From maritime territorial disputes, to issues around “cyber sovereignty” and the internet, to the burgeoning economic and political domains of outer space, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders want to establish greater Chinese influence over how industrial standards and political norms are established and interpreted.

China’s National Security in the Information Age

The CCP’s leadership has enunciated China’s national security goals in its “core interests.”

First, the CCP seeks to maintain the current political system in China in order to preserve their unchallenged rule.

Next, China seeks to protect its national sovereignty and guarantee its territorial integrity. This is part of why Taiwan has long been such a major flashpoint — but China’s understanding of territorial integrity and national sovereignty also applies to areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang.

And finally, China’s national security is linked to its ability to maintain the conditions for sustaining economic growth. At the end of the day, even in an autocratic system, legitimacy matters. For the CCP, sustaining economic growth benefits the broader Chinese population, which is an essential part of answering the question: “Why are you in charge?”

In the Information Age, information and communications technology (ICT) is fundamental to these goals. But as China pursues national economic development and national security preservation, it sees itself as still operating at something of a disadvantage. China is technologically capable and integrated into global supply chains. But it is not dominant across the board. It uses other people’s software, such as operating systems, and requires other people’s certifications — realities that are not conducive to the kind of control the CCP would like to exert over China’s continued development.

Additionally, from the CCP’s perspective, ICT is also essential because it fits the dual-use paradigm. It has clear economic effects, not only in terms of direct job creation but also in amplifying economic efficiency and the capacity of other industries, while at the same time possessing obvious military roles.

Rewriting Industrial Standards

It is this dual-use nature, especially ICT’s economic effect, that is driving China’s efforts to influence not only political norms but industrial standards. Ideally, from Beijing’s perspective, Chinese influence over norms and standards will mean that China will have an outsize influence on the international common spaces of the maritime, information/cyber and outer space domains. This is essentially a 21st century version of mercantilism, where China is part of everyone else’s supply chain while restricting others’ access to its own markets.

In looking at Chinese efforts in these domains, it’s important to recognize that the establishment of industrial standards often does not involve governments at all. Instead, many industrial standards are set by industry — in other words, by corporate stakeholders. For example, the standards for the modern shipping container — which revolutionized the movement of goods on land and sea — were not established by governments, but by shipping companies, including trucking companies, merchant shipping and railways.

Maritime Norms and Exclusive Economic Zones

In the maritime domain, China is trying to rewrite how nations think about international waterways, and the rules governing them. China has an idiosyncratic approach to international maritime law. In the South China Sea, where we see the Chinese efforts more clearly, China is trying to shift the understanding of how the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) work.

Under traditional maritime law, EEZs extend 200 nautical miles from a state’s shore or baseline. Within those waters, the owning state gets the right of first refusal on the resources contained therein, while ships of all nations can freely transit through them. In this version of maritime law, EEZs might be thought of as international waterways, just with the owning nation getting first crack at the fisheries, hydrocarbons and seabed resources within the EEZ.

Meanwhile, the Chinese approach to EEZs is more along the lines of territorial waters with specific, restricted ability to transit through them. Thus, in the Chinese view, only merchant ships and aircraft should be able to transit through EEZs — and even they should notify the owning state. Foreign warships and aircraft should request permission to enter or transit through the EEZ, but without that permission, are effectively banned, much like they are from territorial waters.

This is how the Chinese are treating the South China Sea within the 9-dash line — a line used by the CCP to demarcate its claim to almost all of the South China Sea. The line extends far beyond China’s own EEZ. China has even gone so far as to construct islands atop various underwater reefs and islets and then attempt to get others to recognize that these artificial islands generate their own territorial waters and EEZs, effectively extending China’s claims almost to the very shores of the Philippines. China has also ignored the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which was asked by the Philippines to help arbitrate the South China Sea dispute under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty that both states have signed and ratified.

China’s Cyber ‘Firewall’

In the cyber domain, we see China trying to create essentially a Chinese “intranet.” China has never been comfortable with the idea of the “free and open internet,” preferring a Chinese information space with Chinese companies providing its citizens with all communications and internet services. China established the “Great Firewall of China” in order to monitor the online behavior of its citizens, restricting their ability to access outside information that might contradict the CCP’s narrative.

In recent years, these efforts to limit foreign access to Chinese citizens have expanded to also restrict access to their data. The CCP has mandated a series of laws that restrict information flow within China:

• The National Security Law defines what is in national security interest (military, economics, finance, information, culture, etc.)
• The Cybersecurity Law establishes Chinese rules for its portion of the internet in what China calls “cyber sovereignty” and demands data localization. The law also mandates that foreign software and hardware must be certified, which requires access to source code.
• The National Intelligence Law requires all businesses (including foreign ones) to hand over data to the Ministry of State Security upon request. This also means Chinese companies operating abroad may be required to hand over foreign data.
• The Data Security Law expands Chinese legal purview from “important data” relating to “critical information infrastructure” to all companies, if “important data” is deemed of national security interest.
• The Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) prohibits handing over Chinese citizens’ data to foreign law enforcement entities without Beijing signing off. Foreign companies handling Chinese citizens’ data are therefore subject to the PIPL.

These laws have been used to limit the ability of foreign companies operating in China to obtain information necessary to their proper function, such as due diligence research on Chinese companies. Chinese investors in the West, meanwhile, face no comparable set of hurdles on business information.

Extending Chinese Influence into Outer Space

Outer space is especially important to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), as Chinese military analysts have concluded that future conflicts will almost certainly extend into this realm. The West relies heavily on space-based information systems for reconnaissance, communications, weather, navigation and timing information. A successful effort to degrade Western space systems will badly hinder their military operations in the western Pacific.

Chinese authors have discussed the growing importance of cis-lunar space, the area of space between the Earth and the Moon. Chinese space activities include a variety of robotic landers on the Moon, and plans to land Chinese astronauts on the Moon by 2030. These efforts, in turn, will help support Chinese efforts to influence space traffic management in that same volume of space, as China is likely to sponsor a significant amount of space traffic.

A China that is responsible for the bulk of traffic to the Moon would be one that would be well positioned to set the terms and standards for space traffic operations. Just as the language of international air travel is English, even between countries that do not speak English, so too is the language of space travel to the Moon likely to be a competition between English and Chinese.

Accessing Global Markets

What links China’s activities in these various domains is an effort to ensure that China can access global markets and information, while denying outsiders access to China’s own markets and information. The point of “Made in China 2025” is to insulate the Chinese economy from foreign suppliers in 10 key technology areas. This includes both high-technology fields such as microchips and advanced medical equipment, as well as more traditional technologies in key areas such as railways, ocean shipping and agricultural machinery.

While, as noted previously, China is essentially pursuing a 21st century version of mercantilism through its “dual circulation” strategy, the unique element here is that China is also pursuing information mercantilism, where it can access others’ information — from databases to social media information to intellectual property — while again denying others access to its own.

In this regard, China poses a different challenge than the Soviet Union once did. It has the world’s second largest economy and is integrated into global supply chains. It can pursue a whole-of-society approach to its policies in ways that no other competitor has been able to before.