The now 27 Chinese technology firms that we cover on our Mapping China’s Technology Giants project (‘our map’) span sectors including biotechnology, surveillance, artificial intelligence (AI), e-commerce, finance, entertainment and telecommunications. For the first time, it described technological innovation as a matter of national security, not just economic development. 8 The 14th Five-Year Plan, unveiled in March 2021, reflected the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) sense of urgency. 7 The US’s ability to cut off China’s technology companies’ access to semiconductors, in particular, is seen by leaders from Xi Jinping down as an unacceptable ‘choke point’ holding back China’s progress. 6 The effects of the actions have been uneven-dealing a major blow to Huawei, for example, while barely touching the major Chinese internet firms’ businesses.įor China’s leadership, the twin crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and the growing China–US strategic and technological competition highlighted the country’s need to achieve its long-held goal of ‘technological self-reliance’. That onslaught has further convinced China’s leadership to redouble its efforts to dominate the commanding heights of technology as a source of strategic and economic power.Īmong the measures meted out by the Trump administration were limits on investment by Chinese technology companies, 1 blocks on the operations of Huawei and other Chinese telecom companies in the US, 2 pressure on other countries to block Huawei’s operations, 3 new export control regulations, 4 tariffs on products benefiting from Beijing’s ‘Made in China 2025’ program 5 and an attempt to ban ByteDance’s TikTok and Tencent’s WeChat apps. Amid the trade war between the US and China, which began in 2018, the Trump administration unleashed a relentless series of actions targeting Chinese companies in an effort to slow their advance. Telecommunications companies such as Huawei and ZTE that are deemed ‘high risk’ by multiple countries are increasingly finding themselves locked out of developed markets. Supply-chain vulnerability has ignited work in Europe, North America and other regions to reduce dependence on China. As the geopolitical rivalry between the US and China has heightened, both sides increasingly see any reliance on the other for strategic commodities, such as rare-earth minerals and semiconductors, as dangerous vulnerabilities. The lessons about national resilience learned from the pandemic are now being applied in many sectors, including the technology sector, where a trend towards decoupling China and the West was already well underway. The environment in which the Chinese tech companies are operating has changed radically, as the pandemic sensitised multiple governments, multilateral groups and companies to their own critical supply-chain vulnerabilities. While most were buoyed by the global Covid-19 pandemic, which stimulated demand for technology services around the world, many were buffeted by an unprecedented onslaught of sanctions from abroad, before being engulfed in a regulatory storm at home. Since the launch of ASPI ICPC’s Mapping China’s Technology Giants project in April 2019, the Chinese technology companies we canvassed have gone through a tumultuous period.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |