However, setting international standards has proven more challenging, and requires supporting private internet players in their efforts to embed digital technologies in international technology stacks. As noted in Section 3, ‘bundling’, or full-stack offerings, are a key source of international advantage for China. While its technologies may sometimes be behind the technological frontier, their adoption is nevertheless encouraged either directly by lower costs or by contractual stipulations bundling them with hardware where China is cost-competitive (Seaman, 2020). In this way, the Digital Silk Road serves as a vehicle for setting Chinese technical standards without necessitating their adoption at SDOs. The 20% cost competitiveness in telecommunications hardware offered by Huawei, for instance, incentivizes states to integrate with its networking software ecosystem (Ghiasy and Krishnamurthy, 2020). It also supports adoption of third-party systems, such as China’s BDS-3 satellite navigation system, an alternative to US-operated GPS. CITCC recently constructed Tanzania’s upgraded broadband network to be compatible only with Huawei routers (Agbebi, 2022, 5). Huawei’s HarmonyOS aims to use similar mechanisms to displace Android and Apple, and has so far secured 4% market share in this duopoly (Lan et al., 2022). Inroads into software provision can be more easily made where Chinese internet cabling, data centres, and cloud storage facilities are established (Shen, 2018; Munn, 2020). The rollout of smart city technology, for instance, boosts Chinese software embeddedness across economies and territories more generally (Feldstein, 2020), and allows for the assembly of data from social media and payment apps WeChat and Alipay (Ekman and de Esperanza Picardo, 2020). Similarly, SinoPharm and SinoVac’s vaccine provision under the ‘health silk road’ have bolstered Alibaba’s overseas expansion into third countries’ digital infrastructures, because they are predicated upon cold-chain storage and delivery of vaccines provided for by Alibaba’s cloud-computing system, via the Alibaba Health platform (Habibi and Zhu, 2021).
As de facto standards become adopted, they act as a source of pressure towards aligning ‘global technology standards developed by bodies such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) with proprietary technologies used by Chinese suppliers’ (Robert and Paul, 2020). Aware of how standard-setting capacities have cemented the dominance of its platform giants, US state agencies are increasingly collaborating with big tech firms to limit the space for Chinese (public and private) actors to continue to influence standards. Plantin (2021), for example, cites the case of Open RAN. Nominally a set of standards to ensure interoperability between components in a 5 G network, the Open RAN ‘community’ mostly consists of US-sponsored SDOs which exclude Chinese players. These groups (such as the Open RAN Policy
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