Some Cheeni Technicalities

Recently, for an academic workshop I had to submit a brief on China as a latecomer in global technology standardisation. Notwithstanding the Napoleonic assessments of the waking of a sleeping giant, I argue that the Chinese “latecoming” in global technology standardisation has been more of a “coming of age” instead. As Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi note, presently China has twice the manufacturing capacity of the US, is churning out more active technology patents and highly-cited papers than the US, not to mention of producing 80 percent of consumer drones worldwide, and boasts of a shipbuilding capacity 200 times larger than the US. This structural transformation has been decades in the making, and should a single word be chosen to describe the Chinese strategic thinking in light of its “latecoming”, we may concur that word to be Patience.  

In an earlier blog, I had noted the sharp rise in Chinese contributions to internet governance from 2008 onwards, eventually coming head to head with a slowly declining US in the making of a bipolar world. Let us unpack the structural factors that led to that sharp but stable rise over the years. 

First of all, around mid-2000s, China began a twofold process of global influence. One aspect of it was to synergies its military and economic policy under the slogan of Zìzhǔ Chuàngxīn which could be translated either as indigenous or independent Innovation. And the second was Zǒu Chūqù which could be translated as Go Out (as in global). By the end of the 2000s, China had thus tried to reform its domestic industry and enabled them to capture global markets. Consider that in 2008, 75 percent of Huawei’s total revenue came from outside China, demonstrating the successful internationalisation of Chinese industry. Ostensibly, China had to undertake a rapid drive towards international technical standardization to support its global trades, especially from ICT corporations like ZTE and Huawei. 

Simultaneously, China also completely revamped its domestic R&D environment. The Chinese state actively enabled people in its technology companies and academia to develop strategic cooperations in national interest and participate in various multistakeholder technology forums. A lot of this also came from requiring PhD outputs to contribute to standards or open-source type of ecosystems, as well as the effective use of diaspora networks. This has significantly driven academic actors like Tsinghua University, as well as state actors like China Telecom and China Mobile, towards actively shaping the outputs of transnational technology forums. We must note here that in this China’s own digital transformation required a standards backbone which these actors found the opportunity to build themselves – leading to such entities producing successful global standards in areas like IPv6 transitioning or the multilingual internationalization of domain names.     

China has also been strategic about the use of its territory to engage with global talents. In November 2010, IETF’s 79th meeting was held in Beijing, which alone may have cause a significant spike in Chinese technical publications during 2010. In comparison, other “latecomers” have not made such explicit attempts to engage with global communities of experts. India, for example, has not yet hosted any major IETF meetings (barring some small on-boarding sessions in universities) despite a large IT sector and several digital-industrial geographies like Bangalore and Hyderabad. What further stands out is that the Chinese spike of 2010 has sustained and improved in the subsequent years, indicating that change emerged from strong structural foundations. 

In all, China vies to become the new global hegemon. Ostensibly, a global hegemon has to provide global public goods, and open digital technical standards are a prime variety such global public goods. DeepSeek’s surprising open-sourcing too had followed the same logic and even technical goals (relating AGI frontiers). The fluctuations in US’ determination to keep providing such key public goods in digital technologies, as has been evident in the recent back-and-forth over the the financing of CVE databases, or in the quite migration of RISC-V microprocessor governance to Switzerland, further creates a vacuum which other entrepreneurial states arriving “late” into this onsetting global bipolar disorder may try to fulfill through their own structural and productive capacities - if they know how to nurture and wield those capacities.  

Technology and Security Competitions

There circulate these days a variety of rumors of technological destruction - from an impending AI doom to a US-China technological decoupling and subsequent showdowns, or even an escalation of "small wars" into a litany of CBRN scenarios - for all we know (do we ever?), the internet could well be full of competing social botnets programming us for our imminent futures. Nevertheless, these rumors invite a closer look at the nature of technology development, coupling and competition before we could mourn (gleefully?) upon the demise of this brave new world of ours. In this digitally inter-connected world where "there is no there and we're all here", geography still remains a fundamental reality. Westphalian states are the dominant security providers over specific geographies. There are many competing states, perennially uncertain of each others' intentions and desirous of each others' resources and geographic control. They must also maintain a moral upper-hand and legitimacy over competing security providers. This security competition is one of the the key troubles in contemporary governance of "cyberspace" where there exist competing multilateral vs multistakeholder logic and value systems. 

Let us therefore begin with the internet itself. The graph below depicting the nation-wise publication of technical documents at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) underlines the nature of technological contest among "great powers". A Thucydides vibe between a rapidly rising power (China) and a gradually declining one (US) is quite naturally apparent here. Ostensibly, the cyberspace is a global common, contested but shared, and its protocols' and standards' development, historically contingent as is it, could not be used to make generalised remarks about the development of AI technology stack and its technical standards. For those are developed with a much greater regional impetus where locally clustered actors dominate markets and policy. Moreover, as AI and social bots become more pervasive, internet governance itself might have to integrate aspects of geographically contingent platform and API governance machinations.       

A Thucydides' Graph of Technology Competition [Source]

This geographic characterization of digital stack portends an incipient geopolitical logic in technology construction. To take a particular area, one could see how geography forces technology in the development of various national cyber security complexes. For example, the US, that has no mortal enemies at its borders and is fairly isolated by the oceans, but has to fight wars all over the world. It has, as a result, leaned quite heavily on developing global communications and surveillance networks, superiority in air and electronic spectrum, and the enabling cyber security partnerships such as Five Eyes. Furthermore, one may argue that the present internet norms and architecture in itself are a significant tool at the service of the liberal international order.

The Chinese cyber security complex, on the other hand, has leaned a lot more towards domestic control, industrial espionage, management and expansion of territory, and its ambitions over pacific waters - where it comes into direct conflict with the US hegemony that'll continue to shape its digital-technical goals. One must note here that the construction of state's cyber security complex entails all three properties of technology - namely technique, equipment, and organisation - the unique nature of which emerges from the geo-strategic forces underlying these. 

One of the best example of this geographically contingent interplay of social organisation, technique, and equipment is Israel. Its location and initial conditions forced it to shed all the useless pomp and hierarchy of military-technical organisations and adopt a ruthless functionalism instead, producing in effect a world-class cyber security complex without the accompanying burden of quasi-victorian bureaucracies. In fact, Russia's embrace of "hacker culture" and asymmetric cyber capabilities with respect to US and Europe must also be seen within the context of the collapse of Soviet geographic and economic vision, and not to mention the abject failure of Soviet's symmetrical competitive strategy with US in early internet development.    

We, not to leave ourselves out, have had two main geographic adversaries - Pakistan, and China. However, early on our state managers pivoted the Indian strategic thinking and discourse around Pakistan, not China, and stuck to it. Pivoting our strength and capability building around the smaller adversary was certainly easier and also suited the political and professional incentives of powers that be, given long and painful historical damages. However, this long-held strategic benchmark of a useless and weaker enemy produced a psychological and technical backwardness in our society - we chose to import, not build, our own military-security stack, including even cyber security software. In fact, it was a third-party cyber threat observer (who we also tried importing then, and is now famous for its Pegasus investigations) that had initially flagged the sweeping extent of Chinese botnets in India to the notice of the public and government.   

The geo-strategic foundations of technology development suggest that as long as our polity remains shy and inertial about the deeply geographic and military-technical nature of our competition with China, our cyber security complex and technology organisation too will continue to reflect that institutional ambiguity. There are three key broad lessons here requiring "radical acceptance" by policymakers that the geo-strategic foundations of technology development hold: 

A) Technocratic rationality dominates ethical rationality in hyper-competitive arenas. 

The development of dominant cyber security clusters in Tel Aviv, Washington and San Francisco indicates how closely tied together innovation is with knowledge spillover and a hyper-competitive social ecosystem. Not only is there a great mobility of high-end expertise across public-private organisations within these geographies, it also corresponds highly to the military-security requirements of their states. Hyper-competitive games cannot be played with ethical or ideological instruments. A case in point can be that present AI systems need robustness, safety, and energy efficiency - as per technocratic rationality - but if governments prioritize corporate DEI policies instead and direct finite resources into inter-governmental virtue signaling games, they may win some validation but will lose the broader security competition itself.  

B) Global technical standardization is beyond conventional competencies of governments. 

The rapid rise of China in the Thucydides' graph above draws significantly from contributions of companies like Huawei, Baidu, and Tencent, along with actors like China Telecom. This happened post a series of reforms in early 2010s giving more leeway and independence to such actors in the global internet governance. Thus, transnational technical standardization requires a whole-of-society anti-Westphalian approach to address certain gaps in states' technical expertise and governance capacities. Having to navigate this conflagrating techno-security competition between US and China, we need serious structural reforms now across the state and industry to dramatically drive the trajectory of our own line, and certainly not more of the same thing.  

C) Technology artifacts are not technology. 

Fundamentally, technology is information (as in know-how). One may further say that technology is strategic information. On their own, societies acquire this knowledge under considerable security and civilisational stressors, wars being a prominent one. Since it is widely understood that high ambitions often have to grapple with constrained timelines and low budgets, it is tempting for bureaucracies to buy cool stuff and say that they've acquired technology. Yet, this is eventually hogwash accompanied with an overbearing servitization component. The Americans and Israelis got this information in process of navigating warfare, and the Chinese by stealing intellectual property instead.     

This discussion also underlines a key change in national polities post-WWII (because of the introduction of nuclear weapons and a corresponding military-scientific elite in decision-making processes) that in addition to the military and geopolitical planning, states also have to integrate global technological developments in their strategic calculus. With strong AI around the corner and a possibility to remake the internet (for good?), this would require considerable expertise outside the usual skills possessed by politicians and their babus, and additionally a permanent view of politics beyond electoral vicissitudes. Technology, by transforming our needs, environment and actual possibilities, slowly shapes its own operating environment. It has a life, and now a mind, of its own, throwing the transnational digital governance in practice into an uncomfortable mix with the contraptions of the administrative state. Where does our geo-strategic imperative take us at this juncture?

On Unsavoury Memeplexes

 Tigress & Serpent, Thomas Landseer

When ChatGPT was released, soon arose several continuing Chinese whispers of the online variety that expressed discontent over the AI being too "lobotomised". These are also valid concerns after all, for information (the semantic significance of it, not the syntactical expression itself), or the deliberate absence of it, can often be political. And consequently, from a range of quarters, we've seen people clamming for their ideologically or theologically consistent AIs. Times are such, even computation can get cancelled. But this tendency to fortify, arm and train their memeplexes against adversarial memes under the pressure of structural changes is a phenomena that calls for deeper exploration, for much of what drives an abundant people (those who've sufficient access to food, mates, and circus), whether state identities or culture wars, are memeplexes undergoing constant unraveling.     

State identities are a rather interesting example here, because these also carry along a bureaucratic rationalization of their adopted memeplexes. Therefore, following the principle of co-evolution of politics and technology (i.e. institutions and techniques), states in peacetime will openly pursue only the degree of cultural politics that their established bureaucratic institutions may permit - such as the US evangelising worldwide its own cultural revolution, or the Chinese digging up old religious artifacts in western Tibet to expand their claims over Indian territories, or even some babus in India conveniently forgetting to discuss all pre-invasion indo-tibetan boundary arrangements with their Chinese counterparts in the hopes of a bff-ship (effectively secularising the wider political discourse over western Tibet). The role which bureaucracies play in the evolution of state identities and corresponding memeplexes is an excellent case of the chief evil of the (sometimes necessary) institutionalisation of anything - that the process take over the purpose. During existential turmoils, the phenomena may briefly slip into the-purpose driving the-process again, but soon the newly emerged processes again tether the purpose, establishing a cultural homeostasis until the inertia is disturbed. And thus, in the absence of a clearly defined, objective and actionable political purpose, pragmatism dictates that bureaucratic rationalizations orchestrate state identities.

In 1945, after taking over Japan, the local US administration had banned the images of Mount Fuji, samurais, and even performing arts such as sword-fighting movies and Kabuki plays, while at the same time promoting pacifist literature and debating fraternisation with Japanese women. In the eyes of west, Japan's collective mindset at the core was feudal, requiring considerable reeducation and civilizing for democratic functioning. And much of this grand effort came under the perview of an "Information Control Division". Over the decades the naming conventions have gotten a lot more politicaly correct, i.e. it'll be scandalous for a public department to be named Information Control Division these days, Ministries of War have become Ministries (and Departments) of Defense and so on. But bureaucratic institutions embody patterns of state behaviour, and changing their names does little to alter human affairs and organisational logics. The Twitter files might suggest that Information Control Division lives on, and Ukraine turning into West's collective proxy might indicate that the ministries of war too, live on. Survival requires old-timer memes to not only remain relevant but also interact competitively or even freeride with other memeplexes. The freeloading memeplex is a thing of beauty, a beast of prey in the realm of ideas. Like a parasite it benefits from susceptible memeplexes, and often us biological hosts have little recourse to deal with such epenthetic memes. Glorious ideals like The Law, Justice, and Freedom et cetera are all also great examples of such memes. 

Since we were speaking of state identities, justice too is an interesting meme to consider. Just a couple of centuries ago, if someone had harmed your loved ones, you might have sought to take revenge, maybe even banding together your community and friends into it. After all, revenge has its evolutionary logic - credible retaliation prevents future indiscretions i.e. an eye for an eye does not make the whole world blind, instead the arrangement ensures that people avoid poking into another's eye. But irrespective of the role which revenge plays in human affairs, and plays much greatly in state and international affairs, if someone harmed your loved ones today, it is expected that you'd not be going out seeking revenge on your own. Instead, you'd go to the police and the court (irrespective of their effectiveness) and hope that "The System" will take your revenge for you. Here is a meme that is treated differentially at different levels of society - for indignity and a lost sense of kindred honour, a man pursuing his revenge could be too barbaric and patriarchal in today's world, but the sovereign doing so is a "strategic imperative". 

This is infact the very essence of The Law among the sovereigns. Consider that for the unparalleled specialisation in enforcing his will, in the jungle the lion is the law. Over his subjects within his territory, the lion may exercise his jurisprudence, if he has any. That jurisprudence forms the law of the land, the constitution and other sacred documents of the people living in that land. But the meme of justice takes a U-turn when the matter to be resolved is not within a lion's territory, but among the lions that hold such territories. Our salaried lions then do not say that XYZ lion is breaking the law, instead, they say that XYZ lion is disturbing the order. Just with different communities of underlying hosts, the expected behavior around the memeplex shifts from being almost mathematically formalised to being merely customary. Moreover, modern memeplexes are also partly driven by and dependent upon constant connectivity and a (computer) networked society, and thus the bureaucratic rationalization of our world necessitates reigning in the unsavoury memeplexes via technical means of the computational variety as well. 

How unsavoury is your memeplex? 

Often such unsavoury memeplexes could originate from and target the lions themselves - an example is cyber threat information sharing about these memeplexes. A lot of cyber security discourse today (including the just released US' National Cybersecurity Policy) include online influence and disinformation threats. Some "do-gooders" at NATO's StratComCoE are also trying to extend the existing threat information sharing standards and languages to cover these online informational threats. However, such information sharing involves a fair share of subjectivity and semantic conflicts (some of which I go over here) which could make releasing such "memetic threat intelligence" a bit of political activity as well, as opposed to sharing conventional cyber threat information. It'll be a diplomatic soup if states or their CERT-type organisations do it, so there is an precipitating growth in dependence on private sector proxies - online platforms, OSINT organisations, and commercial information vendors - to do what in the old days would have been done by foreign services and information control divisions.    

Clausewitz, of all the philosophers, had rightly remarked that every period carries its own cultural grammar for war. And thus even decades old conflict today are being fought under a new cultural grammar in Ukraine. Often the biological hosts' vainglorious assumptions of modernity dictate that they sanitise and compartmentalise their memeplexes - change the content of books, redesign classics, listen to musicians not music, so on and so forth. Even after hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, information producers - whether it is Tulsidas or Roald Dahl - need to be retrofitted into "The 21st Century", and ironically even the 21st century AIs too. Which also triggers me to invoke Stanely Kubric's absolute masterpeice - 2001: A Space Odyssey - where the protagonist eventually wins the race of evolution by "lobotomising" his fellow AI. Interestingly, much of the popular AGI risk discourse today is effectively synthesised into the memeplex of that one Hollywood movie.     

Perhaps all of this also points at the default human tendency to let their beliefs be coloured by their desires. Buddha, as some Chinese communist babus may also be grappling with, postulated desire to be the root of suffering. But would the underlying biological substrates of living memeplexes ever be able to shun their desires and see things as they really are? I'd say never, for that is our prison, which Czeslaw Milosz captured beautifully when noting that men will continue to clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.   

Cautious Quadrilateralities

There was the sound like a rumor without any echo of history, really beginning.

Following the recent Chinese overtures towards Arunachal, Ladakh, and Sikkim - notably sending troops, altering maps, taking land and calling for peace - there now hopefully would have enkindled some degree of sovereign urgency among Delhi's international security leaders towards a reassessment of some of our geostrategic priorities. So understandably (with some hindsight) while we might want to avoid symmetrical competition with an obviously bigger opponent and focus on emerging capabilities which could break an established stalemate and provide sustainable asymmetric advantages to constrain CCP actions in future. Delhi and even Dharamshala both understand this very well, after all. And other than the slowly simmering borders and periodic geo-economic swings, India also has a bit of a civilizational obligation to herself that Asia doesn't turn into a CCP fiefdom.

Under this kind of environment, there has lately been a resurgence and expansion of the old US-JP-AU-IN HADR (The Quad) alliance which in itself is a center of varied interests owing to its strong political proximity with maritime dominance and the welfares originating from a post-pandemic diversification of China based supply chains. There have even been some efforts to promulgate the idea that this arrangement is not against China. In all honesty, unless China itself joins the mix, any attempts to regulate the security of Indo-Pacific waters will have to take on a character which faces China as the opponent. This is a bit of a Tolstoyan case of the fate of nations being independent from the individual wills of their kings and ministers.

That said, there are valid reasons to reconsider the strategic utility of institutionalizing these emerging structures. Japan is a treaty-based US ally. Australia is a US ally which with RCEP is unlikely to break from an economic dependence on China. The US of course, is the incumbent politico-military arbiter of liberal world order. None of these shares a land boundary with or has massive trigger-happy territorial disputes with China. We do. But the quadrilateral isn't about India, it is about "Indo-Pacific". And that thick line needs more policy thickening, because given West's ideological and economic competition with China, it can be easy to surmise that the IOR or the Indo aspects of Indo-Pacific will recieve less attention than the Pacific aspects. Besides, a third of the worldwide maritime trade passes through the South China Sea that is being contested over, and the Chinese aren't exactly going to accept some fancy rules based order in strictly diplomatic manners.

It can also be expected that more and more states joining this arrangement will still try to maximize their relational benefits while minimizing the individual costs even if that isn't in the grander strategic interests of the arrangement itself. It is well known that specific goal oriented coalitions with clear objectives are better than a general-purpose bloc riding-the-waves of international waters. The military incentives here rest with the former, or in very localized regional arrangements between states trying to order their own backyards. Unless there are strong political and economic incentives, no one is going to make commitments of manpower and resources for expeditionary operations to defend foreign interests. So it can be fairly argued in this case that expansion for sake of expansion, while gaining more legitimacy in the eyes of public and possibly even some international institutions, would tend to dilute the coalitionary maritime defense potential unless carefully guarded against.

China too is aware of the possible maritime encircling and will focus on global economy to find its way out. Consequently it has revamped its foreign investment regime and launched a slew of techno-economic armamentarium including the central bank's digital currency which could in future help in renminbi internationalization, generating non-trade currency demands, and in getting the CCP a hold over China's burgeoning money networks and perhaps over the slippery oil shores as well. Considering 'all the things that need consideration' maybe the best way to think about the current stratagems is to affirmatively rephrase Derek Walcott that the sea is indeed the history.