China aims to form international standard organizations for cyber dominance

Beijing's aspiration to become a great cyber power is reflected in its policies directed at competing with the West in next-generation technology and as part of this effort, it is trying to strengthen its influence in international standards development groups.

China has lobbied hard for key positions in foreign SDO bureaucracies in an attempt to persuade the international standards process aimed to eventually regulate the use of key strategic technology, according to Tibet Press.

Beijing has considerably improved its ability to secure approval for its initiatives and to reject those that it does not support using a variety of strategies.

The purposeful strategy is to strengthen China's influence within international standards development groups.

Notably, the Belt and Road Initiative has garnered considerable attention, along with the Asia Society Policy Institute's (ASPI) "Navigating the Belt and Road" series, the Digital Silk Road (DSR), which supports the export of Chinese telecommunication technologies as well as other high-tech systems, had gotten far less.

The process of standard-setting, according to China's authorities, is a sign of a leading technical power.

As per Tibet Press, Beijing's quest for the dominance of the international standards arena is centred on increasing economic and geopolitical power, as well as resolving vulnerabilities and lapses in the existing governance structure by adjusting the standard-setting process in the state's favour.

Reports say that the Chinese government came up with the "China Standards 2035" project as a result of this since they understood the importance of technical and technological standards in terms of both politics and economics.

The notion is that developing nations that have positioned themselves in the technology sector have had to operate under the cover of Western rules and regulations. Controlling significant technologies is a fundamental push for China's participation in the standards process.

In terms of telecommunications, the Chinese have had to pay significant sums of money to get patent licenses for networking technology produced by major hardware manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Cisco. This put China's telecommunications industry at a disadvantage.

However, by licensing patents linked to 5G technology, Huawei has reaped tremendous economic gains for both the private and the government sectors, Tibet Press said.

Media reports said that China has been leveraging its technological prowess and geopolitical heft to shape the global technological environment and standards to serve its commercial and strategic interests, to achieve Xi Jinping's goal of making the nation a "major power with pioneering global influence" by 2049.

China propagates its technological standards in project host states by signing agreements with BRI partner governments, establishing dependencies that bind these countries to Chinese vendors and standards.

Beijing's actions, according to the report, are focused on establishing global standards for next- generation technologies, as well as gaining control over critical technologies such as the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Big Data, 5G, and artificial intelligence, Tibet Press reported.

The report suggested that international organizations must be mindful of these manoeuvres in order to prevent Beijing from acquiring a monopoly over the world's future-shaping technologies by dominating global technological standards, it added.