How President Xi Jinping plans to turn China into a “cyber-superpower” that will dominate the web through domestic regulations, innovation, and foreign policy
For almost five decades, the United States has guided the growth of the Internet. From its origins as a small Pentagon program …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Foreign Affairs analysis lands mid-arc in a documented sequence: Xi Jinping first framed internet sovereignty at the end of 2015, drawing echoes from leaders like Russia, and the Obama administration responded by publicly accusing China of undermining an open internet while calling for cooperation on cybersecurity. By mid-2018, The Atlantic was cataloguing how Beijing pushes dozens of regulations and technical standards to wrest control of the internet ecosystem from the West.
What changed with this piece is framing: it ties those domestic controls to an explicit superpower strategy spanning regulation, innovation policy, and foreign policy rather than treating them as isolated censorship measures. The follow-on EFF reporting then supplied the external evidence, documenting state-sponsored DDoS attacks, malware, client-side filtering, surveillance, and economic sanctions projecting Chinese internet power abroad.
First-order effects
- Beijing's regulatory and standards agenda directly constrains Western technology firms operating in China, shifting compliance from a local market issue to a lever over the entire ecosystem as catalogued in China's push on regulations and technical standards.
- The United States faces a direct rhetorical and policy challenge to its five-decade role guiding the internet's growth, forcing cybersecurity cooperation talks to proceed alongside open-internet accusations.
Second-order effects
- Countries that echoed Xi's 2015 sovereignty arguments gain a template and a patron, lowering the cost for other governments to adopt national-control models over their own networks.
- As EFF-documented tools of projection — DDoS attacks, client-side filtering, economic sanctions — become visible, foreign governments and firms must price Chinese internet influence into infrastructure and vendor decisions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the single global internet fragments into blocs governed by competing rule-setters, with standards bodies and domestic regulation replacing open interoperability as the default organizing principle.
- The strategy prefigures today's AI-sovereignty contest: whoever writes domestic rules and technical standards first converts them into international leverage, a playbook now visible across frontier-model and industrial policy fights.
The trend: Internet governance is shifting from US-led openness toward state-controlled sovereignty blocs, with China converting domestic regulation into foreign-policy power.