The Coming of Bipolarity

Recently, for an academic workshop, I had to submit a brief on China as a latecomer in global technology standardization. Notwithstanding the Napoleonic assessments of the waking of a sleeping giant, I argue that the Chinese “latecoming” in global technology standardization 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 producing 80 percent of consumer drones worldwide, and boasts 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 contributions from a slowly declining US in the making of a bipolar world. Let us unpack the structural factors that have led to that sharp but stable rise over the years.

\ First of all, around the mid-2000s, China began a twofold process of global influence. One aspect of it was to synergize 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 it to capture global markets. Consider that in 2008, 75 percent of Huawei’s total revenue came from outside China, demonstrating the successful internationalization 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 the 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 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 talent. In November 2010, IETF’s 79th meeting was held in Beijing, which alone may have caused 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 example of 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.