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?