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The highlights this week: China considers a sweeping cybercrime law, a date is set for a summit between Trump and Xi, and a plagiarism scandal rocks the Chinese literary scene.
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China Mulls Cybercrime Reform
After changes to existing cybersecurity laws came into effect last month, China is considering sweeping new cybercrime legislation aimed at further tightening the country’s online environment. (As ever, I am indebted to Yale University’s China Law Translate project for drawing my attention to this.)
Since the early 2000s, China has managed the difficult task of maintaining a closed, highly monitored internet that serves the country economically without threatening it politically. Though Westerners often focus on the Great Firewall as China’s primary means of limiting access to the outside world, its system of censorship and control is far more complicated.
China’s primary focus is not on restricting access to foreign content but on containing the spread of information within its borders and restricting users’ ability to organize collectively online. These objectives became even more important after the Arab Spring and were taken up with alacrity by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.
One key development was comprehensive real-name registration rules, requiring users to link their online accounts to their name and national ID number. Previous laws already mandated that phone numbers be linked to ID cards; these were easily evaded in the early 2000s, but by the 2010s, enforcement had become much stricter.
Today, the Chinese government is still concerned about gaps in the real-name registration system. The draft cybercrime law, if enacted in its current form, would place significant pressure on internet service providers to police behavior such as using other people’s IDs, using tools to circumvent restrictions, or creating multiple accounts.
Noncompliance with real-name registration could result in fines of up to 200,000 yuan, or around $29,000. Government agencies are also authorized to blacklist violators—in effect, locking them out of the digital tools and payment systems on which modern Chinese life depends.
Another persistent issue in China is the use of virtual private networks, or VPNs, which allow users to bypass internet controls by making it appear that they are accessing the web from another country. VPNs are generally illegal in China, but enforcement is inconsistent, and penalties vary widely.
Article 44 of the draft law targets the use of tools to access illegal foreign content, with other sections specifically addressing VPNs. There is an inherent dilemma at play with this issue, though. As the firewall grows ever more restrictive, VPNs are essential for many professionals in China, not just foreigners.
Even sites that the government has no reason to object to rely on services that are blocked in China: Coders need access to GitHub, academics to Google Scholar, and state media reporters and officials to foreign news sources.
There are formal channels for VPN access, but they are limited. When I talked to Chinese state media reporters in 2017, for instance, they had to apply for separate permissions to access individual websites through official VPNs. Commercial VPNs are often informally purchased by companies, sometimes even state-linked ones, with details shared among employees.
Loopholes and gray areas are a common feature in Chinese legal and economic regulations, and they help the system run smoothly. But if these draft laws make people warier of using VPNs, China’s hopes of economic revival could run into obstacles as productivity drops without smooth access to vital information.
What We’re Following
Trump sets a date for Beijing. U.S. President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to China from March 31 to April 2 for a summit with Xi. Trump enters the meeting eager for a deal, offering concession after concession to China, but hamstrung by growing discontent over the U.S. economy and the Supreme Court’s new limitations on his ability to use tariffs.
Beijing knows how to indulge Trump’s love of pageantry, so it’s likely that he will walk away with a deal that favors China but is framed as a personal success. Xi needs this, too: He may not want a permanent arrangement with the United States or even believe one is possible, but the temporary relief provided by a trade war pause is useful.
No “Long Telegram” for China. Sunday marked the 80th anniversary of U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” which outlined Soviet ideological and strategic goals and helped shape the trajectory of the Cold War—and most famously, the U.S. policy of containment.
There have been many attempts to replicate Kennan’s epochal text for present-day China, but none has succeeded in creating a grand strategy for U.S.-China relations. I think there are two main reasons for this.
First, the Soviet Union was an unusually ideological state when it came to geopolitics. Leader Joseph Stalin and his successors genuinely believed in the global communist cause. The Chinese Communist Party leadership, though still ideologically driven, has largely abandoned the international aspect of communism and prioritized domestic control.
Second, Kennan had unique access into the inner workings of the Soviet state, and he was writing during a period of relative bipartisan consensus in Washington. Few people in positions of power today have the same level of direct experience with China’s leadership or firsthand knowledge of China, so discussions about China tend to be subsumed by U.S. political battles.
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Plagiarism scandal. Amid global concerns about artificial intelligence, I’m pleased to report that China has found itself embroiled in a good old-fashioned literary plagiarism scandal. In the last year, a RedNote blogger compiled a long list of popular Chinese authors who appear to have lifted passages from foreign works, causing public outcry and promises from magazines to do better.
Chinese literary publishing is a mess, with minimal editing or oversight save for political censorship. As Chinese writer Yan Ge points out, however, this scandal highlights the financial role of state-backed literary magazines.
China invests heavily in traditional literary culture, funding city and provincial journals that regularly publish short stories and poems. For writers willing to churn out the right kind of content, these magazines can be a reliable and steady source of income.
Japan feud update. China has imposed another round of export restrictions on Japanese companies with defense ties, escalating the stand-off over comments from Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi that Japan might intervene in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. China likely hoped that the issue would weaken Takaichi’s position at home; instead, it led to her record-setting electoral victory.
In normal times, this might prompt other countries to accelerate efforts to derisk their supply chains from China. But as the United States has proved itself an unreliable partner, middle powers are thinking twice about closing off their options.
A man looks at his phone near a giant image of the Chinese flag on the side of a building in Beijing on Oct. 23, 2017.
