Description
The last decade has seen China increasingly playing a proactive role in various regional and
international organizations, developing, and perpetuating its own set of norms for
international behaviour as opposed to the Western norms. Cyberspace is one such domain
where China has started actively engaging at various international platforms with its focus on cybersovereignty, promoting the norms of sovereignty and state-centric, multilateral
governance of the internet as opposed to the established multistakeholder governance of the internet. This activeness on part of China has come at a time when its economic presence in cyberspace has highly risen to an extent that cyberspace is increasingly seen as an arena of cold war between US and China. This paper aims to unpack the norms established by China under the conception of cybersovereignty, i.e., state sovereignty, multilateral cooperation amongst others. By using the theoretical conception of norm life cycle theory as developed by Finnemore and Sikkink and the conception of normfare, the paper examines the role of China as a norm entrepreneur and looks at how China has engaged on international and regional platforms and through its initiatives such as Digital Silk Road (DSR) to bring about increased acceptance and internationalisation of these norms as well as strategic reinterpretation of existing norms in cyberspace. The paper examines various reasons for the acceptance of Chinese norms in the international community such as dissatisfaction with US hegemony in the existing multistakeholder internet governance, diversification in the interests of the US and the EU, and affordable access to cyberspace facilitated by Chinese companies in various countries in Asia and Africa as part of DSR, which also facilitate the transfer of Chinese norms of internet governance. The paper concludes by examining the implications of China’s rise as a norm entrepreneur in cyberspace for the possibilities of cooperation in international internet governance and whether there are possibilities of convergence in norms at international level or whether the spectre of a fragmented internet is coming to reality.
Keywords: cybersovereignty, norm entrepreneur, norm life cycle theory, cyber norms, Digital
Silk Road
