China recently unveiled a five-year plan to improve security and defend its state secrets from cyberspace threats. With the recent rash of violent and aggressive cyberterrorism attacks, nations are bolstering up their defenses to protect both their citizens' right to privacy, as well as sensitive assets and information they couldn't risk falling into the wrong hands.

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A senior official for China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology presented the plan to  the media. One of the highlights of the five-year plan is to refocus the national government's software and hardware purchases from multinational corporations to local manufacturers. With luck, this could significantly decrease the risk of hackers from overseas tapping into China's vital tech and information resources.

While this is good news for Chinese software developers and tech companies, these new regulations potentially diminish the entry of foreign companies even further. Many western tech firms are already concerned about being edged out of the world's second biggest economy.

Despite this five-year plan, though, China's stringent policies on foreign technology isn't news. Over the past two years, Beijing has been cutting off a number of major tech firms from its list of approved vendors. When the five-year plan gets into gear, even banks and other financial institutions in the country will be focusing more on local tech, instead of getting equipment and software from foreign markets.

A report by Reuters claims that China's banking regulator recently "temporarily suspended bank-technology guidelines in April that would have effectively replaced foreign tech products with domestic alternatives, following feedback from banks and an outcry from foreign governments and business."

Despite the western tech industry's qualms about China's five-year cybersecurity plan, though, the Red Dragon's actions isn't exactly baseless. News of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, regarding the U.S. security agency's surveilance capabilities, have propelled countries around the world to take the defensive and start boosting up their countermeasures to possible cyber spying or hacking, especially from cyberterrorists who will stop at nothing to get to the core of the world's most powerful nations.

TagsTech Companies, cybersecurity