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China's hacking of foreign news organizations -- like, for example, its demands that foreign governments not call attention to Chinese pollution or human rights abuses -- is not just about protecting the Communist Party's reputation within China. This is what I, like others, have long assumed: that the party is worried about any information or dissent that might fuel unrest. Ford isn't disputing that, but rather suggesting that there may be another layer of thinking, one in which the Party is legitimately concerned with protecting how China is discussed outside of China as well. He calls it “a sort of conceptual imperialism, at least in aspiration, suggesting that it is a Chinese strategic objective to control the world’s discourse about China.”