A new approach to the geopolitics of Chinese internets

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay summarizes how our understanding of Chinese internets – in the plural – has shifted in the past two decades. The incumbent approach sees ‘Chinese tech’ as a unitary and statist monolith, an incomplete view whose utility has declined. By contrast, the articles in this special issue collectively substantiate a novel geopolitical approach that analyzes ‘Chinese internets’ as internally diverse and externally border-crossing; as both public (governmental and non-governmental) and private (e.g., corporate); as discursive and policy entanglements beyond the dichotomy of multistakeholderism and multilateralism; and as global, regional, and local formations that are connected to, but not entirely constrained by, their national counterparts. Pluralist and multilayered, this new approach to analyzing Chinese techno-geopolitics shall provide a better fit for contemporary internet research involving state and nonstate actors in China, including Chinese companies operating both overseas and globally.

KEYWORDS:

• Geopolitics
• China
• Chinese internets
• internet governance
• US-China tech war

Introduction

More than two decades ago, there were high hopes for ‘the Internet’ to change China from a land of authoritarian information lockdowns to an open society of free flows, integrated into a worldwide marketplace of ideas. Addressing his audience at Johns Hopkins University on 9 March 2000, US President Bill Clinton (2000) remarked: ‘[T]here’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall’. Such optimism has since subsided – first among legal scholars, political scientists, and political economists, and then among policy analysts, social scientists, and humanities scholars.

Today, this conventional approach remains influential among technologists, China critics, as well as those who celebrate Chinese tech prowess. Despite differences of opinion, these scholars and commentators all tend to see ‘the Chinese Internet’ conceptually as a single system dominated by central actors in Beijing. These actors are assumed to be all-seeing and all-powerful not only within China, a sovereign domain, but also in their effort to project a sovereignty-based model outside of the country – through such conduits as Chinese tech giants (e.g., Alibaba; see Shen and He in this issue), intergovernmental structures (e.g., International Telecommunications Union or ITU), or global standard-setting organizations (e.g., Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF) (see Nanni in this issue). Those taking the conventional approach believe they know how ‘the Chinese Internet’ works and fails, how it is incompatible with global norms and standards, what exogenous factors cause it to change, and how it will either completely break down or, worse, re-make the world internet in its own authoritarian image.

Now, in 2022, we look back with humility and realize the hubris of this incumbent approach. Although internet-based technologies have diffused widely throughout China, and although Chinese tech companies, personnel, and products have become deeply integrated with global markets and institutions, little real transformation has occurred by just about any measure to open up China or ‘the Chinese Internet’. In world affairs, the US–China trade war since 2018, including the decoupling of the tech sectors in both countries, has exposed the dwindling usefulness of the incumbent approach. The crises of COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have further weakened this conventional approach.

In academia, leading technologists such as computer scientists O’Hara and Hall (2021) have also come to see the ‘Beijing Paternal Internet’ as one of the world’s main internet models – or what they call ‘four internets’. As such, they no longer construe China as an abnormal case, waiting passively to be acted upon or attempting the impossible task of nailing Jell-O to the wall. Yet, these technologists continue to rely on the incumbent approach to define the ‘Paternal Internet’ based on the belief that ‘Internet engineering and governance should be subordinate to centrally defined beneficial outcomes’, for which ‘the authority does not need the consent of individuals to act, as long as it acts for their welfare, and not for a self-interested reason’ (O’Hara & Hall, 2021, p. 126). Despite taking a normative approach that is more neutral than earlier versions of the incumbent view, the ‘four internets’ model continues to portray ‘the Chinese Internet’ as a unitary and statist monolith.

The poverty of the monolithic approach

This special issue presents alternative conceptualizations of ‘Chinese internets’ as multilayered and pluralist. This novel approach does not deny the effects of Beijing’s centralizing tendencies in controlling internet users and tech companies. These tendencies have been ironically reinforced by the China-bashing public discourse and tech decoupling policies of both the Trump and Biden administrations. Yet, the articles in this collection recognize and highlight many other important ongoing developments, such as the struggles to define data sovereignty for Chinese tech companies overseas and for their western counterparts operating in China; the politics of localizing digital platform infrastructures at subnational and transnational levels; dynamic public-private relations full of productive and counterproductive tensions; and the continuous role of technical experts and civil society advocacy networks in selected domains such as standard-setting and environmental protection. Unlike the incumbent approach – which tends to treat the developments mentioned above as secondary, if relevant at all – we deem these developments as primary. This special issue therefore aims to shed light on four sets of issues that we recommend readers keep in mind:

1. Who are the key players in ‘Chinese internets’? The authority of China’s central government is important, but the effective extension of such authority to different segments of officialdom, and to various domains of business and society, must rely on other players, who also possess power. Among these players, some do oppose, or are unconstrained by, Beijing’s policies.

2. What role do Chinese actors, such as government agencies, state-owned and private enterprises, and individuals, play? Fragments of ‘Chinese internets’ often traverse established boundaries. How have the structures of and processes in ‘Chinese internets’ spatialized?

3. What is the level of analysis? ‘Chinese internets’ operate at the global, regional, and local levels in addition to the national level. Each level has its own dynamics. Politics at one level may or may not travel easily to dominate other levels – for example, from global to national or from national to local. Such dynamics can also be found at the same level, but across the different political actors.

4. How are geopolitical patterns within China influencing or being influenced by external world or regional events? In recent years, China’s involvement in internet governance is frequently explored through the multilateralism vs. multistakeholderism debate (Raymond & DeNardis, 2015, p. 573). Is this debate premised on a false dichotomy?

When considering the issues above, readers should remember that Chinese authorities have multiple goals, be they political, economic, or socio-cultural. So do various nonstate actors who interact with these authorities and with each other to shape ‘Chinese internets’. To outside observers, these actors may appear to toe Beijing’s official line of sovereignty-based multilateralism. But in reality, they, as several articles in this special issue have shown, may practice informal multistakeholderism and promote the interests of different parties, including private companies and civil society.

The making of new geopolitics

Conventional analysis deems the central government as the dominant force that shapes ‘the Chinese Internet’ while attempting to influence global internet governance. Contributors to this special issue, however, take a more fine-grained approach to examine players at micro, meso, and macro levels. In ‘Data farms in China’, Darcy Pan shows that local state actors, like the central government, matter in cloud infrastructure build-up and that such build-up may not always have uplifting socioeconomic consequences. The focus of her article is Guizhou, the most impoverished province in southwest China. At the global level, Riccardo Nanni, in ‘Digital sovereignty and Internet standards’, finds that the participation of Chinese IETF members has shown more signs of collaboration in standard-making, rather than simply following Beijing’s party line.

Four articles in this collection focus on corporate players and their entanglement with governments not only in China but also in the United States, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. In ‘The geopolitics of infrastructuralized platforms’, Hong Shen and Yuejia He focus on Alibaba, China’s equivalent to Amazon and eBay, and the successes and failures of its global journey. Wenhong Chen, in ‘Zoom in and zoom out the glocalized network’, presents a study of Zoom, a transnational firm with Chinese ties which has gained increased popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study shows how this firm had to reconfigure its business and adjust its image to alleviate national security concerns – in this case, from Washington, not Beijing. In ‘The challenge of the cloud’, Min Tang examines how transnational companies such as Apple and IBM operate in China and interact with Chinese authorities. In ‘Embedded symbiosis: An institutional approach to government-business relationship in the Chinese internet industry’, Shangwei Wu, Weishan Miao, and Jiacheng Liu provide a detailed portrait of the strategies used by Danlan to deal with Chinese authorities. Danlan runs the popular gay dating app, Blued.

Behind these four articles are four broad categories of corporate players: (a) Chinese tech giants going global, including Alibaba; (b) global apps severing or limiting their ties with China, covering not only Zoom but also TikTok; (c) foreign, particularly American, companies operating in China, such as Apple, IBM, Cisco; and (d) Chinese firms relying on the domestic Chinese market, including Danlan. All of these corporate players have their own patterns in dealing (or not dealing) with the central government and in influencing and/or being influenced by the Chinese authorities.

Besides private companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) remain important with their translocal networking and data activism inside China. This is the argument Vincent Guangsheng Huang and Yuexin Lyu advance in their contribution, ‘The interactive field of open government data’. Their study provides an in-depth analysis of an environmental NGO, the grassroots players and their boundary-spanning strategies, and the mutual shaping dynamics between the nonstate and local state actors. Collaboration also occurs between NGOs and private companies, which may involve Chinese government agencies at various levels. Interestingly, these agencies do not always take the lead vis-à-vis corporate players. There is also a great deal of negotiations and unfulfilled promises (see Wu, Miao, and Liu in this issue).

What Huang and Lyu refer to as ‘interactive strategies’ can also be seen, at least partially, in the cases of Alibaba, Danlan, cloud businesses in Guizhou, Apple in China, Zoom in the United States, and IETF deliberations at the global level. The use of these interactive strategies brings us to a counterintuitive observation about the continuing importance of collaboration in this age of tech decoupling between the United States and China, which has come to be called ‘a new cold war’ as a hallmark of contemporary internet geopolitics (Yao, 2021). Despite worries about and evidence for the global internet being Balkanized into a ‘splinternet’, articles in this special issue demonstrate that players at various levels still work with each other through negotiations and shared solutions to practical problems.

Standard-setting is a good example. China’s alleged influence on the ITU is much discussed, but it is often overlooked that this UN agency is just one of several transnational bodies in which internet standards are developed. The IETF, as Nanni’s article shows, is equally, if not more, important for internet governance. There, the Chinese players do not dominate. Instead, they participate: the more involved they are in the discussions, the more they are drawn to shared decisions.

Another notable case is Danlan, an unlikely candidate to survive Beijing’s repeated tightening of rules on social behaviors and sexual mores. Yet, its gay dating app has grown into the world’s largest. ‘Embedded symbiosis’ provides what Wu, Miao, and Liu consider the path to success. This coined term denotes the collaboration between the government and the private company through a working relationship that was initially built on their mutual need and interpersonal relations, and that later became institutionalized and thus embedded. What is typically considered weaker in the state-business dyad, they argue, can in fact be the stronger – or at least an equal – partner with considerable negotiating power. This finding often goes unnoticed in both internal and external analyses of how the government works with commercial tech players.

For companies such as Alibaba and Danlan (see Shen and He; Wu, Miao, and Liu in this issue), the dilemma is to leverage their resources and heft within China and globalize, while at the same time maintaining their distance from the Chinese government, negotiating internal requirements and business legacies (in a very competitive and nearly all-Chinese environment), and adapting to local or international environments. At a more conceptual level, a similar dilemma confronts Zoom, which operates globally but interacts with US authorities (see Chen in this issue).

The 2021 crackdown on tech companies saw the Chinese government fine Alibaba $2.8 billion (Zhong, 2021) and suspend or severely curtail the activities of other firms. This barrage of regulatory actions suggests that the optimism expressed by Wu, Miao, and Liu may be premature. The overarching theme of collaboration across sectoral and geopolitical lines might also be the leftover from a more open and cooperative era. Nevertheless, digital economies already account for a substantial portion of China’s GDP. They are also key drivers to achieve Beijing’s vision of global connectivity and using data as ‘the oil of the twenty-first century’, as described in the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan. As the fall of the Soviet Union has taught us, business does not run on centralized fiat. A certain amount of negotiation, maneuvering, and gray space is necessary. It is a fine line that companies with international ambition must tread, between keeping customers happy to hand over their data and money with a certain expectation of privacy and trustworthiness on the one hand, and abiding by national laws and local rules on the other.

Towards methodological pluralism

This special issue underscores the benefits of methodological diversity. Such diversity is particularly important in a post-pandemic era when there is a growing illusion that all research can be moved online. When we issued the call for papers in summer 2021, we hoped to gather research that would give readers a real and dynamic ‘sense of place’ (Massey, 1991) for the different parts that make up the Chinese tech world. This is what the contributors delivered. It is not a surprise that ethnographies and interviews feature prominently, as they can show us the emic (or insider’s) perspectives that are often lacking in stories of Chinese tech while also having the ability to interweave these perspectives with the more common etic (or outsider’s) approaches (Boellstorff et al., 2012).

In this special issue, Pan deploys ethnographic methods to explore the contradictions around data centers in Guizhou. Wu, Miao, and Liu conduct participant observation to understand the mechanisms that make the Blued app work. Huang and Lyu use secondary data, document analysis, and in-depth interviews. Through network analysis and expert interviews, Nanni shows how findings from each of the two methods he employs raise questions and answers that can then be addressed by the other method. Chen, Shen and He, and Tang all navigate a wealth of primary and secondary documents and media resources in both Chinese and English. They show a prism of perspectives that enriches our understanding of both Chinese tech companies and their processes.

Another aspect that most articles touch upon is how historical legacies and constant changes in policies, relations, and economics influence the actual day-to-day interactions between the Chinese government and Chinese companies. These evolving and shifting dynamics go against the typical view that the central government pursues a cohesive and relatively unchanging digital strategy that has kept the same goals since the building of the Great Firewall. As such, this collection contributes to a more realistic understanding of the layered complexity within which policy and institutional relations develop.

Conclusion

When President Clinton analogized China’s crackdown on the Internet to nailing Jell-O to the wall two decades ago, he rightly identified the immense challenge of controlling a technology as elusive and fast-evolving as the Internet. However, he did not present a complete picture. As the past two decades have shown, the Jell-O analogy can be equally invoked to warn about the tremendous difficulty in using the Internet to pry open China.

If ‘the Chinese Internet’ – or, in our view, ‘Chinese internets’ – is indeed the metaphorical Jell-O, it is time we move past binary debates and simplistic predictions to develop a deeper understanding of this powdered gelatin. Jell-O is not a universal name, but the American name for jelly. Throughout the world, including in China, jelly comes in different colors, flavors, shapes, and packaging. It can be consumed as congealed salads, liquor-filled shots, or fruit desserts such as Hong Kong-style zaapgwozelei. Like the Internet, our experience with Jell-O has changed over time, across cultures, and in response to new technologies.

The articles in this special issue have shown ‘Chinese tech’ is not a unitary and statist monolith. Instead, it is a system of internets that is diverse, multilayered, border-transcending, and at times messy. If we are to fully appreciate developments in ‘Chinese internets’ – in the plural – we will have to study these developments up close using different vantage points and varied theoretical lenses and methodological tools. A deeper and more nuanced understanding of the geopolitics of ‘Chinese internets’ will strengthen internet research in not only China but also other parts of the world. Such an understanding will be particularly useful in societies encountering strong authoritarian legacies or emerging illiberal tendencies.

We hope you will enjoy this special issue.

Acknowledgements

This special issue benefits from the insights provided by the global network of scholars who have participated in the annual Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC) and whose support and contributions have helped overcome the increasing challenges of geopolitics. The editors and contributors would like to express their sincere thanks to the reviewers, whose topical expertise and constructive feedback were critical to improving the articles and the overall structure of this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Linchuan Qiu

Jack Linchuan Qiu is Professor in the Department of Communications and New Media, the National University of Singapore. He has published more than 120 research articles and chapters and 10 books in English and Chinese including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (2016, University of Illinois Press). He is a co-founder of CIRC and an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association [email: [email protected]].

Peter K. Yu

Peter K. Yu is Regents Professor of Law and Communication and Director of the Center for Law and Intellectual Property at Texas A&M University. He is a co-founder of CIRC and Vice-President and Co-Director of Studies of the American Branch of the International Law Association. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he previously held the Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law at Drake University Law School and was Wenlan Scholar Chair Professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China [email: [email protected]].

Elisa Oreglia

Elisa Oreglia is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is the principal investigator for the European Research Council-funded project DIGISILK, which looks at Chinese digital investments and technological influence in neighboring countries [email: [email protected]].