When historians look back on the first three decades of the 21st century, they are likely to point to May 2023 as the moment when the U.S. government sounded the alarm that the Chinese cyber threat had well and truly come of age. That was when the U.S. government’s Cyberspace and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a formal warning about Volt Typhoon, an extensive web of Chinese state-sponsored penetration of American information technology infrastructure and other sensitive nodes in the utility and transportation sectors in the U.S. and Guam.[1]

Volt Typhoon was not an isolated incident, however. In October 2024, the federal government announced that another Chinese-sponsored hacking group, this one dubbed Salt Typhoon, had succeeded in penetrating the networks of major U.S. telecommunications providers, successfully compromising key systems and gaining access to sensitive communications.[2] The strategic significance of both hacking campaigns was undeniable: China had evolved from a largely cyber-enabled espionage actor to one capable of achieving strategic-level cyber effects.  

That was an alarming revelation. For years, experts had debated whether the greatest cyber threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) came in the form of intellectual property theft—and for good reason. As Gen. Keith Alexander, who served as President Barack Obama’s NSA director, put it in 2018 to Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo: Chinese theft of US intellectual property represented “the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” with estimated annual costs of more than $400 billion.[3] The Typhoon hacks of 2023 and 2024, however, hammered home to American policymakers that China sees cyberspace as a decisive domain of conflict and is positioning itself to dominate it in the event of a conflict with the United States.

How China Thinks About the Digital Domain

This focus is part of a larger orientation toward digital technology and network warfare that has taken hold in the PRC in recent years. In the Chinese lexicon, this trend is termed “informatization:” the strategic integration of information and communication technologies to transform the economy, government, society, and military.[4] As seen by Beijing, this is not simply computerization, but something significantly broader. It implies the use of information systems to reshape how institutions operate and how modernization is pursued.[5]

The concept got its start in the late 1980s and 1990s, as China began treating information technology as a strategic foundation for modernization. By the year 2000, official documents explicitly framed informatization as a strategic move to drive overall modernization and even to help China “leapfrog” stages of development. For his part, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has framed informatization as one of the “new productive forces” cutting across “political, economic, cultural, social, and military fields.”[6]

“Intelligentization,” a more recent term describing an augmentation, rather than replacement, of informatization, generally refers to the deployment of artificial intelligence, big‑data analytics, machine learning, and autonomous or semi‑autonomous systems to make processes capable of learning, adapting, and making decisions with minimal human intervention. A 2017 article by Liu Guozhi, a PLA representative to the National People’s Congress, marks one of the first mentions of the term in a specifically military context.[7] Thereafter, however, the usage proliferated, and it figured prominently in the PLA’s 2019 National Defense White Paper.[8] The idea is often framed as the “next step” beyond informatization: not just connecting and digitizing systems, but giving them “intelligence” so they can optimize themselves in real time. 

Xi Jinping treats “intelligentization” as the next phase of China’s development, where artificial intelligence, data, and automation “drive the digital transformation of… manufacturing, services, and agriculture.”[9] In his writings and public comments, China’s leader talks about artificial intelligence not as a purely technical trend but as a “paradigm shift… leading a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation” that must be guided by Party leadership, security imperatives, and long‑term planning.[10] And for Xi and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one of the most important strategic use cases of informatized and intelligentized technologies is military modernization. 

A Marital Focus

Since the late 1990s, the Chinese military has fully embraced cybernetics as a conceptual core of its military modernization, blending ideological and philosophical concepts to produce a force which, if necessary, could defeat the “strong enemy” (that is, the United States). Since his ascent to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has been a champion of this push within the PLA. In 2017, in his report to the 19th Party Congress, Xi asserted that the PLA must “accelerate the development of military intelligentization” to enhance all-domain joint operation capabilities.”[11] The following year, he opined that the integration of information technologies with the military represented the “most dynamic and promising” aspect of informatization.[12]

Not surprisingly, this view quickly began to permeate PLA vernacular—and to evolve. More recently, the PLA has been actively discussing the relationship between mechanization, informatization, and intelligentization, which are to be pursued simultaneously and in parallel.[13] By the 20th Party Congress in 2022, Xi had fully embraced “intelligentization,” emphasizing it as a strategy to “leapfrog development of the PLA’s military cyber-information system,” which is playing an “unprecedentedly prominent role” in modern warfare.[14] These concepts have manifested in the PLA’s widespread deployment of cybernetic decision-making systems like the Integrated Command Platform, which are treated by the PLA as having superior cognition to their human counterparts. 

What does all this mean for the future of PLA command and control, and the military balance between China and the United States? Already a decade ago, a theorist at China’s National Defense University offered an early, maximalist but illustrative take of the Chinese military’s view of the central role of AI and cybernetics: 

Whoever can process information faster, understand the operational environment, make decisions, and execute strikes will gain the initiative. Compared to the human brain, artificial intelligence’s greatest advantages lie in its faster reaction speed, greater processing capacity, and freedom from the constraints of time, space, or physical limitations. Therefore, to accelerate their own decision-making cycles and disrupt those of the enemy, militaries around the world will increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to win this battle of decision-making cycles.

On future battlefields, as artificial intelligence and human-machine integration technologies continue to advance, the pace of combat will accelerate until it reaches a “singularity”: the human brain will no longer be able to cope with the rapidly changing battlefield situation and will be forced to cede most decision-making authority to highly intelligent machines. Furthermore, to reduce casualties and mitigate political risks, military and political leaders worldwide are increasingly inclined to replace human soldiers with intelligent machines in combat.[15]

This expansive view stands in contrast with the Pentagon’s more restrictive policy on autonomous weapons systems. That directive mandates that “autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems will be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.”[16] As such, it reflects a well-founded Western cultural concern about unleashing “Terminator”-style weapons systems that end up escaping human control. Unfortunately for the U.S., the largely semi-autonomous systems of the U.S. military operate at a structural disadvantage to China’s increasingly fully autonomous ones, presaging future military confrontations between the U.S. and China that have the technological potential to tilt in the latter’s favor.

Cyber and Great Power Competition

The implications of all this are vital for U.S. national security, and for our strategic competition with China. Via espionage, Beijing undermines the U.S. economy and accelerates its technological advancements at a time when technology has become a key instrument of national power. Meanwhile, the capability to disable or disrupt key parts of the U.S. economy and daily life provide Beijing with a powerful tool to deter Washington, including preventing a resolute American response if it ever decides to invade Taiwan. 

China’s cyber operations constitute the ultimate preemptive weapon because they can undercut both American military capabilities and our larger political will. In the event of a war with China over Taiwan, for instance, the U.S. power grid and transportation system would be essential in moving personnel and equipment to the Pacific. (During contingencies, the U.S. Army moves approximately 67 percent of Army unit equipment by rail from bases to shipping ports.[17]) Credible Chinese threats to the integrity of these systems would do more than simply complicate U.S. logistics; they might undermine the political consensus surrounding action in the first place if the American people face the specter of sustained disruption. China could also fracture domestic cohesion with cyber-attacks against other critical systems that American citizens rely on every day (such as water and power systems), thereby degrading Washington’s political resolve to intervene in what, at the end of the day, would be a distant conflict. 

In other words, cyber capabilities provide the PRC with an attractive and comparatively low-cost way to shape American behavior according to Chinese preferences. Perhaps more importantly, from a Chinese perspective, they offer Beijing the ability to forestall actions by Washington that would run counter to or complicate its priorities.

Mitigating Risk

As Beijing increasingly implements intelligentized warfare, the risks facing the United States are very real. Mitigating risks in this domain requires revitalizing U.S.-China discussions on cyber and AI (official bilateral discussions over the latter that are currently planned for September represent an important first step in this regard). Such contacts are essential to establishing bilateral “rules of the road” for the use of key military technologies, and pursuing such dedicated discussions is paramount because cyber and AI are key military technologies in their own right, as well as critical underpinning technologies for space and electronic warfare. Even achieving limited goals, such as establishing clear U.S. red lines and a framework for signaling in cyberspace, could lead to a more stable and predictable cyber balance of power between Washington and Beijing. 

Such bilateral discussions could be a useful complement to ongoing global discussions about establishing binding norms for the use of cyber and AI. Both sets of discussions have long been challenging, because China and the U.S. have differing views of key concepts such as sovereignty in cyberspace. Beijing views traditional arms control treaties as a U.S. ploy to maintain military superiority, and therefore has been unwilling to engage on the arms control domain.[18] Meanwhile, the technologies in question are advancing at a rapid pace.

Here, there is room for cautious optimism. Although official Chinese views about the threat arms control poses to military modernization have hardened over the last five years,[19] both formal documents and diplomatic positions demonstrate a genuine concern by Chinese leaders regarding the threat posed by the military use of cyber and AI. For instance, China’s July 2026 position paper on global cyber governance details that: “Emerging technologies including AI [have] escalated cybersecurity risks, reducing the threshold for cyberattacks and conflicts between countries, and exposing critical infrastructure to high cybersecurity risks.”[20] Likewise, in its earlier November 2025 arms control white paper, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs highlighted the security risks associated with military use of cyber and AI capabilities.[21] This suggests that a Washington willing to engage in meaningful discussions on cyber may find a ready interlocutor in Beijing. 

Such an evolution is necessary. For over a decade, Washington’s primary response to Chinese cyber aggression has been public attribution: detailed threat reports on China’s cyber campaigns and unsealed indictments against various Chinese entities. The PRC has remained undeterred by such measures. Its continued cyber presence in U.S. systems strongly suggests that Beijing perceives U.S. infrastructure to be deeply vulnerable and the American will to retaliate to be low. 

Even if cyber discussions do not yield agreements on guardrails, they could be considered a success if they prompted Chinese decisionmakers to make more cautious decisions about cyber operations against U.S. critical infrastructure. The goal would not be complete deterrence, given the qualitatively different dynamics of cyberspace. Nevertheless, discussions about communications, risks, acceptable behaviors, and red lines would help both sides understand how to interpret each other’s cyber operations.

Here, changing China’s perception of American resolve will be paramount. Given the track record so far, the PRC needs to be convinced of U.S. seriousness in this domain. Doing so will require a change in U.S. policy and commensurate responses to Chinese cyber-attacks. One option is to develop a cyber declaratory policy that explicitly defines which U.S. critical infrastructure systems are off limits and emphasizes that any attack will trigger a nonproportional and cross-domain response. 

In recent years, the PRC has demonstrated that its cyber capabilities, a key element of its intelligentization strategy, represent a powerful instrument of national power. In response, the U.S. needs a new whole-of-government approach that better integrates cyber operations into our national security strategy.