China’s Other Great Global Ambition for Tomorrow: Data Control.
Beijing is convinced that whoever controls the data can control the world.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the authoritarian regime of Xi Jinping relays on the various Western information networks the untruths of the Kremlin about Ukraine. Beijing sees a double advantage here: to help Vladimir Putin in his propaganda while the two countries are recalled in February 2022 their limitless partnership, but also to undermine the credibility of Western democracies to better highlight the alleged superiority of the Chinese model.
But in the digital world, the real threat posed by China is much less visible: it lies in the physical infrastructure of the digital world and the virtual platforms that are connected to it, explains Samantha Hoffman, of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
Data storage centers, 5G equipment, cables, connectivity software for everyday objects, sound and image sensors, smart cars or smart cities: developed all over the planet, these infrastructures aim, through the collection of data, at a global control of people and trade, as evidenced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents analyzed by the researcher.
In mid-March 2022, Samantha Hoffman presented a report on China's Digital Ambitions produced by the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), an American think tank. Digital technologies, seen by China as the means to solve all the problems of society and ensure its development, are put at the service of the CPP's expansion and are now exported for this purpose, underlines Ms. Hoffman.
For example, GTCOM (Global Tone Communication Technology), a company controlled by the central propaganda department, exports a translation tool integrated into smart city equipment offerings, Language Box, which is primarily used to collect information. The company claims to collect 2 to 3 Petabytes (2,097,152 Gigabytes to 3,145,728 Gigabytes) of data each year, thus contributing directly to the security of the Chinese state, according to its own words, via relationship mapping, sentiment analysis, or voice recognition.
After land, labor, and capital, “data is the new determining factor of production” in human history, theorized researcher Dai Shuangxing in an article in Qiushi, the central committee newspaper, in May 2020. “Whoever controls the digitized logistics centers can control global cobalt shipments without needing to deploy troops to seize the mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” NBR illustrates.
Key elements of the system are Chinese online platforms, such as Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, DiDi, and TikTok, which have expanded across the board, in information, commercial transactions, mobile applications, and industry. In 2020, TikTok became the most downloaded application in the world with over 1 billion users in 150 countries.
Beijing has undertaken to better control its tech giants by developing their convergence in terms of technology and content. This set of global initiatives provides powerful and complex means. Tencent's investments in mobile payment applications Lydia and the neobank Qonto have allowed it to enter the European market without a license, says Karen Sutter of the U.S. Congress Research Service. She also cites Alibaba, which has become the largest shareholder in India's leading mobile payment company, Paytm, and its equivalent in the Philippines, Mynt.
A new international order fostered by the data control
China believes that by controlling data, it will be able to redraw the international order, according to the. NBR. If the first level of this ambition is access to information, the second is formatting it.
To do this, Beijing is working to design the rules of the digital environment from the top down, by installing international technical standards and exporting China's centralized system of digital governance. The 14th Five-Year Plan 2021-2025 emphasizes the importance of setting these standards, especially in trade.
The Chinese standardization administration has already signed 98 bilateral agreements on digital standards with 55 countries and is investing in all international forums in this field.
Africa, in this context, appears as a land of conquest. Among the 100 smart cities equipped with Chinese equipment, there are 33 in Africa, 26 in Asia and Oceania, and 20 in Europe. Huawei set up the national data collection center in Senegal, as well as the one in Cameroon. By 2021, the company alone had built 70% of the 4G networks on the African continent. Beijing has also targeted Tanzania as a pilot country for digital governance, Nigel Cory, a former Australian foreign ministry official, recalls in the NBR report:
“China's technical assistance has influenced restrictions in Tanzania's cybercrime law, and other laws are inspired by Beijing's control over digital content.”
Of the 600 or so mega data centers around the world, 40% are American, 10% Chinese. To serve its digital ambition, the country wants to invest $1.400 billion in the next five years on infrastructure, including 6G, smart cities, or the Internet of Things applied to industry.
The political and economic project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) includes a digital component, with Internet coverage by the Beidou operator's satellites at the heart of the plan. The stated goal of the new Beidou-3 constellation is to supplant the GPS navigation and positioning system to become number one on the planet. Dominating information to dominate international competition: the war with the American Internet and cloud giants is the key to China's desired supremacy.
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