Foreign Policy > Military Affairs

America Must Fight China's All-Out Cyber Warfare

Cyber warfare blurs the boundaries between war and peace.

Janet Levy | March 20, 2026

Cyber espionage is one of the unconventional methods recommended for achieving global dominance in the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare by People’s Liberation Army (PLA) colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. They state that America, though far more powerful than China, is vulnerable to asymmetric warfare, which has “greater destructive force” than military action.

Like other asymmetric strategies, cyber warfare blurs the boundaries between war and peace as well as between military and civilian domains. Consequently, covert attacks continue without formal declarations of war: research and technology are stolen from universities, corporations, and leading institutions; sensitive networks and grids, both military and civilian, are hacked; critical infrastructure is compromised with bugged Chinese-made components.

Grpahic: PLA Soldiers. Wikimedia commons.org. DOD. Public Domain.

These efforts have been ongoing for decades as China seeks to cheat its way into dominating key industries in the 21st century, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning. No other country has targeted our government, military, and corporations to seize intellectual property as aggressively as China has.

Take the Made in China 2025 initiative, for example, which aims to comprehensively upgrade both traditional and advanced sectors of Chinese industry. The goal is to position China as a leading player in global supply chains; additionally, it emphasizes increasing the use of domestic components from 40% to 70%. To achieve this, Chinese agents have engaged in outright theft: estimates suggest that one in five American companies has had its patents and trade secrets stolen.

Data centers are another target for Chinese hackers. Generative AI, which can produce original images, text, and code, and conceptualize designs, depends on access to large data sets for learning. By attacking data centers and corrupting data sets, Chinese hackers slow down the progress of this advanced technology toward reliability. Additionally, companies that unknowingly use contaminated data for analysis and projections end up with unusable........

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