By Elena Alonso Cardenosa
Your commercial awareness dose
During the second half of the 20th Century, two world powers fought silently for the dominance of the global geopolitical landscape; on the one hand there was the former Soviet Union and on the other was the United States of America. Today, the surviving country of this encounter is facing a second Cold War, this time against the People’s Republic of China. The chosen weapons? The most powerful technology firms in the world. The prize? The information of billions of internet users, as well as the production chains that provide the technology needed to make this possible.
China and the United States lead a technological war that is not only limited to military research but extends to consumer electronics with two fronts that become apparent in the division of what devices and applications people use depending on their location in the world. While the Western bloc questions the monopoly of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon in the tech industry, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean all these companies have their equivalents in the Asian market, which have sometimes made the leap to the American and European markets, with results that have made technology investors and governments nervous.
The Donald Trump administration, in cases like Huawei and Tiktok, begun a series of defensive measures in the technology race that included strong regulations to Asian firms, in addition to the decentralisation of production chains operating wholly or partially on Chinese territory.
In 2020, a year marked by the covid-19 pandemic, for the first time in history, scientific advances such as 5G networks, artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology are an important part of how the world’s greatest powers interact on the international stage, how they promote their own agendas in the geopolitical and economic arena. China is taking an increasingly important role in all these categories, a role that traditionally had belonged to the United States.
With the expansion of companies supported by Beijing like Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, China Telecom and China Mobile outside the Asian giant’s borders, the claims for alleged violations of national security by the Donald Trump administration have become more numerous and more aggressive, coming to directly confront the American technology industry for the possible consequences of doing business in a country controlled by the Communist Party.
This is not only a classic case of the president’s security agenda coinciding with his economic agenda, but it arises as part of a strategy to downplay Chinese technology in the United States and in the rest of the Western world. This is a measure that, intentionally or unintentionally, also protects the same technological monopolies that are questioned within their own borders.
While the competition between Chinese companies and the West could be the trigger for the most important technological advances of the following years on both sides of this conflict, also leaves to consideration the role of countries with traditionally passive roles in the industry such as Mexico, which will depend on the commitments it has to take with its T-MEC partner country in the defence of its technological hegemony and the possibilities opened by the Chinese market, which carry their own world of consequences and side effects that would imply being an ally of two sides that participate in a technological war, both good and bad.
Although it is impossible to know with certainty what will happen in the future, given the expectations generated by the administration of Joe Biden, a scenario is possible in which Washington will, for the moment, continue to accept the inevitable rise of China as a superpower, that is if the Chinese government can assure that such promotion will not entail any challenge to the vital interests of the United States. President Xi Jinping recently stated in a UN General Assembly that ‘’We have no intention to fight either a cold war or a hot war with any country.’’ but will this peace be possible?
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