The report about U.S. National Security Agency engaging in espionage on Chinese telecom company Huawei and Chinese leaders further exacerbates China's domestic concerns about cyber security and may bring some unexpected changes to Sino-US cooperation on cyber issues.

In the past year, Chinese media has been focusing on cyber security incidents. In June 2013, as the Prism project revealed, US intelligence monitored Chinese academic institutions and individuals, which soon became an open class for Chinese public about cyber espionage. In August 2013, some hackers leaked over 20 million private records to the internet, which came from several hotel chains, including customer’s name, ID number, date of checking and room numbers. Also in the second half of 2013, Chinese media reported the super online banking system (widely used online payment software) had an authorization loophole by which criminals can easily steal money through. According to the released recently 2013 Internet Security Report made by the National Internet Emergency Center (CNCERT), the agency found 7,854 types of cyber security vulnerabilities, including 2,607 high-risk ones, both of which increased 15.1% and 6.8% respectively, compared to 2012. Malicious mobile apps increased significantly. CNCERT captured 703,000 samples, an increase of 3.3 times compared to 2012. It showed that Chinese Internet security situation was deteriorating.

Combining the growing concerns, the awareness about cyber security is also changing in China, which is clear in the more serious incidents of 2014. On January 21, 2014, China had a largest-ever internet interruption. Domestic users in China could not normally access the website end domains as .com or .net for several hours. Many people suspected that the incident was caused by a foreign cyber attack on the DNS servers. As none of 13 global DNS root servers are located in China, this incident also reflected that China's cyber security was still controlled by others. In April, two other incidents also caused widespread concern. On April 8, Microsoft officially stopped the security supporting of Windows XP, which would affect hundreds of millions of Chinese users. For many Chinese users, they find it difficult to adapt to another operating system rather than Windows XP. On April 9, a major security flaw called Heartbleed caused no small panic in China. In the past, Chinese media showed less attention to such cyber vulnerabilities overseas, but this time, Chinese media used “earthquake” and “nuclear attacks” to describe the event. Their views are broadly similar to their foreign peers.

Not only the public, Chinese decision-makers have been treating it more seriously. Cyber security has become an important part of national security, same as the economic security and military security. In February 2014, president Xi addressed that with “no cyber security, there is no national security and modernization.” In April, Xi highlighted that cyber security was a national security at the first meeting of the central cyber security and information leading group. Also in April, Xi took it as one of the 11 most important security areas of China in the first meeting of the National Security Commission.

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