The National Bureau of Asian Research

What was China’s end goal of escalating tech sector restrictions in the early 2020s and how has this impacted tech companies’ digital governance priorities now? The overarching goal of the state was to communicate to tech companies that China’s tech sector was not going to be a carbon copy of Silicon Valley. The first priority was state goals to which the tech industry is expected to contribute.

This final episode in NBR’s Borderlands miniseries explores ways in which China uses cultural endeavors to pull its Borderlands neighbors into its orbit. Positioning China’s civilization as the core of the historical Silk Roads, promoting state-backed Nanhai Buddhism, or owning entire collections of historical records requires massive financial and human resources. These examples illustrate the crucial importance for Beijing of what otherwise appears as an amorphous, intangible domain. To what end?

This final episode in the Borderlands podcast miniseries explores ways in which China uses cultural endeavors to pull neighboring countries into its orbit. Nadege Rolland hosts the conversation with guests Ondřej Klimeš, Amish Raj Mulmi, Ryoko Nakano, and Dylan Plung. Go to the episode on the Mapping China’s Strategic Space website.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY MAIN ARGUMENT States around the world are developing national cybersecurity strategies and policies to address emerging risks in cyberspace and are implementing these measures at the domestic level through strategies, laws, and regulations and at the international level through discussions in the United Nations and other forums.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY MAIN ARGUMENT Cyber resilience development in the Pacific Islands follows a dynamic, nonlinear trajectory in which a nation’s willingness to engage internationally evolves alongside its domestic cybersecurity maturity. A four-category maturity model ranging from minimal to advanced cyber resilience demonstrates that Pacific Island governments adopt distinct collaboration strategies depending on their institutional capacity, resource constraints, and strategic priorities.

Cybersecurity policy inevitably involves trade-offs among competing values and interests, as well as hard decisions about where to spend scarce resources and hard realities about the practical limits of government capacity for administration in a technologically complex domain.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY MAIN ARGUMENT Cybersecurity policy decisions have significant but inadequately understood long-term effects on core national interests. While policymakers often focus on balancing the short-term costs, benefits, and feasibility of particular approaches to addressing acute current cybersecurity risks, longer-term consequences of these decisions are not always adequately considered.

Read the first section of the Introduction below. To read the full Introduction, download the report. For over two decades, digitalization has served as a major driver of economic growth and job creation in countries around the world. This is true for not only advanced economies, which could build on decades of previous investments in telecommunications infrastructure to take early advantage of digital innovations, but emerging economies as well.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY MAIN ARGUMENT Where policymakers choose to adopt policies that limit global online openness, it is often because of a specific concern about the risks posed by particular international actors—for instance, tech firms based in foreign countries—rather than a belief that doing so will broadly improve the resilience of their cyber infrastructure in the face of most cyberattacks, outages, and other disruptions.

China’s borderland with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) must contend with balancing regional integration with regional security. In the wider context of China’s Northeast Asia strategy, perpetuating the political durability of a North Korean regime friendly to its rise continues to be an imperative for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to further tilt the regional balance in its favor and prevent a unified pro-U.S. Korea.