With an estimated 400 million Internet users and 50 million bloggers, China has become a major cyber power. The Internet has brought China great benefits by spreading knowledge, shrinking the huge distances that hindered economic development, and making available a wide range of leisure activities.

The Internet has had an important political impact on society, changing in a quite fundamental way the nature of dialogue between the authorities and the public. China's "netizens" have become a de facto civil society. They use the Net to collect and disseminate information and mobilize public opinion against injustice and maladministration.

In ancient and medieval times, China's rulers used to disguise themselves as ordinary citizens and move around in cities and villages to find out what was really happening outside the walls of their palaces. Today, they just have to log on.

Not all outsiders welcome China's emergence as a global cyber power. Over the past decade, the Western media have carried many stories against the Chinese government and private-sector networks.

One senior US government official has said terabytes of information is being lost to such activities (to give an idea of what this means, the US Library of Congress is estimated to hold 160 terabytes of data). And private-sector companies such as Google have complained about covert efforts to access their proprietary software.

The Chinese government has responded by highlighting the extent to which the country, too, has been a victim of such attacks, which is more than likely true. The Internet offers users the opportunity to engage in covert collection of information or spying on networks to find their weaknesses. It is all but impossible to know from where an attack was launched or what its purpose was. Many players are engaged in such activities, both state and non-state, and the boundaries between them are blurred.

One key aspect of the Net, which concerns Chinese authorities, is that of soft power. To put it simply, most of the hardware and software which make up the Internet has been developed in the West. Even the most widely used systems for word-processing in Chinese have been developed by Western firms such as Microsoft. The way in which the Internet functions and most of the ideas transmitted on it have been shaped almost entirely by the West.

As Minister of State Security Meng Jianzhu said in January 2009, "The Internet has become a major vehicle through which anti-Chinese forces are perpetuating their work of infiltration and sabotage and magnifying their ability to disrupt the socialist order".

The response of the Chinese government has been twofold. First, it is trying to develop software indigenously to lessen the country's dependence on the West. And second, it plans to control the access to the Internet to combat socially disruptive phenomena such as crime and pornography. Nor is China the only country to impose such controls. Even Western countries like Australia have sought to limit Internet access to eliminate child pornography from the Net.

China is worried that the United States and other Western powers are trying to enjoy the same dominance in the cyber world that they have in space and strategic weapons. This perception has been enhanced by the recent US decision to create a cyber command in the Pentagon.

China's military has developed its own doctrine on cyber dominance in the event of an armed conflict with another power(s). Many experts say cyber warfare is a new dimension of war and it could even decide the fate of one.

Modern society, no doubt, is highly dependent on utilities and services such as energy supplies and financial services, which are delivered with the help of information and communication technologies. A disruption in these services could have a disabling effect on society as a whole, as was seen in Estonia in 2007.

Militarization of the Internet is an unwelcome development, as are efforts to limit access to the Net. Some experts say efforts to limit access to the Net could lead to the establishment of a "walled world" in which each state would operate something like a "national intranet" with limited connectivity to the outside world. That may create an illusion of security. In the longer-term, however, it would be a move away from a globalized communication system.

No country understands the risk better than China which, five centuries ago, turned its back on the world only to later discover that it was ill-equipped to deal with threats emanating from without.

A better approach would be to accept the Internet as a common global platform and encourage all countries to take steps to ensure the security and integrity of the Internet elements under its control. Besides, the countries should develop effective and globally coordinated law enforcement efforts to deal with the negative consequences of global connectivity such as crime and child pornography. The Convention on Cybercrime, signed by 43 countries, offers a basis on which the globalized world can build (or strengthen) its security network.

Aggressive behaviour on the Internet can never be controlled through formal arms control arrangements, enshrined in an international treaty, because it is almost impossible to devise effective verification measures.

But it is possible to achieve some measure of international agreement on globally unacceptable online actions and behaviours.

The author is Director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk at London-based the International Institute for Strategic Studies.