Nathan Lee
Cyber operations are now a defining feature of modern warfare, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated—and China is taking note. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has served as a testing ground for the integration of emerging technologies into hybrid warfare. Drawing from the lessons of the Ukraine war, China’s new military strategy establishes a joint and multi-domain doctrine that prioritizes a modernized wartime cyber approach, targeting key future conflicts such as a Taiwan contingency.
China’s Great Cyber Rejuvenation
Modern Chinese national military strategy seeks to leverage cyber power through constant readiness and information technology to enhance information dominance—the operational advantage gained from the ability to control, manipulate, and defend information to maximize warfighting effects. Starting in 2014, Xi Jinping began ambitiously envisioning China as a “cyber great power” capable of defending critical infrastructure from cyber intrusions, ensuring internal stability, and launching offensive operations against foreign adversaries. Critically, this shift affected People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military doctrine on cyber warfare.
The PLA’s focus on cyber power traces back to its study of the US military’s technological dominance in the Gulf War, primarily in information technologies, to control the battlefield. Cyber capabilities were subsequently incorporated into PLA doctrine and formally articulated in major policy documents such as the 2013 Science of Military Strategy, which emphasized the significant role of cyber in command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems. As military technology has advanced, Chinese military doctrine has become increasingly focused on information operations within the “three dominances” (三权), achieving superiority in the information, air, and sea domains, to determine the viability of a successful military operation, specifically against Taiwan, the United States, and its allies. In the 2020 Science of Military Strategy, the PLA states that cyberspace is the “basic platform for information warfare” because blinding cyberattacks on an adversary’s computer C4ISR networks can paralyze its combat processes at the outset of a conflict, thereby ensuring one’s own information dominance. To operationalize this strategy, the PLA advanced the doctrine of “peacetime-wartime integration,” a central principle under its military-civil fusion strategy. Designed to secure prepositioned information dominance, peacetime-wartime integration streamlines cyber operations by maintaining a constant state of readiness, ensuring these assets can be rapidly leveraged during wartime. Thus, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has increasingly designated cyber as a central cornerstone of military power in attaining information dominance, soon accelerating these reforms based on lessons from the Ukraine war.
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