Sharone Tobias and Will Piekos look at the top five stories in Asia this week.

1. China offers to play peacemaker, but Bibi and Abbas don’t bite. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas both visited China this week. The Chinese media enthusiastically reported on the possibility that the country could serve as neutral territory for the two leaders to negotiate a peace settlement. However, the Chinese government made sure the leaders stayed far apart throughout the trip and were never in the same city at the same time. Read more »

The Defense Department released its annual report to Congress on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2013. Besides being delivered relatively early compared to past editions and being almost twice as long as the 2012 version, this year’s version has at least three interesting points about Chinese cyber activities.

First, as many have noted, the sharpest break from the past is that the report directly ascribes blame for cyberattacks to the Chinese government and military, saying, “numerous computer systems around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, continued to be targeted for intrusions, some of which appear to be attributable directly to the Chinese government and military.” Read more »

Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, authors of the new book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, published last month, answered several questions on big data, foreign policy, and China. Questions by Sharone Tobias. Read more »

Over the past week, since the sentencing of a prominent Thai editor Somyot Prueksakakasemsuk and activist to ten years (eleven if you count the suspended sentence he must serve again) in jail for publishing articles that supposedly violated Thailand’s broad and outdated lèse majesté law, both Thai and foreign commentators have hotly debated whether, and how, to alter or abolish the law. On New Mandala, there is a lively discussion of whether the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand—which itself has been hit with lèse majesté charges—is too weak in defending the rights of free speech in Thailand. Read more »

A few days after the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post all admitted that their computer networks had been attacked, apparently by China-based hackers, it seems fair to say that both sides agree the “naming and shaming” approach to the problem is not working. The United States can call China out, but it has no real affect on behavior. Read more »

Mr. President, as you look toward Asia in your second term, cybersecurity will be a grain of sand in the eye, a major irritant but not one that blocks the larger vision of what you hope to accomplish in the region. That grain, namely Chinese cyber espionage, is not going away any time soon, but there are things you can do to make it slightly less annoying. Moreover, many of the policies to mitigate the situation will overlap with other efforts to re-energize the U.S. presence and boost ties to allies and friends in the region. Read more »

Mihoko Matsubara is a cybersecurity analyst and a nonresident Sasakawa Peace Foundation fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS, Honolulu, Hawaii. The views expressed here are her own. 

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a majority in the lower house election on December 16. This victory will make it easier for the next administration to reinforce cybersecurity as part of national security and improve technologies to deal with cyber attacks. Yet this will not be sufficient, and the new government must also enhance nontechnical aspects of cybersecurity policy, including international cooperation. Read more »

With 2012 coming to an end, here are some of the larger trends to watch in Chinese cybersecurity in the upcoming year.

New institutions/bureaucratic reform. There are rumors that there will be another round of bureaucratic reforms in the spring. Chinese analysts have pointed out that one of the great weaknesses in their defenses is that institutional oversight of cybersecurity is fragmented and ineffective, and there is a low degree of information sharing between the government and industry. There have also been complaints that China lacks adequate strategic planning for information security. In the past, efforts at ministerial reform have been underwhelming, resulting in little more than shuffling around of titles. This CCID report, however, does make the interesting suggestion that China should set up an “information security agency” to better coordinate cyber strategy. Read more »

Xi Jinping has one over-riding political mandate: clean up corruption or clear out. Corruption and its manifestations are at the heart of the Party’s greatest challenges: its glaring lack of legitimacy; one hundred eighty thousand mass demonstrations annually by most recent count; and an outflow of money through corruption, crime, and tax evasion as high as $3.72 trillion over the past decade. Is Xi up to the task? Read more »

China will announce its new leadership slate this week and the rest of the world will start scrambling, trying to figure out what the lineup means for the prospects of economic and political reform as well as the direction of Chinese foreign policy.

It is hard to know what, if any, impact the political succession will have on Chinese cyberspace policy. Read more »