Central Asia and Gulf states are key battlegrounds in China’s cyberspace bid
- Beijing sees cyberspace as a strategic battlefield in the evolution of US-China rivalry, with both Central Asia and the Gulf important arenas
- China has for decades tried to establish international digital-governance norms and standards that align with its own values and vision of cyberspace
In Central Asia, China’s near abroad, the Chinese policy banks actively subsidise new technologies from information and communication technologies to AI-controlled facial recognition.
While full digital decoupling is not on the horizon, the increasing influence of Chinese standards and technologies is a cornerstone of Beijing’s cyber sovereignty strategy, in place of the Western open-internet model.
China’s hi-tech offer with no strings attached seems too good to be true, however. Beijing is not shy to state that Chinese cyberspace is an integral part of China’s national territory – a far-reaching concept – which triggers several laws related, but not exclusive, to the digital domain but also to national security.
These laws govern most data protection and set the rules for data management and flow across China’s borders. Also, PIPL and DSL include long-arm jurisdiction that applies to organisations’ data-processing activities and personal-information flow outside China, if such events affect Chinese national security.
In this respect, the impact of Chinese-style cyber sovereignty from Central Asia to the Gulf is based on two overlapping tactics. The first relates to the digital silk road’s infrastructural expansion from fibre optical cables to data centres and smart cities.
In this respect, China’s concept of cyber sovereignty is an economic and security pillar of Beijing’s strategic competition with the US. However, while China benefits from masses of data produced at home, currently used to fine-tune algorithms and specific artificial intelligence, the battle for digital supremacy continues.
The increasing influence of Beijing’s hi-tech industries and their expansion from Central Asia and the Gulf states is a significant victory for China, but it is not the end of the story.
Beijing’s ambitions for digital ascendancy are marred by intrinsic weakness derived from the Communist Party’s monolithic, top-down strategic planning and implementation approach. Namely, Beijing’s overreliance on big data tends to miss the human variable in the equation.
Especially in a state-enterprise culture rooted in a risk-averse mentality that hampers technological innovation and, most importantly, the needed flexibility in a fast-changing environment. Beijing addressed the problem for many years, establishing an international network to identify and recruit scientists worldwide.
It’s unclear whether renewed US efforts to curb Beijing’s appetite for foreign talent will hamper China’s quest for technological supremacy. Dealing with Beijing’s efforts to remake cyberspace in its image is like trying to pick up a drop of mercury with a fork. Stab it all you want, but when you try to pick it up, the drop just slips away.
Alessandro Arduino is an affiliate lecturer at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London, specialising in the convergence of technology innovation and national security.