China's long term strategic goal of becoming a cyber superpower is paying off as it has been successfully using cyber tools to conduct espionage operations around the world. China is now among the best in the world in the cyber domain with Xi Jinping's reorganization of China's military and intelligence agency, which "prioritized cyberwarfare and initiated a “fusion” of military and civilian organizations geared toward boosting the nation’s cyber capabilities". China has become more reckless with its attacks, with one against Microsoft in February 2021 and a coordinated attack in May against military, government and tech industry targets in the West. China has also tightened control over its own researchers as they are now very rarely allowed to go to hacking competitions and must disclose any vulnerabilities they know of to the government first, before attending. China also ranks near the top in alerting American firms to vulnerabilities though this may stop soon as they become increasingly restricted. In 2016, DARPA held a cybersecurity competition which was won by a machine called Mayhem which was automatically "detecting, patching, and exploiting software security vulnerabilities". China saw this success and copied it soon afterwards with its own "Robot Hacking Games" competitions which helped expand its cyber domain scope and reach.