China has made concerted attempts to establish formal and informal standards of its own (Murphree and Breznitz, 2018). It successfully developed a domestic standard for 3 G mobile communications (TD-SCDMA), which was accepted as one of three viable standards at the International Telecommunications Union [ITU]) (Gao, 2014). Subsequently, China has developed national-level industrial plans to create international standards since the publication of Made in China 2025 strategy by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (Malkin, 2020). MiC2025 was followed by the 2018 China Standards 2035 strategy, which in turn generated the 2022 National Standardization Development Action Plan. The latter aims to set global technological standards in a range of high-technology industries, including explicit targets for software, operating systems and AI development (Wu, 2022). The Chinese state has filled positions at SDOs with political appointees rather than corporate delegates (Rühlig, 2023).
China’s concerted efforts have met with some success. China has become amongst the most active members of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (Seaman, 2020), while Houlin Zhao served as Secretary-General of the ITU from 2015 to 2022. During the race to develop 5 G technology China successfully achieved ‘technical leadership and the firstmover motivation’ (Kim et al., 2020, 6), establishing the largest portfolio of standard essential patents (SEPs). Huawei has been the top filer of standard essential patents (SEPs) for 5 G to the standards body 3GPP – ahead of both Ericsson and Qualcomm (Ryugen and Hiroyuki, 2020). One recent investigation estimates Chinese firms (especially Huawei and ZTE) will continue to succeed in the filing of next-generation 5.5 G patents, which will act as milestones on the road to 6 G development. However, US efforts to isolate China appear to have weakened its ability to set 5 G standards vis-à-vis rivals like Cisco and Nokia (Kawakami and Miyajima, 2023).
Beyond this drive into de jure global standard setting, China has also sought to establish de facto standards by encouraging adoption of its technologies. Far from its origins as a messaging service, Tencent’s WeChat has become a ‘superapp’ which encompasses many third-party apps (‘mini-apps’). In this way, it has effectively bypassed Android and Apple stores (which suffer restricted access within China) and become a principle interfacing mechanism with the internet for many users (Thun and Sturgeon, 2019). This has enabled Tencent to control a sizeable ecosystem, forcing mini-app developers to conform to its technological standards.
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Reinventing Capitalism