"China’s Use Of Rhetorical Adaptation In Development Of A Global Cyber Order" By CWP Alum Courtney Fung
How does China shape a global information order, regarding the norms and institutions that manage cyberspace? Cyber norms are the preferred tool to govern cyberspace given the rapidity of technological change. China’s advances ‘cyber sovereignty’ (wangluo zhuquan) norms to reorient internet governance to the United Nations and specialist state-led international fora and emphasise the dominant position of the state regarding information management. The paper uses a critical case study of a foundational cyber norm: the protection of the public core of the internet, which focuses on ‘safeguarding the functionality and integrity of the core logical and physical infrastructure of the internet from unwarranted state interventions’ (Broeders 2017a). Using descriptive research drawing from primary and secondary sources in Chinese and English languages, I highlight China’s use of rhetorical adaptation – a strategy and set of tactics that simultaneously modify norm content while also deflecting and reducing critiques of norm obstructionism to modify cyber norms. China’s use of rhetorical adaptation renovates norm content by centring the state as the public core of the internet that must be protected – in short internet infrastructure security is in service to state security.
China’s use of rhetorical adaptation in development of a global cyber order: a case study of the norm of the protection of the public core of the internet
Courtney J. Fung Received 30 Jun 2022, Accepted 27 Dec 2022, Published online: 22 Mar 2023 https://doi.org/10.1080/23738871.2023.2178946
Courtney J. Fung is Associate Professor in the Department of Security Studies & Criminology at Macquarie University. She is concurrently Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University and also Associate Fellow at the Lowy Institute and Chatham House. Courtney is on the editorial board of Contemporary Security Policy, the Australian Journal of International Affairs and H-DIPLO ISSF. Her research examines how rising powers address the norms and provisions for global governance and international security, with an empirical focus on China.
Courtney was previously an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong; a research fellow with the East Asia Institute (Seoul) in their Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia, and a post-doctoral research fellow with the now Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program.
Courtney is author of China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), which explains the effects of status on China's varied response to intervention and foreign-imposed regime change at the United Nations. Her book was shortlisted for the BISA LHM Ling Outstanding First Book Prize and received the 2019 - 2020 HKU Research Output Prize for the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Contemporary Security Policy, Cooperation and Conflict, Global Governance, International Affairs, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, PS: Political Science & Politics, The China Quarterly, Third World Quarterly, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, and International Peacekeeping.
Courtney holds a PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. She serves on The Fletcher School Board of Advisors.
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