SSU Forum “Approaches to U.S.-China Technology Competition: Perspectives from Media Studies and Sociology”

On March 15, 2022, the Institute for Future Initiatives’s Security Studies Unit at the University of Tokyo hosted a public webinar titled, “Approaches to U.S.-China Technology Competition: Perspectives from Media Studies and Sociology.” Professor Kiichi Fujiwara, chair of the Security Studies Unit, moderated the discussion.

Dr. Aynne Kokas of the University of Virginia was the first to present and described how fragmented data policies in the United States have helped enable China’s model of centralized data governance through a phenomenon she calls “data trafficking.” The process of data trafficking begins when consumers willingly give corporations their data which is then stored and perhaps shared or transferred with third parties for financial gain without consumer’s knowledge or consent. She complemented Japan’s security laws for requiring extensive user consent before data is transmitted across borders but reminded the audience that most countries don’t have Japan’s technical acumen and must instead rely on Chinese or U.S. products or services, thereby exposing themselves to the system of data trafficking.

In the United States, data trafficking has been enabled by limited regulatory oversight which has resulted in the effective privatization of data. While there has been a political push from Congress and the Executive Branch against such monopolization, incentives for users to continue sharing data to enjoy better services undermines the political potential for such pushback. The business model of these tech companies, relying on ever-increasing numbers of users. This search for growth by adding new users drives them towards the Chinese market, but the PRC’s claim to cyber sovereignty defines and protects its digital borders by tightly controlling data and tech infrastructure. For U.S. firms, the trade-off of accessing China’s market at the expense of user privacy is one that they have been willing to make.

Dr. Seio Nakajima’s followed, with his remarks providing a sociological framework for understanding the actors relevant to technological competition that moves beyond thinking of international affairs as state-to-state relations in favor of thinking about field-to-field relations. He used the concept of “strategic action fields” which describes how actors coordinate in a common field on the basis of a common understanding of that field, to understand the relationships between “incumbents” and “challengers”: at the state-to-state level, the United States would represent the incumbent and China would represent the challenger. At the “field” level, the incumbent would be represented by established actors (in the case of the auto industry in the case of the major automotive corporations) and challengers would be represented by new entrants (like Tesla or Nio). Because the interests and behavior of these actors do not line up neatly with national boundaries, the ability to articulate goals and means of action becomes important for both individuals and institutions.

The way that fields interact is also important – he used the example of the 2010 boat collision incident near the Senkaku Islands to show how an interstate security crisis impacted the automotive industry due to the stoppage of the export of rare earth minerals that followed the incident. The framing of the reliance on exports from China as a “threat” to Japanese economic security illustrates the collective construction of a threat or opportunity, the Japanese government’s ability to allocate budgetary resources to secure the future supply of rare earth minerals illustrates the organizational resource mobilization (or social appropriation) that followed, and corporate firms developing new sources of rare earth minerals demonstrates innovative action by these actors. Taken as a whole, this illustration demonstrates how state-to-state relations and field-to-field relations interact and influence actors’ behavior across fields and actors.

Extending the illustration’s lessons to current China-U.S. tensions, he argued that it is better not to think of the “Chinese auto industry” in competition with the “U.S. auto industry,” but to think of the auto industry as a whole with new entrants and challengers to see how they interact. Not only does this better contextualize the behavior of actors, but it also helps to reframe how Japan is seen as a “middle power” given its relatively weaker position between two major powers by recognizing the strength of its incumbent actors (like its auto industry) relative to similar entrants and challengers in China and the United States.

Dr. David Leheny of Waseda University provided remarks on the two presentations, pointing out that the deregulated U.S. model matches up poorly against China’s centralized model and praising Dr. Nakajima’s work on providing a more nuanced perspective on these issues that reminds us that states are not the primary actors in this space and to think about actors more broadly, including in the construction of interests even if states have a determining effect on actors. Yet he wondered if the emphasis on how interests are constructed too greatly marginalizes the role of states given that states have roles beyond responses to political and economic pressure. States also have blind spots in their intelligence capabilities that can have real impacts on their behavior.

In the Q&A period that followed, Dr. Kokas said that level of risk to individual users is limited, while the greater risk lies in the development of AI capabilities and similar innovations. Data trafficking presents a greater risk to businesses as well as a geostrategic risk due to the fusion of political and military technological efforts in China. For users, the longer term concern is “digital capitulation,” where users become completely resigned to questions of data control because their primary concern is ease of use. As an alternative to trafficking data, Dr. Kokas presented the idea of “stabilizing” data as potential solution to data trafficking whereby small individual wedges like critical reporting, oversight, and more robust consumer regulations combine to aggregately better manage data. Because there is no single private, public, or institutional authority for managing data, without buy-in from consumers, and in the absence of any global consensus on managing data, any attempt at governance would need to be layered and incremental.

=SSU Forum=