1. China’s growing technological dominance: what does China want?
Key Point Summary
China’s ‘Digital Silk Road’ initiative is exporting China’s techno-authoritarian model globally, while enabling its technology giants to become world leaders in areas from 5G to artificial intelligence – including technologies with dual use civil and military applications.
Chinese state backed companies are leading efforts to normalise state surveillance within global Internet architecture. Huawei’s new IPv6+ proposal to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) would enable closer state monitoring of how citizens use the Internet.
By submitting Huawei’s proposals to the ITU – a UN body – the Chinese government is deliberately trying to undermine the existing multi-stakeholder Internet standard-setting process. This takes regulatory power away from civil society groups, and gives it instead to multilateral forums that the Chinese government has greater influence over.
Democratic countries should push back against China’s attempts to re-write tech norms by establishing global regulatory standards which limit the role of the state and protect user privacy. This must include harmonising existing data regulations, such as between the EU and the US, and establishing joint regulations for emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence.
China’s growing global tech dominance
In a matter of decades China has transformed itself into a technological superpower. Once a byword for low quality, cheap manufacturing, today Chinese technology products are desired not only for their price, but also their world leading capabilities. Yet the Chinese state hasn’t overseen the rapid rise of its technology giants solely for the purpose of its own domestic development. Rather, the Chinese government plans to use its growing influence to cement the leading position of its technology firms and extend its governance model globally. Two examples of this campaign are its Digital Silk Road (DSR) initiative and its attempts to revamp the global processes of technology standards and norm setting.
Building the Digital Silk Road
The DSR was initiated in 2015 as a part of China’s ambitious and broad-ranging Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). By providing considerable state-backed investment, the DSR enables Chinese technology firms to enter the markets of targeted BRI countries – the majority of which are situated in the global south. Observers differ as to whether the DSR is a “masterplan by Beijing to deploy its techno-authoritarian model” globally or simply a reflection of the demand for such surveillance enabling technologies from BRI countries themselves. Either way, China stands to gain. The DSR has allowed Chinese firms to export their technologies en masse across the globe, a position from which the Chinese government hopes to influence global technology adoption and standards.
Chinese companies involved in DSR projects provide governments with dual-use products for military and commercial purposes. These often include tools for digital repression, such as “next generation national firewall” infrastructure projects that give governments active surveillance capabilities and data analytic features. In Uganda and Zambia, Huawei technicians have assisted governments in intercepting encrypted communications and tracking the locations of political opponents.
The DSR has played a large part in enabling Chinese companies to rapidly gain global market share in areas such as 5G networks, cloud, data analytics, artificial intelligence and even satellite positioning and navigation. Tanzania, Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone all took on Chinese government financing to acquire network infrastructure projects from Huawei and ZTE, with funding amounts of US$30-337 million.6 Huawei today occupies around 30% of the global 5G market. Similarly, Chinese firms have made major innovations in artificial intelligence technologies, including an AI emotion-detection software to aid the surveillance and repression of Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region.
Resetting global tech governance
The success of Chinese technology vendors such as Huawei — not only in developing BRI countries but also in many parts of the western developed world — has further reinforced the Chinese government’s desire to instil China’s techno-authoritarian control philosophy as a universally accepted global norm. Beijing aims to change both the technological standards and the process by which these standards are set.
In recent years, China — represented by its leading advocate Huawei — has been actively proposing two new and related conceptual standards: the so-called ‘New IP’ and ‘IPv6+’. Huawei, along with several other China state-backed actors, submitted these proposals to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for discussion in 2019 and 2022 respectively. These proposals, while highly technical in nature, pose major ramifications to the future of global cyberspace. ICANN, the global multi-stakeholder administrator of Internet resources, warned that Huawei’s New IP advances a stronger regulatory binding between an IP address and a user, making "pervasive monitoring” of an Internet user’s activity by governments and other actors much easier.
Under the proposals, websites, social media platforms and other content providers will also know the identity of everyone who connects to them. The Internet Society, a leading nonprofit organisation monitoring internet freedoms, pointed out that the New IP proposal would result in fragmenting the Internet into two: the “old” and the “new”, with the new Internet converted into one big surveillance engine.
The process by which Huawei made its proposal also illustrates a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government to undermine the existing multi-stakeholder Internet standard-setting process. By strategically taking the case to the ITU, a body under the United Nations, the Chinese government is seeking to shift the power balance in global Internet regulation away from civil society groups and towards nation states.
Traditionally the Internet standards have been set through a process that involves multiple groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) — all with longstanding involvement from civil society, private sector and academia, and not driven by nation states.
By trying to set up an alternative standard-setting route to gradually replace this existing norm, China aims not only to control the Internet within its own border, but would like to see its techno-authoritarianism justified by international bodies and its model and philosophy exported to the rest of the world. Without that, China would consider a free and open Internet outside its Great Firewall to remain as a threat to its own regime stability and existence.
Conclusion
China’s global technology influence campaign is a battle for the soul of the Internet. This competition takes place across all Internet related technologies, norms, operating principles and philosophies. How this plays out will determine whether the future of the Internet will be one that is free, open and secure, or another reality that is controlled, censored and surveilled by centralised authoritarian regimes, dictating only their versions of the truth.
Recommendations
(1) Establishing global regulatory standards
Regulatory regimes related to data transfer and privacy currently differ widely across democratic countries. Until these regulations are harmonised, democratic countries will not be able to effectively establish global norms and standards around these issues.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is widely considered to be the standard bearer in data and privacy protection in the world and provides a unified regulation across Europe. This is in sharp contrast to the U.S., which has a patchwork of state legislations without any unified federal privacy protection legislation. Countries that exist outside the EU can still seek to formally align domestic regulations with the EU’s GDPR, as the UK has done. Other attempts to harmonise regulations across borders include the US led Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules initiative with Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and other APEC members. Democratic governments must work to expedite these negotiations, thereby both securing a high standard of data protection and enabling free flows of data.
Harmonising regulations is particularly important for emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, with governments otherwise at risk of lagging behind developments and new risks in the sector. While the EU is formulating its ‘AI Act’, the US is yet to propose any specific regulations on the sector. Meanwhile, US technology firms, reportedly with backing from the US government, have lobbied EU policy makers to drop provisions aiming to safeguard the fundamental rights of users.
(2) Countering surveillance technologies
Democracies must find ways to effectively counter efforts by authoritarian states to develop technologies that aid state monitoring, surveillance and repression. This can be achieved by expanding targeted sanctions and regulatory actions against surveillance products, technologies and platforms from countries such as China to deter their proliferation and further advancement.
While Hikvision has been the most high profile case, with bans or restrictions on the use of its surveillance camera equipment in the US, UK and Australia, this represents only the tip of the iceberg. Chinese technology firms have played a leading role in aiding the Chinese government’s repression of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Region, including developing artificial intelligence driven surveillance cameras capable of racial profiling. Governments should seek to establish regulatory regimes similar to the US Entity List, which limits the transfer of technologies to firms identified as aiding repression and surveillance in the region.
(3) Investing in open technology research
Governments must increase their investment in open technology research and development, particularly in the areas of privacy-preserving, anti-surveillance and anti-censorship technologies such as encrypted communication apps and anti-tracking systems. Other countries can seek to replicate the US Agency for Media’s Open Technology Fund, which provides funding for developing technologies to circumvent censorship and protects journalists and audiences’ security and privacy online. The US CHIPS and Science Act and the EU’s Horizon programme provide opportunities for further funding research and development in this sector.