What China’s Vast New Cybersecurity Center Tells Us About Beijing’s Ambitions – By Dakota Cary (Defense One) / July 23 2021
The 15-square-mile campus in Wuhan will serve as school, research lab, incubator, and talent cultivator.
China—the country that has stolen billions of dollars in intellectual property and pilfered millions of records from U.S. government agencies, insurance companies, and credit-reporting giants’ records—is just getting started on its plans to become a “cyber powerhouse” (网络强国). Since 2017, it has been building a National Cybersecurity Center (国家网安基地, NCC) as big as its ambitions: a 15-square-mile campus in Wuhan that will serve as school, research lab, incubator, and talent cultivator.
A new report by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), together with an interactive map of satellite photos, examines the NCC — formally, the National Cybersecurity Talent and Innovation Base (国家网络安全人才与创新基地). The site includes seven centers for research, talent cultivation, and entrepreneurship; two government-focused laboratories; and a National Cybersecurity School.
For all of China’s past successes, which have established it as a near-peer cyber competitor to the United States, its path to becoming a “cyber powerhouse” is not free of obstacles.
