China's cyber warfare : the strategic value of cyberspace and the legacy of people's war

concepts. Even though a large number of studies about the internet or cyberspace have been compiled, it can still be asserted that little is known about how cyberspace is structured and how it operates. Therefore, this chapter takes as its premise that there is a need to define and illustrate the features of cyberspace inherent across the government, civil society, and military sectors, which should begin with an examination of the nature of cyberspace to establish how its features may shape it into a potential battleground. 2.1 The nature of cyberspace Although the term ‘cyberspace’ originally came from science fiction, for many of us cyberspace now forms part of our everyday routine. Since 1990, rather than considering cyberspace to be a manifestation of a video game, academia has begun to take cyberspace more seriously. This development is certainly closely related to the rapid commercialisation of the internet in the 1990s. Michael Benedikt (1991:122) defined cyberspace as a structure formed by an amalgamation of computer technologies such as both 2D and 3D graphic user interfaces, internet technology, virtual reality, multimedia, databases, and hyperlinks. He also ascribes a broad domain of physical space to the nature of the computer-sustained virtual world. Along with the technical development of computers and the internet, cyberspace seems to be becoming more concrete and the concept of cyberspace is continuously expanding. Cyberspace is not only a physical body of machines or 16 Michel Benedikt also indicates that cyberspace is ‘a new universe; a parallel universe created and sustained by the world’s computers and communication lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alt-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night.’ (Benedikt, 1991:1)