Dragon Week: Information Warfare in the Information Age

James Carafano / January 21, 2011

Writing in 1995, before anyone in the West thought all that much about war online, Major General Wang Pufeng (the former Director of the Strategy Department at the China’s Academy of Military Sciences) observed, “Our sights must not be fixed on the firepower war of the industrial age. … Rather they must be trained on the information warfare of the information age.”

“In the final analysis,” General Pufeng added, “information warfare is conducted by people.” And China has a lot of people. For over a decade, China has been building its cyber militia.

In 1990, China’s domestic computer hardware industry was worth less than $1 billion. In 2000, it was worth almost $23 billion. This development reflected in part a government decision to become a global leader in the computer industry. In 1995, there were about 40,000 Internet users in China. By 2003, there were over 59 million. In 1995, there were about 170,000 miles of fiber-optic cable in China for telecommunications. In 2000, there were about three-quarters of a million miles of the stuff. (more…)