A historical explanation of Chinese cybersovereignty

Abstract

In recent years, China has become one of the most prominent voices in the debate on the future of Internet governance, in part through the aggressive promotion of what it calls a doctrine of "cybersovereignty". To date, studies of Internet governance have primarily focused on China s diplomatic efforts in this area from a security perspective and emphasized the explanatory power of China s authoritarian system when discussing the concept s underlying logic. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the historical origins of China s vision of a sovereigntized Internet, which predate the People s Republic of China and are crucial to understanding cybersovereignty in all its dimensions. This article aims to fill this gap by putting China s cybersovereignty doctrine into its proper historical context. It first charts the rise of cybersovereignty, notably through an examination of the extensive Chinese literature on the concept. The article then turns to historical antecedents for cybersovereignty within Chinese policy discourse. We argue that cybersovereignty should be understood as part of a tradition which we describe as "compound sovereignty", a discursive strategy of legitimation which arose from China s distinctive historical experiences with the idea of sovereignty, and which is used as a strategy of legitimation and reassertion for state authority. By cross-pollinating cyber studies with insights from historical International Relations scholarship, we seek to present a less presentist, more historically anchored and methodologically diverse approach to the study of global Internet governance.