomacy stumbled; yet, the state initiated outward-looking remarks and actions, especially on bilateral fronts such as the One Belt One Road initiative (now BRI). At the inaugural China-ASEAN Forum on Cyberspace in 2014, the Chinese authority praised the ultimate value of cross-border connectivity and information flow from the standpoint of integrating markets, only paying lip service to security (“Lv Wei zai,” 2014). Tacitly defying the US paradigm at the 7th Sino-US Internet Forum, the Chinese representative held interstate differences as a base for bilateral trust and collaboration (Yuan, 2015). Notably, political culpability and ideological finger-pointing took a back seat to preserving China’s contested convergence with the US-led global internet. 21 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty Sovereignty, Relationships and Global Connectivity In light of the diplomatic stalemate and internal pressure for widening globalization, the state moved to transcend the opposition between border-reinforcing and opportunity-seeking imperatives. The discursive justification of cyber sovereignty shifts from defending national security to achieving positive goals. Opportunity, development, and innovation in and around the internet are featured. The move is made from reacting to an external adversary to addressing transnational connectivity and shared collectiveness. The contours of this discourse shift is indicated by changes regarding selfperception, causes for action, conception of border 2.0, and construction of global authority. The idea of “building a cyberspace community of shared destiny,” introduced in 2015 by President Xi at the Second Wuzhen Summit, entails establishing a multilateral governing structure and turning the internet into development opportunities commonly shared by people across nations. It is a vision for reshaping transnational structures of communicative relations, opportunities, resources, and protocols. Claiming that China has become an “internet big nation” in the world—thanks to the efforts of all stakeholders and to the integration of advanced technologies and ideas from around the world, commentaries contrast the ideal of shared development with the reality of domination and monopoly and oblige internet big nations, especially the US, to fulfill the promise of global justice (Wei, 2015). To break away from the US-style technocratic corporatist dominance of global communication, the discourse justifies component principles of cyber sovereignty, i.e., non-transferable rights to development, governance, and participation regardless one’s 22 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty techno-economic capacities, for redressing crises in the political economy stemming from the “law of the jungle.” The trope of common prosperity, or internet-enabled development across borders and divides, turns cyber sovereignty from a territory-based device into a global developmental vision. In turn, the realization of sovereignty, defined as encompassing security, connectivity, and development, is cast in transnational and multicultural terms. Ultimately, cyber sovereignty is implied not as a return to absolute autonomy because membership in the cybersphere has already eroded Westphalian sovereignty in the first place, but it is proposed as a viable option of global governance for shielding state capacity necessary to fulfill economic and social responsibilities. While projecting a counter vision that embraces the developing world’s unmet developmental need, the Chinese state is not without strategic considerations. It takes upon itself to drive the global digital economy. In 2014, it denounced protectionism and demanded law harmonization for integrating online marketplaces (“Guowuyuan,” 2014). In 2015, the construction of four cross-border cables connecting China and ASEAN countries, and a spurring of regional business partnership that followed, were praised as highlights of the year (“Lv wei,” 2015). The discursive gesture, and the state-led wave of investment, represents a profound reaction by the Chinese state to the new requirements of a globalizing cyber economy originating from China, a reaction the basic purpose of which is to help break barriers against China-based techno-corporate forces and to gain more commanding position in the global order of communication. Notably, these actions invite disagreement and complicate regional relations not least because China’s rise has disturbed the hegemonic position of the Global North—and has complicated the category of the South (Wasserman, 2018). Recent data shows that Chinese companies’ 23 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty investments tripled in Asian developing countries, but growing criticism that BRI increased debt burdens have pressed the Chinese authority to limit Chinese overseas investments as part of the state initiative for the first time (Kynge, 2019; “China moves,” 2019). Sovereignty in Action: Disagreement and Porous Borders In China’s counter vision, the fixed and reliable notion of borders remains important, but complex relationships of state and private governance, national and international standards, emerge. The lexicon of internet sovereignty, for instance, has evolved more de-territorialized and flexible notions of security, such as confrontational capacity, capacity frontier, authorization power, and relative security (Li & Li, 2017). At the Third Wuzhen Summit in 2016, Xi also affirmed internet development as “borderless.” He advised his rank-and-file cyber administrators that cyber security could only be improved in an “open” environment—through more “communication, collaboration, and contention” (“Xi Jinping zai,” 2016). This reflects a new thinking among Chinese policy makers. Cyber sovereignty is not to be clawed back through rigid control over a bounded territory, but political economies of communication power are to be built by transcending and uniting the domestic and global, central and peripheral, and state and market binaries. This stance leads to institutional and material thrusts of cyber sovereignty, which trigger conflict and complicity, opposition and alliance, and ultimately dispersed and contestable dominance. The party state’s mission in Xi’s view requires “solid, domestically developed technology, rich and comprehensive information services, a 24 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty prosperous cyber culture, a robust infrastructure, high-caliber experts in internet security and information, as well as international cooperation” (Herold, 2018, p. 57). So, domestic authority is enacted over and through varied degrees of privatization, liberalization, and globalization in the cybersphere. But as these efforts may contradict liberal values and compromise neoliberal interests, they make strides at the cost of facing consistent pushback and reversed allegations. The National Cyber Security Law passed in 2016 installs in legal terms various dimensions of domestic sovereignty, including authority over cyber activities at home, control over cross-border flows, jurisdiction over foreign entities operating in China, and authority to block out unwanted information from overseas (Wu, 2016). How to parlay legal principles into practices is subject to contention though—as Wang Yukai, professor from China National School of Administration, advised: the law needs a viable method for implementation or it would backfire on the international scene (Wang, 2015). Notably, tension and caution runs through three main policy areas, namely platform liability for speech and actions of netizens, transnational supply chain management, and data collection and transmission. To buttress the legitimacy of the party state against so-called “digital storms,” the state attempts to re-organize non-traditional power structures enabled by the internet. This is done focally through the privatization of internet content control—without contesting transnational ownership or mass self-communication capacity. The Provision on Management of Instant Messaging Services (2015) obliges platform providers to screen institutional accounts, authorizes the former to shut down accounts if the latter violates political bottom-lines, and mandates a reporting relationship between platform 25 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty providers and supervisory authority. Online news providers, including online intermediaries authorized only to convey news, are required to have an editor-in-chief for overseeing content preview, whose nationality must be Chinese so as to facilitate law enforcement. Still, when institutional accounts exceeded 20 million on Tencent’s WeChat alone, the power of digital re-mixing, translating, and sharing is too diffuse to be contained. So, despite intensified efforts to clean up the Internet, a public opinion cycle has shaped up as acknowledged by an authoritative source, with a singular scandal leading to investigation of similar cases and then breaking into generalized critiques of the establishment (Peng & Che, 2018). The state also attempts to rein in various transnational supply chains by installing virtual and physical borders. Yet this attempt, and the formative domestic authority structure that supports it, continues to contend with global authorities that represent the interests of the transnational internet industry. The “Network Products and Services Security Inspection Measures” (2017) stipulates critical network products and services to pass a national security check before put in use. But the inspection excludes technologies and services that only pertain to public interests due to US government pressure (“Xi Jinping fangmei,” 2015). In another example, when the National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee issued about 300 cyber security-related standards, the Chinese authority must disclose required standards to the World Trade Organization and, to avoid backlash, has downgraded 1000 such standards from required national standards to recommendations (Sacks & Li, 2018). The state also demarcates authority claims over cross-border data flows, stipulating that data collected real-time on cloud-service platforms at the behest of state 26 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty agencies belongs to state agencies. Boundaries are further demarcated through territory and population—as data is digital traces of populations and their conduct. In principle, data collected within physical national borders should be stored and processed locally, subject to security assessment. But leeway is available—as “Measures of Security Assessment for Offshore Personal Information and Critical Data Storage (draft)” set up thresholds below which businesses can exercise independent discretion. Although making rules for itself rather than promoting the model through trade diplomacy, China’s unilateral stance on data localization has hampered digital flows. This triggered US unilateralism in the ongoing trade negotiations, forcing China to reconsider its cloudmarket access policy and to delay the final verification of the draft measure (Kubota & Wei, 2019; Yang, 2019). The Chinese state is asserting sovereign rights and securing new borders, but its independence is circumscribed and its interdependence is constantly felt. To prevent a delink from the global internet system and to avert stoking domestic disagreement and global confrontation, the formative border 2.0 is porous rather than solid—as far as jurisdiction over security throttles are ensured. One may still read the state’s words and actions in the traditional manner as for internal political-security reasons and/or as protective techno-economic policy. But it is imperative to add: the state is a major site of struggle in global domestic politics—as the internet enabled by the state has materialized China’s integration and struggle with the global capitalist system. Thus, even when the state’s actions and reactions express its own wills for control or reflect the interests of domestic constituents it prioritizes, the state has to mind global legitimacy and sphere sustainability in its words and actions. Indeed, in transforming the cybersphere as non- 27 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty traditional structures of power, the state’s sovereign authority is contested. Its assertion of authority and boundary expresses both preference and compromise. Discussion and Conclusion Sovereign relations are being worked out in various fashions. To make sense of contested yet ongoing ties between states and the internet, we use the cybersphere to conceptualize a layered, varied, and evolving network-enabled ensemble of production chains, techno-economic infrastructures, and legal-political arrangements that translate socio-cultural vitality and channel communicative flows. The cybersphere is global in its scope, unifying uneven engagements, different trends, and numerous venues. Its new centrality in the ever-expanding scope and depth of communication has further animated disagreement over political economy and governance. The entanglement of political economies and disagreement spaces transforms the cybersphere into an expanded geopolitics where competing narratives, categories, proposals, and arrangements emerge, clash, work out, or transcend difference. We reviewed the Chinese state’s agentic power at a critical moment when China and the cybersphere, a set of intertwined engines in the global political economy, render the party state a contesting subject and a contested object at once, especially its bid for cyber sovereignty. The state’s construction of cyber sovereignty is intended to safeguard the multipolar direction of global digital capitalism and to extend contestation over cyberspace governance beyond issues of security and privacy to material wellbeing, developmental justice, and alternative planetary futures. Notably, the state functions both a driver and barometer of disagreement. It has come to heed the risk of using sovereignty 28 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty and territoriality interchangeably and is turning the concept from a territory-based device into a global developmental rhetoric. At home, the state is demarcating boundaries through authority, territory, and population in the transnational structures of the cybersphere, leaving loopholes, decentralization, and diffusion as normality under the pressure of discord and defiance. Notably, if cyber sovereignty embraces the cybersphere and also critiques crises it amplifies, this “embrace plus critique” gesture is made up of three competing visions and practices, i.e., a counterhegemonic order, a defender of the globalization order, and a unilateral reorganization of non-traditional structures of power. Looking forward, heated contests for the future global internet governance is torn by inter-hegemonic rivalries, but controversies over development and justice will become increasingly embroiled with tensions between sustaining global interdependence and asserting national interests. To prevent a slide into decision-making patterns driven by power interests, it is the case that 'ideal' cybersphere for different national/international projects is differently envisioned, but that the political economy of practice (adjusting inside and out by nation states and international groups) is a necessity. With adjustments tacit and voiced, secret and opened, a sphere of engagement, entanglement, and regulatory/performance rules gets put into place, contested, and revised. Following the traditional praxis of critique, we hold accountable practices and structures developed during an era of prevailing communication flows from center to periphery. This paper ultimately offers a step towards laying the grounds for open public debates over a global digital cybersphere order and for considering anew the internet and governance. 29 How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty Reference Agnew, J. (2009). Globalization and sovereignty. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 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