The End of the Illusion: China’s Cybersecurity Ban and the Strategy Behind It
Why Beijing’s Cybersecurity Ban, AI Ambitions, and Tech Decoupling Mark the End of Strategic Pretending
China’s decision to ban U.S. and Israeli cybersecurity technologies is not a regulatory adjustment or a procurement dispute. It is a strategic declaration.
By directing domestic organizations to remove Western cybersecurity platforms from critical environments, China is formalizing a break that had already occurred in practice. This move is not about hidden backdoors, compliance nuances, or vendor trust assessments. It is about control—over visibility, response, recovery, and leverage.
More importantly, it is about timing.
This decision marks the end of a long-running illusion: that China and the United States were converging toward partnership. They were not. They were diverging slowly, deliberately, and now openly.
Cybersecurity Was Never Neutral
Cybersecurity platforms define how environments are observed, how incidents are contained, and how systems recover under stress. For a state pursuing long-term strategic dominance, outsourcing that layer to foreign firms operating under rival legal and intelligence frameworks is untenable.
