“Cyber Great Power,” not “cyber powerhouse”

Translating Cyber Great Power (网络强国) into English presents a special challenge, as both elements of the term, “cyber” and “great power,” raise distinct translation issues that need to be addressed individually.

强国： Great Power or powerhouse?

Despite the importance of the term-of-art “Great Power” in Communist Party theory and its lexicon for national strategies, there is no standard English language translation for “强国,” including by PRC state-run media.

In the context of national strategy, I use “great power,” or by context simply “power,” to translate “强国” on this website except when directly quoting from other sources. This translation best reflects the formality, meaning, and wider usage of “great power” (强国; shortened form of 强大国家) in the Party’s lexicon for national strategies, and to ensure consistent translation of a Party term-of-art.

In cases where the term “great power” is linked to the formal name of a national strategy, such as “Cyber Great Power,” I adopt the standard practice in the West regarding national strategies and capitalize the title.

The preferred (but not exclusive) translation of “强国” in PRC state-run media is “powerhouse” (lowercase), i.e. “cultural powerhouse” or “cyber (or Internet) powerhouse.” The choice is too informal for a theoretical term, and masks the strategic gravitas of the original Party term-of-art.

In the West, “强国” is also routinely translated as “superpower,” as in “cyber superpower.” Similarly, this term is too informal for the original Party term-of-art, and there is a separate, standard Chinese word for superpower, “超级大国.”

“Strong country/nation” is a literal translation of the Chinese term, and although contextually appropriate for some translations, like the other translations cited above it does not paint a national strategy with the same strategic gravitas as the original Chinese term-of-art when used in a formal title.

Since Xi Jinping’s public proposal of “Cyber Great Power” during the first meeting of the newly formed Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization on February 27, 2014, standardizing the translation of “Cyber Great Power” (网络强) has become increasingly important as PRC theorists began (and continue) to describe China’s “great power transition” from a cyber “(major) power” (大国) to a cyber “(great) power” (强国). The references are often difficult to spot due to PRC state media mistranslations of “Cyber Great Power” into English variously as cyber powerhouse, Internet powerhouse, Internet Power, et al.

网络： cyber or network?

On this website, I translate the Chinese term “网络” as “cyber” in the context of Cyber Great Power and cybersecurity, primarily because “cyber” is now the standardized translation in PRC state-run media and official documents. Using the standardized PRC translation (if generally accepted like “cyber”) ensures consistency in support of research and analysis in English.

However, as a number of Western experts have pointed out, including Emily de La Bruyère and Rogier Creemers, translating the term as “network” in this context is a truer reflection of its meaning. Beijing’s use of the term “网络” in this context points to the “networked domain” globally, a broader connotation than the word “cyber” carries in English.

This difference poses a greater challenge when analyzing the relationship between elite digital strategies (like Cyber Great Power) and their corresponding Informatization phase (like Networkization), as this website does. This is because the same Chinese term “网络” is translated differently into English in each case (cyber and network) despite carrying the same meaning in Chinese.