Geopolitics of Standards Wars: A Perspective of International Political Economy

• In Event: Transnational Private Governance Under Stress: The Case of Standardization

Abstract

A policy document titled “United States Strategic Approach to The People’s Republic of China” was published by the White House in 2020. It clearly shows the US stance on China’s international standardization. That is, the Belt & Road Initiative is a standardization project by which China’s technical standards will be disseminated among the countries along the Belt & Road. And the US will block China’s standardization efforts particularly in emerging technology areas like AI, data, and cloud, to name a few. This position is also emphasized in a paper written by the newly elected president, Biden (Biden, 2020). On the Chinese side, it is expected that a new strategic document named “China Standards 2035” is published soon. It is a sequel to the “Made in China 2025” strategy and its extended version. While “Made in China 2025” pursues the dominance in the production of goods, the “China Standards 2035” aims to control the rules and system of production and transaction (de La Bruyere and Picarsic, 2020). It is a national strategy to set international standards in emerging technologies in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution and digital transformation.

As seen above, standards competition is now upgraded to the geopolitical level beyond the corporate and industrial levels. While the issue of standards/standardization is increasingly mentioned not only in the context of business and economy, but also in that of international politics as seen in the disputes surrounding 5G and Huawei, there is little research from the viewpoint of international political economy. The proposed paper first examines how China’s international standardization has evolved, particularly in the ICT sector, to the extent that we can call it ‘the geopolitics of technical standards’. Then it asks what implications it brings to communities of international standards. In specific, it aims to address challenges for historically dominant standard-setting countries like Japan as well as increasingly active players like Korea. It also touches upon the impacts on the Global South, in particular the ASEAN region. This paper contributes to the literature on the international political economy of technology by focusing on standardization which is a key pillar of technological dominance in the international economy along with patents.

Biden, J. (2020). Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020.

de La Bruyere, E. and Picarsic, N. (2020). China Standards 2035: Beijing’s Platform Geopolitics and “Standardization Work in 2020”. China Standards Series. Horizon Advisory. April 2020.

Author

• Heejin Lee, Yonsei University