Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty

what constitutes the digital domain of China can be very expansive and can include the data of Chinese Nationals abroad of companies that operate in China of any Chinese company anywhere that they're potentially operating and these aren't necessarily clearly defined domains but the way that the laws are written at this point means that all of these things could be included thank you my name is Margo landman Deputy vice president for programs at the National Committee on U.S China relations and I'm very pleased to introduce our guests for today's interview and coccus is the CK Yen professor at the Miller Center and an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia her research examines sino-us media and Technology relations she has received fellowships from the Library of Congress the National Endowment for the Humanities the Mellon Foundation the social science research Council and the Woodrow Wilson Center for international Scholars among others moderating the interview will be Sylvia Lindner she is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of information and director of the center for ethics society and computing she draws for more than 10 years of multi-site ethnographic research examining China's shifting position in the global political economy of Technology production Economic Development and Science and Technology policy she is just back from a year in Shanghai we are proud to note that both Anne and Sylvia are also members of the national committee's public intellectuals program with that Sylvia the floor is yours thank you so much Margo for this lovely introduction and it is such a pleasure to be in dialogue with Professor carcass today about this really important and timely bug trafficking data I think we all are familiar now with debates around the rising uh politics and geopolitics of artificial intelligence and data science but very few people actually really know what this means with regards to policy making and how much of what is going on with regards to data science in the United States hinges on decision-making processes in China and vice versa Professor Cocker's book is examining exactly this tension and disentanglement between legal structures and technological structures in these two Nations so I want to begin this interview today with um one of uh the most provocative Arguments for me personally that this book is making uh one of the uh early arguments and really sort of the framing for for the book is your argument that China's conceptions of digital sovereignty um can really only be understood if we examine closely historically and contemporary processes of American market-driven innovation with a specific focus on this shift towards a data-driven market economy so I wanted to ask you Professor Cocker to just unpack this particular process of entanglement that this book at its core really examines for us a little bit more what is at stake in this transnational configuration of data markets how did it happen that China the United States became become entangled in a global data market um that really um extends from earlier technologically driven governance processes but also departs from them in important ways so what is at the root of this how did this happen that these two Nations became entangled when it comes to contemporary processes of data governance so thank you so much Professor lintner for um for being here and for asking that fantastic question I'm really excited to be able to talk about this lineage um as well as the kind of contemporary moment we're in and what that means so one of the things that we observed through the through the opening up of China's economy was this effort by the US in the process of the multi-stakeholder governance process which means that the United States advocated for the participation of Corporations and civil society and um and governments in making technical standards a great example of this is in the 1980s the evolution of things like technical standards in the aviation industry where the U.S and U.S based companies had a large at a large stake and a large say in the development of technical standards which then led to the shape which then shaped the aviation industry from from that period And before as well as as well as moving moving onward now what we see is that the Chinese government became very aware of these processes of the way in which the multi-stakeholder process where U.S companies would have an outsized role in shaping standards in conjunction with the US government would play in shaping digital or shaping technical Norms in a wide variety of Industries so this became really interesting with the evolution of digital of digital platforms and of digital markets where it became very clear that U.S firms like Google like Amazon like Facebook were establishing patterns and practices through multi-stakeholder engagement with with organizations that Drew in the perspectives of industry of us of the US government of civil society that were not necessarily in the interest of company of countries like China that were much more focused on the role that the state was going to play in establishing these these standards and norms so in 2020 10 in 2010 with the introduction of the white paper on the internet in China we see this establishment of an idea of Internet sovereignty where China asserts an idea that the internet is a sovereign site and from there we see the growth and development of a wide range of different multilateral efforts by the Chinese government to assert technical standards now the difference between multilateral and multi-stakeholder is key here because in the context of a multilateral agreement we see the state take much more take a much more important role and much less of a role by civil society and corporations now in many ways the United States had stacked the deck in its favor in order to establish technical standards in a wide range range of Industries using the multi-stakeholder model because they were able to draw on the power and interests of U.S companies U.S Civil Society organizations and the U.S US government in order to push forth technical standards now we see a very different context when we look at just the US government and just the China and the Chinese government in a multilateral context like the United Nations for example where independent where individual countries can have outsized influence where it's possible for example for the Chinese government to sway to sway smaller Nations or nations with similar governing systems to vote on a multilateral vote on multilateral standards now what we see is that as this Evolution happened from earlier Tech Industries through to digital the digital landscape the Chinese government has become more and more aware of the importance that this plays in not just establishing power domestically not just establishing economic power globally but establishing political hegemony globally and I think what is so remarkable about your book is really that um people haven't thought about per se data-driven governance as a side of geopolitical tensions we often think of um data structures and artificial intelligence with regards to perhaps National borders and but even that has been a very recent debate like just 10 years ago very few people had on their minds things like an AI arms race for instance which is how the US and China often characterize these days through sort of a language of like a cold war um kind of mentality and so we also I think the book captures really well um what is at stake in this current moment as these two nations are competing over questions of National Security but also Global reach as you were just unpacking um so my second question is is sort of very specific about the Chinese state and its conceptions about data so there's the determined that's commonly used in Chinese is often translated I think into English as a digitization but the term really connotes um numerical processes right and then actually speaks to the sort of focus on data-driven decision-making processes that have drastically shifted over the last four years how the Chinese State approaches various Industries and thinks about transforming um um and you describe it in the book anything from health over citizen engagement uh to Agriculture and everything in between so I'm curious to hear from you a little bit to explain to our listeners um how does this conception of data-driven governance or digitization or suitable in the sort of Chinese State contexts how does that differ from how um American Tech corporations and perhaps even the American government government has conceptualized data what is the key difference there well I think that there are many key differences uh and that's one of the reasons why writing this book was so exciting to really see how differently country countries conceive of these issues and as we're looking at you know an AI arms race or even just intense in competition economically in the digital realm how these different conceptions of what the digital is relative to how a society functions how companies operate how sovereignty works are so different in the United States and China and I think this is one of the amazing things that the National Committee does is to bring these ideas into dialogue so I'm really grateful to have the chance to talk about this now I think that we need to think about the relationship between and uh so the digitization uh is one thing so that's turning a society into a digital into a site of the usage of digital types of digital platforms um and then is this idea of a sort of digital sovereignty it's also um they're also the idea of there's also the idea of um so like a network sovereignty uh and these are key distinction these are key distinct terms the reason why they're different is because um could just refer to the use of digital tools to make a society function more efficiently so for example in the course of researching the book I visited the pudong district um Administrative Building that was designed to be a municipally LED smart City initiative to improve a wide range of different Municipal services and that's really handy I mean I as in the United States I would love it if there were if there were more enhanced you know traffic management mechanisms that were in place to help me not get stuck in traffic or flood Management in in places like Florida that was that was based on you know effective predictive mechanisms so that's that's one municipal or Civic management strategy uh and the part that becomes complicated is when those Civic or municipal or even National management strategies become part of this idea of what constitutes a sovereign state and then what becomes even more complicated on top of that is the very broad way in which China conceptualizes what the digital domain of the Chinese state is and what we've seen through China's data security law through the Hong Kong National Security Law um through the 2017 cyber security law is that this idea of what constitutes the digital domain of China can be very expansive and can include the data of Chinese Nationals abroad of companies that operate in China of any Chinese company anywhere that they're potentially operating and these aren't necessarily clearly defined domains uh but the way that the laws are written at this point means that all of these things could be included the external operations of companies that are operating in China or in Hong Kong or in the PRC or in Hong Kong um can also be included so these are very complicated Dynamics now in contrast in the United States we have none of this uh there is an effort right now in Congress to pass a very minimal data privacy regulation that called the American data privacy and protection act which looks very much like it will not pass prior to the midterm elections um and then we will likely have a different Congress and it more than likely will not pass then so in the United States we don't really have a national conception of what data privacy is of what a digital domain constitutes and a lot of this has been the result of a very useful agreement that has been made tacitly between Washington and in Silicon Valley that with a lot of autonomy Silicon Valley firms are able to grow be minimally taxed minimally regulated but they expand U.S national power in these really substantial ways but at this point these are now global corporations that have you know are in some cases have a you know domicile in Ireland or in the Cayman Islands and their interests are not really aligned with with US Government interests so instead there are these massive corporations that are located in the United States that the U.S government through you know very mild oversight has allowed to grow and now they're very difficult to to regulate even though there's a lot of Will and a lot of interest through organizations like the Federal Trade Commission or through the you know Biden Administration has been issuing executive orders these are these are much smaller in scale than China's entire conception of uh you know digital or or um or network sovereignty and and I think you have actually a really wonderful term to describe some of these Dynamics in the book you're drawing on the black studies scholar Simon Brown to develop this notion of a National Data Corpus to speak to China's uh comprehensive approach to actually managing technological processes and also managing the relationship between the state and and data Gathering and data analytics and data companies and I think for me the the concept is really powerful because you use it to demonstrate also how data-driven governance renders not only the individual body which was sort of a focus that's the Simon Brown had not only rendering the individual body but rendering the whole population biometric so it's a really provocative important concept I think and I wanted to ask a little bit more what does it entail to make the nation its people and its resources legible through the data I mean this is this is sort of what the concept is getting at right so could you unpack a little bit more was what does that entail how is that done um how exactly does it work and what are the consequences of that well I'm so glad that you brought this up the thinking through the idea of the Data Corpus was was really um was something that really draw drew the book together as I was trying to think about the differences between China and the United States and how differently the Chinese government conceives of the way that citizens interact with their data and the way that the government interacts with citizen data and so I use the term Data Corpus to to draw on a lot of different ideas so there's the so there's Simone Brown's conception of the the individual body um the idea of a corpus also draws from the idea of a corporation so a lot of this data is corporatized or mod or modulated or gathered through engagements with corporations we also have the idea that a corpus is used a Data Corpus is used to train AI models so in addition to the body we also have this training mechanism that that the bodies the collective bodies of the Chinese people are then being used to develop through a wide range of different economic tools of Civic management School tools potentially even political or or tools related to National Security now when this becomes really interesting is during a time like covid uh which you had much more experience with the dynamic zero covet experience than I did having just come back from China where when I when I first started writing the book covered was not around yet I was not part of our lives and as this as this evolved the idea of the Data Corpus became even more significant and even more upfront about as part of the Chinese experience through things like like Health codes and health apps that shape how people can move that even more intensively monitor their Biometrics their ability to participate in society whether or not they'll be placed into quarantine and basically how their lives function so when I began writing the book I couldn't even conceive of the degree to which a lot of these a lot of these plans would have been been put into place and indeed when I was doing field race research in China prior to covid starting um it became clear that while this was an intention of the Chinese government there were a lot of technical challenges to implementing that type of biosurveillance and that that type of widespread surveillance and in many ways something like Dynamic zero covid and the and the evolution of Health codes has really expedited the development of this National Data Corpus literally through the monitoring of people's bodies for disease I'm really glad you went there because my next question would have been to ask you about uh what role covert played in the adoption of these data-driven governance processes and is it an acceleration which you just mentioned right it accelerated some of these these processes and legitimize them in new ways and and also really I think allowed for kind of experimentation my experience in Shanghai during the the early lockdown was really that these Technologies were constantly shifting and being experimented with and they will they're probably going to stay beyond the dynamic serial covert strategies and will will shape City governance processes for a long time to come which maybe brings me then to my next question so it was it was very um to hear from you um over the last several years there have been ongoing debates in this interdisciplinary field of data science critical data studies around the claim that machine learning and data-driven processes can achieve complete accuracy so there's there's a debate over is it even possible to completely map a society or to completely map um citizen processes through data so some people uh and some tech companies would argue yes and that's the very promise of data science and machine learning and there's also a critical contingency of people who say actually it's not fully possible in the first place so um as you know I was traveling in in China in the southwest recently and so I Revisited the Anthropologist James Scott work on the art of not being governed and had to think a lot about the reach of the state and the reach of data governance all the way into the southwest of China and so rereading James Scott work I was pondering this question is is there something that still escapes the reach of the state in this contemporary moment of data trafficking that includes also quite violent processes in terms of like who is managed through processes of data so I kind of wanted to ask this sort of a little bit more speculative open-ended question what is your take on is there is this a is this a fully completed process if is data governance in China something that has reached the last corners of Chinese Society or is there still things or regions or places that escape the reach of the data-driven date yeah I think that this is a this is a great question I think it's a really important thing to to remember as we're talking about these larger policy Frameworks and you know efforts by governments to expand their oversight and their sovereignty and it is it is always unnecessarily incomplete process even even as we see the expansion of rapid rapid oversight through Health codes and through you know the widespread adoption of apps that have a wide range of surveillance tools like WeChat throughout China there are also misfires and things that don't work and cameras that aren't replaced and and places where the service is not is not good yet or might never be good or where there's local government non-compliance or where there just isn't sufficient infrastructure or infrastructural need or interest to to build those systems I think that we are seeing there are certain places that are highly surveilled so places like like xinjiang or other minority regions where there's concern about political dissent there are also places where there's a high level of Economic Development and Technical development um like Shenzhen or Shanghai places like Beijing which have both a high level of political sensitivity and a high level of Economic Development have even more intensive surveillance systems in place but then there are places in between that might you know be rural but not necessarily contentious uh and places where there isn't a necessarily a significant focus on the development of specific agricultural resources or different different infrastructural tools that might get overlooked and I think that that's something that we need to acknowledge and accept throughout all these processes anywhere that we go actually there are diff we experience different levels of surveillance um through our Technical Systems and then I think not just geographically but also generationally people who are older use tools technical tools differently than people who are younger people who are more technically Savvy use tools more different I use tools differently people in different Industries so I think that we can't necessarily say that there's a blanket data oversight system but I think that we can through Reading Chinese government policy documents see that there's a a very clear intent toward building a digitized society that can be monitored domestically and also extraterritorially yeah indeed and and so I encourage you to talk with you a little bit about have you um sort of seen in throughout the research for this book um different forms of pushback by by entities perhaps both state driven or citizen driven um that my challenge the state's reach so one of the things I was concretely thinking about and experiencing in China was actually doing the Shanghai lockdown right where people increasingly expressed the satisfaction with China series Covert policies um and also with actually the data-driven approach to serial code people made fun of it and and sort of challenged the government have you come across um pushback like that throughout the research of Buddhist book no and I think that that's a really that's a really important point so in addition to commercial or government infrastructure that may not have been fully built out there's also the fact that this rapid uptake of digital oversight and surveillance is something that is also deeply alienating to large numbers of people who while maybe in the beginning benefited very clearly from greater mobility and you know this was I remember we talked about you going to Shanghai when you first got there and feeling this kind of increased freedom of being able to travel and knowing if people were infected which we did not know in the U.S and we just get to experience the freedom of wondering if we're going to get covered from anyone that we talked to at any given moment um good news good news bad news on that but uh but I think that it becomes really interesting when these Technologies are taken up so quickly that there is this concern about them especially when they're associated with things like massive lockdowns or the limitation of movement that to people who are accustomed to otherwise having very relatively free movement around in their lives a lot of autonomy people who are benefiting from The Spoils of China's rapid economic growth seeing their their lives limited so I think it makes sense that there that there would be pushback and this is why it's really interesting to look at the potential future of the dynamic zero coven policy because even among Chinese government officials that I've spoken with there's some disappointment and frustration with the dynamic zero covered policy because it limits their movement as well uh and so there are limits to how much people will take I think that we've even seen from government officials a certain amount of frustration with respect to how long this Dynamic zero code policy has gone on and how limiting it is for their travel as well and so we'll see how things how things proceed over the coming months and thank you so much this has been such a wonderful conversation I have so many more questions but I will reserve them for my students in class because I will be assigning this book to both my PhD level classes and the undergrad level and I can't wait to have conversations with them about this very timely and and you know path breaking books so thank you so much for writing it for versing it out there in the world and yeah I look forward to many more conversations about it well I'm I'm so grateful and I have to say that um that as the as the author of I'm very honored to have the author of prototype Nation be the Godmother of trafficking data so um so you've helped me so much in I'm in building this book and working through all this all these ideas and I feel really honored to have the chance to talk with you and and very honored that you'll be willing to share with your students so well it's been an honor to follow the journey thank you both so much for sharing your thoughts with us today I look forward to the continuing conversation about how all of this is going to affect U.S China relations because neither country is operating in a vacuum and I think that this has profound implications for both countries and for the rest of the world with that I'd also like to thank my colleagues at the National Committee who've been working behind the scenes to make today's interview possible we hope that those who've tuned in today found the interview both interesting and informative and that you will join us again for future National Committee programming thank you all again goodbye

Channel: National Committee on U.S.-China Relations

Views: 10,076

Keywords: China, US-China, US-China Relations, China Data, Technology

Id: vODY08bPlCY

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022