Obama hopes ‘tough talk’ in cybersecurity talks will persuade China to rein in hacking attacks
President Barack Obama is banking that tough talk on suspected Chinese cyberattacks will yield changes in Beijing’s behaviour and justify a decision to hold off penalising China.
American officials say China is privately showing signs of taking the matter more seriously and noted comments from President Xi Jingping this week that he’s willing to work with the US on cybersecurity.
“Those kinds of comments are at least consistent with what we have urged the Chinese to do when it comes to their policies,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Thursday. “But it certainly is not going to eliminate the concerns that we have, and it certainly is not going to reduce the priority that we place on trying to make progress on those issues.”
Obama and Xi were to meet over dinner on Thursday night and talk again at the White House on Friday.
Hacking attacks on US companies and government agencies have become a growing source of tension between the US and China.
The US has been preparing sanctions against China in retaliation for its suspected theft earlier this year of personal data of millions of current and former US government employees. But officials decided against levying the penalties ahead of Xi’s visit – in part because embarrassing the Chinese could have impacted potential cooperation during the talks that begin Thursday night.
However, some analysts say China will only see an incentive to change its cyber behaviour if it feels real consequences.
“The Chinese are going to continue to engage in this activity until they begin to pay a cost for it,” said Patrick Cronin of the Centre for New American Security. “And today they don’t pay a cost for it, so it’s going to continue.”
US officials are particularly concerned with cyberspying that aims to steal intellectual property from private corporations. The White House is seeking commitments from China to protect intellectual property, though officials are downplaying expectations for any particular formal agreement being reached this week.
“We can choose to make this an area of competition, which I guarantee you we’ll win if we have to,” Obama told business leaders last week. “Or, alternatively, we can come to an agreement in which we say, ‘This isn’t helping anybody. Let’s instead try to have some basic rules of the road in terms of how we operate’.”
In his visit to the West Coast earlier this week, Xi said China has also been a victim of hacking. Acknowledging that China and the US don’t always see eye to eye, Xi said China was ready to set up a joint effort with the US to fight cybercrime.
Nick Rossmann, a programme manager for the computer security company FireEye, said his group was tracking about two dozen organisations in China that used malware to breach US organisations and companies. He cited defence, health care and high-tech firms as among the most frequently targeted companies.
“It’s really in a range across American industry where we see this economic espionage occurring,” Rossmann said.
The complaint from those companies is that they spend years developing innovative products while companies in China are able to launch comparable products without that same level of effort and cost, Rossmann said.
Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser at the White House, said the US would make the appeal during talks that China’s failure to crack down on cyberspying could alienate a business community that has been a strong backer of deepening Sino-US relations, and could also antagonise US lawmakers into taking more aggressive action.
