Analysis of China’s cyber warfare capabilities

DESMOND BALL of the Strategic and Defence Studies Center at the Australian National University at Canberra analyzes the development of China's cyber-warfare capabilities since the mid-1990s, the intelligence and military organizations involved, and the particular capabilities that have been demonstrated in defence exercises and in attacks on computer systems and networks in other countries.
In an article in Security Challenges, "China’s cyber warfare capabilities", he states that it was often very difficult to determine whether these attacks originated with official agencies or private "Netizens" as well as that China's demonstrated offensive cyber-warfare capabilities were fairly rudimentary such as denial-of-service, Trojan horse etc. that have been fairly easy to detect and remove. He also states that  there was no evidence that China's cyber-warriors could penetrate highly secure networks or systematically cripple selected command and control, air defence and intelligence networks and databases of advanced  adversaries, or to conduct deception operations by secretly manipulating the data in these networks. 

He concludes that it could however employ asymmetric strategies designed to exploit the relatively greater dependence on IT by its potential adversaries but could not compete in extended scenarios of sophisticated information warfare operations and would function best when used pre-emptively, as the PLA now practices in its exercises.