THE Lowly Peon

Cyber Warriors

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11 February 2010, 6:09am

An interesting perspective on how our [American] perspective of Chinese power could be greatly skewed, noting how the new China has little experience in combat, spends less money on the military than we do (by up to ten times, according to the article), and how most of their equipment isn't nearly as "modern" as ours. It does seem, by reading the NY Times and the Economist regularly, that the American press is somewhat paranoid about the newfound power China has, and our lack of confidence in how they'll use it.

Another former U.S. official put it this way: "We tend to think of everything about China as being multiplied by 1.3 billion. The Chinese leadership has to think of everything as being divided by 1.3 billion"—jobs, houses, land.

China has hundreds of millions of Internet users, mostly young. In any culture, this would mean a large hacker population; in China, where tight control and near chaos often coexist, it means an Internet with plenty of potential outlaws and with carefully directed government efforts, too. ...With financial, medical, legal, intellectual, logistic, and every other sort of information increasingly living in "the cloud," the consequences of collapse or disruption are unpleasant to contemplate.