The Emergence of China as a Cyber Superpower

Abstract

The article is devoted to the emergence of China as a cybernetic superpower and its foundations in the context of the characteristics of Chinese digitalization, the digital economy (“digital economy”), as well as the stages of its development. This process covers the period from 2014, when Xi Jinping announced the emergence of China as a cyber power, to the present. The process of the formation of China as a cyber superpower goes in parallel with the emergence of the PRC as an economic superpower. This means that the digital economy as an economy of a new technological order (or a new technological generation) can only develop effectively with the parallel effective development of the real sector of the economy, producing real and not virtual goods (goods and services), based on a new innovative model of economic management. This fundamental conclusion is the main result of our study. The cybernetic revolution, as well as economic globalization and global digitalization, as two parallel megatrends that give a cumulative effect, resulted in a post-industrial economy in the world, as well as initially the United States as a technological power. At the new stage of economic globalization and global digitalization, as well as the post-industrial economy, there is technological competition between the United States and China and even a technological war unleashed by the United States for technological leadership. Special attention in the article is paid to tectonic changes in the global digital economy, when the so-called. “artificial intelligence” is becoming a meaningful technology, the main way to achieve the country’s competitiveness. It is “artificial intelligence” that becomes the criterion for determining which country will become a de facto cyber leader, a superpower. The authors of the article consider the second result of their research to be scientific proof that China has sufficient potential to become a cyber superpower.