Originally published by My Digital FC, 9 February 2010

Deep inside a Chinese military engineering institute in September 2008, a researcher took a break from his duties and decided — against official policy — to check his private e-mail. Among the new arrivals was an electronic holiday greeting card, purportedly from a state defense office.

The researcher clicked on the card to open it. Within minutes, secretly implanted computer code enabled an unnamed foreign intelligence agency to tap into the databases of the institute in the city of Luoyang, in central China, and spirit away top-secret information on Chinese submarines.

So reported Global Times, a Communist Party-backed newspaper with a nationalist bent, in a little-noticed December article. The paper described the incident as ‘‘a major security breach’’ and quoted one government official complaining that such attacks were ‘‘ubiquitous’’ in China.

The information could not be independently confirmed, and such leaks in the Chinese press often serve the propaganda or lobbying goals of government officials.

Nonetheless, the story is one sign that, while much of the rest of the world frets about Chinese cyberspying abroad, China is increasingly alarmed about the threat the Internet poses to its own security and political stability.

In the view of political analysts and technology experts here and in the United States, Beijing’s attempts to tighten its grip on Internet use are driven in part by the conviction that the West—particularly the United States— is wielding communications innovations from malware to Twitter to weaken it militarily, and to stir internal dissent.

‘‘The United States has already done it,many times,’’ said Song Xiaojun, one of the authors of ‘‘Unhappy China,’’ a 2009 book advocating a muscular Chinese foreign policy which the party’s propaganda department is said to promote. He cited the so-called color revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia as examples.

‘‘It is not really regime change, directly,’’ Mr. Song said in an interview this month. ‘‘It is more like they use the Internet to sow chaos.’’ State media have vented those concerns more vociferously since Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month criticized China for censorship and called for an investigation of Google’s claim that its databases had been the target of a sophisticated cyberattack from China.

‘‘Chinawants tomake clear that it, too, is under serious attack from spies on the Internet,’’ said Cheng Gang, who wrote the Global Times submarine story.

Despite China’s robust technological abilities, its cyberdefenses are almost certainly more porous than those of the United States, American experts say. To cite one glaring example, even Chinese government computers are frequently equipped with pirated software from Microsoft, they say. That means many users miss out on security upgrades, available to paying users, that fix security breaches exploited by hackers.

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for most governments. While the United States probably has tighter defenses than China, for example, experts say it relies more heavily on computers to run its infrastructure and so is more vulnerable to a cyberattack.

But for China, worries about how foreign forces might employ the Internet and other communications advances to unseat the ruling Communist Party are a salient factor in the government’s 15- year effort to control those technologies.

Chinese leaders are constantly trying to balance the economic and social benefits of online freedoms and open communications against the desire to preserve social stability and prevent organized political opposition.

A distinct shift in favor of more comprehensive controls began nearly two years ago and has hardened over the past six months, analysts say.

New policies are designed to replace foreign hardware and software with homegrown systems that can be more easily controlled and protected. Officials are also expanding the reach and resources of state-controlled media outlets so that they dominate Chinese cyberspace with their blogs, video and news. At the same time, the government is beefing up its security apparatus.

Officials have justified stronger measures by citing various internal threats that they say escalated online. Among them: the March 2008 riots in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and reported attempts to disrupt the 2008 Olympics.

Especially alarming to officials, analysts say, was the role of the Internet in ethnic riots last July that left nearly 200 people dead and more than 1,700 injured — the worst ethnic violence in recent Chinese history. Government reports asserted that terrorists, separatists and religious extremists from within and outside the country used the Internet to recruit Uighur youths to travel to Urumqi, capital of western China’s Xinjiang region, to attack ethnic Han citizens.

In August, security and propaganda officials briefed China’s ruling Politburo on their view of how the Xinjiang riots developed, according to one media executive with high-level government ties. The executive spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution for discussing delicate political topics.

China’s leaders also reviewed how Iranian anti-government activists used Twitter and other new communication tools to organize major street demonstrations against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the summer, he said.

Chinese leaders saw the protests as an example of how the United States could use the new forms of online communication in a fashion that could one day be turned against China.

‘‘How did the unrest after the Iranian elections come about?’’ People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, asked in a Jan. 24 editorial. ‘‘It was because online warfare launched by America, via YouTube video and Twitter microblogging, spread rumors, created splits, stirred up and sowed discord.’’ Since the unrest in Iran and Xinjiang, Chinese leaders have unrolled a raft of initiatives, including closing thousands of Web sites, tightening censorship of text messages for lewd or ‘‘unhealthy’’ content and planning to converge China’s Internet, phone and state television networks. They are also carefully cultivating homegrown alternatives to foreign computer technologies and foreign- based Web sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, all of which Chinese censors nowblock. The government says it needs the new controls to fight pornography, piracy and other illegal activity.

In November, nearly 300 government officials and technicians gathered in Beijing for a seminar that stressed China’s vulnerability in cyberspace.

‘‘It is a long existing reality that the West is stronger than us in terms of information security,’’ said the training manual, posted on the Web site of the Ministry of Public Security.

‘‘Most of the key technology and products in the information security sphere are held in the hands of Western countries, which leaves China’s important information systems exposed to a bigger chance of being attacked and controlled by hostile forces,’’ the manual said.

http://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/china-sees-array-internet-threats-and-moves-tighten-control-487