Sino-Russian Cyber Security Cooperation

With mounting cyber conflicts, cyber crimes and other security threats in the wake of technological advancement, Russia and China have suffered from malicious cyber attacks, data insecurity, cyberterrorism, among others. Despite domestic efforts in regulation and releasing a series of laws on cyber security, both nations still find it difficult to solve all cyber security issues, because the cyber space itself is highly open, extends beyond borders and has no boundaries. As such, mutual cooperation is needed to yield the expected results. So far China and Russia have mainly conducted multilateral and bilateral cooperation. The former is done under the SCO and BRICS frameworks, of which SCO emphasizes on cooperation to prevent cyberterrorism, and BRICS leans towards cooperation on data security. Though bilateral cooperation has witnessed a later start, it has achieved some results, mainly in establishing a communication channel to mutually respond to international information safety threats. Experts from both countries believe that as a whole, the Sino-Russian cyber safety cooperation mechanism is quite comprehensive, and has made substantial progress at the technical and infrastructure building level. That being said, there are still some limitations. For instance, both countries still lack substantial safety cooperation, and there is still room for improvement on cyber mutual trust. Nonetheless, when compared with the relation between the US and its allies, the cooperation between China and Russia pays greater attention to equality and mutual respect, and therefore has shown more trends of sustainability.