Much has been made about the explicit acknowledgement of cyber-warfare forces within the People’s Liberation Army. Yet these revelations are neither groundbreaking nor constitute a formal strategic doctrine for cyber or military applications of information technology in the event of war. More interesting is the insights it yields in what appears to be a comprehensive Chinese “whole nation” approach to conducting cyber war, something that experts have suspected for many years.

U.S. companies and leaders have criticized China’s new counter-terrorism law for its increased surveillance mechanisms. Yet, the U.S. government cannot claim the moral high ground when it blatantly violates the rights enshrined in its own constitution. A serious challenge to state surveillance will not come from other states; it must arise from China’s own citizenry.

The Arab Spring was neither a transformation from authoritative political system to western democracy, nor a religious “Islamic Awakening.” Dr. Jin Liangxiang describes it as the reconstruction of political legitimacy, and primarily caused due to governments losing their legitimacy by not providing economically for the people. Externally imposed political systems will not solve the ongoing issues, though.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently presided over a discussion on international security at the UN in New York. The principle of unity and multilateral cooperation, the basis of the original UN Charter, was the foreground to China’s continued calls for cooperation on investments, terrorism, and military trust mechanisms.

The U.S. is concerned over China’s new anti-terrorism law due to additional network security regulations that would affect its enterprises in China. Since Chinese governments, banks, and research institutes are almost entirely dominated by foreign IT companies, there is justified concern over domestic cyber security. Strict regulation in law could ensure that all investors are treated equally without favoritism.

The USCC assessment on the weaknesses of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) offered little new analysis on PLA’s cyber-warfare capabilities. This is due to impossibility of finding a comprehensive assessment of China’s military cyber capabilities on the public record. Much of the debate surrounding the PLA’s cyber war capabilities is mere speculation based on evidence of its undoubted success in cyber espionage.

Jia Chunyang discusses the outstanding features of the U.S. National Security Strategy report. In general, the new report is a basic follow-up to the Obama administration’s opinions about China as well as its diplomatic philosophy reflected in its 2010 edition. But it has a more confident tone.

In order to defeat IS, action needs to be taken well beyond Iraq and Syria. The entire campaign will not be measured in months. It needs to be a global, multi-pronged and long-term battle and requires global input and cooperation to extirpate this universal scourge.

A Sino-American joint military exercise on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) to a typhoon-hit country was held in Haikou, Hainan Province. These cooperative exercises are still in the early phases; non-traditional threats such as counter-terrorism, peacekeeping and maritime security, are still institutionally, logistically, and legally lacking.

This year marks the 65th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Vietnam. Vietnam and China have tried, with some success, to iron out their differences through high-level talks, but far more needs to be done to avert another dramatic and detrimental maritime incident as the world saw play out with the 2014 drilling rig crisis.