Defense-Through-Offense Mindset: From a Taiwanese Hacker to the Engine of China’s Cybersecurity Industry

The belief that offense enables defense in cyberspace, first rooted in China’s 1990s hacker culture, has since permeated the country’s cyber ecosystem

Across the globe, a core tenet is gradually gaining traction in the cyber domain: passive defense alone is not enough. A limited but growing number of states have embraced some form of active defense—the idea that effective cybersecurity requires not just detection and response, but also preemptive action to disrupt adversaries.¹

In the United States, this principle is formally codified in the 2018 Department of Defense Cyber Strategy under the doctrine of “Defend Forward,” authorizing U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA to proactively disrupt threats within adversaries’ own networks. Variations of this approach have since been adopted by other governments. In China, the concept of active defense is grounded in longstanding military strategy. Although this principle extends to cyberspace - as outlined in China’s 2015 military strategy - China has not yet articulated a dedicated active cyber defense doctrine comparable to that of the United States.

Yet in practice, China’s cyber ecosystem refl…