China’s weaponization of global cyber supply chains

As global interdependence deepens and digital technologies permeate society, the security of supply chains has emerged as a critical domain of strategic competition. The diffusion of globally sourced components into critical systems extends cyber conflict beyond post-deployment breaches; today, the battle begins before a device first powers on. China’s malign actors can embed vulnerabilities, conceal them through global assembly, and remotely activate them without warning. Visibility into these threats is central to national defense in the digital era.  

This challenge is most acute in the intensifying technological rivalry between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leverages a uniquely far-reaching capacity to exploit global supply chains through a fusion of military doctrine, intelligence strategy, and party-state control over nominally private firms. Beijing can preposition access points, latent vulnerabilities, and disruptive capabilities within the technological infrastructure of its geopolitical competitors.  

For the CCP, cyberspace is a domain of asymmetric conflict, strategic deterrence, and information dominance. China’s modern cyber doctrine is rooted in the process of “informationization” [xinxihua, 信息化]—the integration of information technologies into a nation’s economy, society, and critical infrastructure. Beginning in the 1990s, China’s strategists observed that the information domain increasingly shaped national interests and security, as adversaries gained unprecedented access to each other’s economies, populations, and decision-making processes. Since then, China’s military and political leadership have embedded cyber operations into the core of national strategy.  

Read more at Center for Strategic and International Studies