In April, Britain's national security agency, MI5, warned that British universities involved in military research were being targeted by foreign cyberattacks.
Recently, news broke that there was a cyberattack on the British Ministry of Defense, and the personal information of 270,000 military personnel was leaked. The main suspect in these attacks is China.
China is often portrayed as a monolithic entity entirely at the whims of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, the reality is more complex. Many of China's cyberattacks and other types of digital interference are carried out by Chinese nationalist groups.
Some of these groups receive funding from and operate under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. For example, the 50 Cent Army is a group that posts pro-Chinese Communist Party messages on social media. The name comes from reports that the Chinese Communist Party pays recruits 0.5 yuan (US$0.69) per post.
However, many of these groups operate independently. There are also cases where Chinese nationalist groups have waged online wars against the wishes of the Chinese Communist Party.
The fact that the cyberattacks are being launched independently of and against the directives of the Chinese Communist Party suggests that China's nationalist movement is escaping government social control. This could become a headache for Chinese President Xi Jinping as the number of cyberattacks increases.
China's nationalist movement is very sensitive to what it deems an insult to the Chinese nation. This is due to the careful construction of Chinese nationalism through narratives such as the “century of humiliation,” in which China was exploited and victimized by foreign imperialist powers from approximately 1839 to 1949.
Chinese nationalists are now acting against what they perceive to be another attempt by foreign powers to once again humiliate China. They take action through “online warfare” against those they believe threaten China's interests.
Taiwan elected anti-Beijing candidate Tsai Ing-wen as president in 2016. During and after the election, a group of mostly young female cybernationalists known as Little Pink waged a “meme war” against Taiwan.
This included thousands of Little Pinks flooding President Tsai's social media profiles and numerous Taiwanese news outlets with pro-Beijing memes. These memes emphasized China's claim that Taiwan is a province of China and not an independent nation-state.
Some cybernationalist groups go a step further by engaging in hacktivism. This includes targeting institutions and organizations through cyberattacks in pursuit of nationalist objectives.
In 2008, an unofficial hacktivist group called Red Hacker Alliance attempted a denial of service attack on the US media company CNN. The attack was in response to CNN's reporting on anti-Beijing protests in Tibet, which has been occupied by China since 1950, and caused the company's website to be temporarily unavailable in some parts of Asia. There has occurred.
In another example, a group called Honker Union launched a cyberattack against the Philippines in 2014. Honker Union hacked a Philippine website in the wake of the attempted arrest of a Chinese fisherman in a disputed area of the South China Sea. University of the Philippines. The hackers posted pro-China slogans and a map showing China's territorial claims on the university's website.
Social control of the Chinese Communist Party
The Chinese Communist Party leans on nationalist sentiments to legitimize its regime, claiming to be the vanguard of the Chinese nation. However, this reliance on nationalism has given China's nationalist movement great influence. It is inconceivable that the Chinese Communist Party is inconsistent with its nationalist credentials by unduly restricting the activities of nationalists.
As a result, cybernationalists have escaped the social control of the Chinese Communist Party, including its ability to direct the Chinese nationalist movement through propaganda. In doing so, cybernationalists undermine the authority of the Chinese Communist Party and sometimes contradict the Chinese Communist Party's foreign policy.
In 2020, the Chinese Communist Party called for restraint from nationalist groups in response to overseas criticism of China's crackdown on Hong Kong. However, cybernationalists continued to conduct anti-foreigner smear campaigns on social media. Even the Communist Youth League, a nationalist organization with formal ties to the Chinese Communist Party, joined in against the Chinese Communist Party's instructions.
As part of this campaign, hacktivists also launched cyberattacks, including taking over the Twitter account of the Chinese embassy in Paris. Hacktivists posted photos of the United States visiting Hong Kong as death incarnate.
The embassy quickly removed the image and apologized to France and the United States. But the incident speaks to the Chinese Communist Party's struggle to control cybernationalists who seek to circumvent social controls and take over the state's propaganda infrastructure to pursue their own goals.
There have also been hacktivist cyberattacks against the Chinese state, usually coinciding with periods of discontent against the Chinese Communist Party. In 2014, a group briefly took control of a television network in the eastern city of Wenzhou and broadcast nationalist and anti-Chinese Communist Party messages. The cyberattack was carried out in protest of the detention of nationalist activist and political dissident Wang Bingzhang.
In 2022, another group hacked a Shanghai police database and leaked 23 terabytes of personal information the state had collected about Chinese nationals as part of a massive domestic surveillance program. This information was later sold on online forums by an anonymous hacker called “ChinaDan.”
In the West, Chinese cyberattacks are believed to reflect the malevolent Chinese state. The reality is more complicated. As cyber nationalists continue to take matters into their own hands, the rise in cyber attacks also illustrates a major domestic problem for the Chinese Communist Party: the limits of its social control.
Louis Eves is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
