Four years after 2010, global cyberspace issues rapidly rose to the forefront of the governance agenda in the international arena. This paper reviews the competing guiding principle governing the cyberspace. The paper introduces and compares the different understandings between China and the United States of how to secure sovereignty in the global cyberspace. This paper also studies China’s understanding of cyber sovereignty as well as the potential impact on the evolution of the governance of global cyberspace after 2013. The paper finds that while China and the United States have different ideas on how to apply the cyber sovereignty principle to guide global cyberspace governance, both countries are focused on how to ensure cyber sovereignty. While the United States is focused on expanding its cyber sovereignty, China prefers to launch cyber sovereignty defensively.
