Syl Kacapyr(607) 255-7701[email protected]</CONTACT_PIO>
Andrew Mertha, professor of government at Cornell University and author of “The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China,” comments on the recent claims that computers at the New York Times were hacked from within China.
Mertha says:
“This type of spying is neither new nor unique to China. China mobilized its huge population to reassemble shredded Soviet documents in the late 1950s and early 1960s to help build their own nuclear bomb. China’s hacking is reminiscent of recent Russian practices as well.
“The United States itself allegedly undertook a similar program in releasing the Stuxnet worm in 2010 in order to delay Iran’s nuclear program. What makes the recent Chinese actions noteworthy is that, if an official policy, which seems likely, it represents a widening of a long-held Chinese practice of attempting to control the parameters of discourse for a targeted group abroad, usually Chinese nationals at universities overseas. In this case, such behavior is likely to backfire.
“China’s use of soft power abroad – most visibly in the more than 300 Confucian Institutes in the U.S. and around the world – has often been met with resistance based on fear of China using these institutions as an extranational propaganda tool. This is not likely to help assuage such criticism. More broadly, it is yet another demonstration of China’s ham-fistedness in exercising soft power.”
Contact Syl Kacapyr for information about Cornell's TV and radio studios.
RSS