Promoting “soft connectivity”: China’s standards-setting reforms and international ambitions

Antoine Bondaz

Source Link

Introduction

The words recently pronounced by the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are not meaningless and underline an explicit national strategy aiming to give China a key role in setting international standards by seeking to integrate what is now officially described as “Chinese wisdom in international standards.”

.

Although there is no public address by Xi Jinping on standardisation, certain statements are reported by Tian Shihong (田世宏), Director of the Standardisation Administration of China. In 2016, as the country had just initiated a reform of its standards-setting system, the General Secretary is reported to have called for “promoting patenting of technology, standardisation of patents and industrialisation of standards” and “the internationalisation of Chinese standards”, presenting them as “strategic resources” at the centre of international economic and scientific competition.

Beyond the rhetoric and stated ambitions, some Chinese companies are experiencing real success. Huawei has become the symbol of China’s technological achievements. However, the company is equally the symbol of the nation’s ambitions in terms of setting standards. It is indeed highly active in international organisations, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) study group on fixed and mobile network protocols, with almost a quarter of the members coming from the company.

Huawei also employs some 400 experts dedicated to developing new standards.

As a direct consequence, it is now the number one applicant for standard-essential patents for 5G.

More importantly, Chinese media present Huawei as China’s first company to develop both products, technology, and standards, the three tiers considered essential for any industrial scale-up.

The Shenzhen-based group thus produces smartphones fitted with a chip using proprietary technology which meets the Polar Code standard proposed by Huawei and adopted by the standards organisation 3GPP.

China’s ambitions in setting international standards are covered by a considerable number of articles in the international press – both general and specialised –, particularly on what is too often wrongly presented as the China Standards 2035 strategy (中国标准2035), which is actually only a research programme that will be described later. The country’s growing participation in international standards bodies such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), chaired for the first time by a Chinese national, is also excessively considered as announcing forthcoming Chinese hegemony, or as a symptom of China’s ambition to “re-write international rules” . As Western political leaders try to identify long-term threats, it is important to distinguish China’s statements – and the concerns they are raising abroad – from the real risks.

China still lags behind its foreign competitors in the development of international standards. The country is responsible for only 1.8 % of current international standards, and although this is a significant increase from 0.7 % in the mid-2010s, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan still account for 90-95 % of these standards. The Chinese state media half-heartedly acknowledge that the country “is still in a relatively weak position when it comes to the setting of international standards, although it is a major manufacturing power.”

Now, these technical standards are of vital importance since they make systems interoperable and useable. The economic stakes are therefore evident for companies which, thanks to the patents used by their competitors, receive significant royalties, but also because international standards serve as a reference point for determining technical barriers to trade. Lastly, the ability to define international standards is both a mark and an instrument in the international power competition.

In this context, the present note aims to fill a gap in the English-language literature by drawing primarily on Chinese-language sources, whether official documents or press articles. Analysing these sometimes technical documents is essential, because although many Chinese publications, such as the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) which refers to it 58 times, mention the country’s interest in standards-setting, it is vital to study specific documents. The aim is to avoid as much as possible the confirmation bias produced by repeated cross-quotes among articles in English that do not necessarily present factual information, do not put China’s stated objectives or its participation in international organisations into perspective, and barely mention alternative forms of cooperation, particularly with the developing countries that are members of the Belt and Road Initiative.