Workers at a factory in Changzhou, China, are assembling a locomotive made to Chinese industry standards that will be exported to Nigeria.
From light bulbs to sofas, from windows to Wi-Fi routers, nearly every product in American homes conforms to a global system of standards and metrology that ensures product quality and also ensures smooth operation.
Industrial standards developed by the United States and its allies over decades have created an invisible system of norms that underpin the global marketplace. As mundane as it sounds, this uniformity is critical to international trade, ensuring that bolts, USB plugs and shipping containers can all be used interchangeably around the globe. The standard reflects the consensus of an international committee that has long been dominated by Western technical experts.
Today, China hopes to play a leading role in these areas in the future. To the consternation of many Western nations, Beijing is using state funds and political influence to try to define norms for cutting-edge technologies as diverse as telecommunications, power transmission and artificial intelligence.
In its annual report last December, the U.S. Congress’ U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said, “Dominating the technological standards that underpin information and communications technologies and other emerging areas is part of Beijing’s grand ambitions.”
China’s efforts are driven partly by a desire to outpace the West and partly by a desire to reap profits. Standards based on patented technologies often require users to pay licensing fees. Nokia Co. (NOK) and Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM), for example, earn billions of dollars a year in patent licensing fees, and their rivals make cell phone systems that depend on those patents. China would prefer to earn such revenue as well by designing standards that match the technology developed by its own companies.
The issue of standards is becoming increasingly urgent as the rules are being finalized for many of the next-generation technologies that rely on 5G networks. Such new technologies include driverless cars, smart cities and the Internet of Things, advances that will connect the digital and real worlds to an unprecedented degree.
The new areas, including facial recognition, involve privacy and public safety and have greater implications for national security than ever before, according to the aforementioned congressional committee.
Technicians install a portable 5G wireless tower last year in Sydalia, Colo.
China is pushing for standards that will boost exports from companies with ties to Beijing and also provide support for China’s national security system, said Akira Amari, a former Japanese economy and finance minister. Gan Liming is currently in charge of a group in Japan’s ruling party that aims to increase the digitization of society. He said that if Chinese products are set up to collect data, it is important to be prepared for it to end up in the hands of the Chinese government.
Chinese officials and business executives say Beijing is simply learning how to act in a system created and long dominated by the West, adding that as one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies, China will take its rightful place in the global business community.
For its part, Beijing plans to soon unveil “China Standard 2035,” an ambitious blueprint that seeks to take a leadership role in the standards field. China’s standards authority and related government agencies did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2018, Dai Hong, a member of China’s National Standardization Administration Committee, said at the Time of the project’s announcement that “global technical standards are still being formed, and it is a good opportunity to achieve a lane change beyond China’s industry and standards.”
Researchers and standards experts who follow China’s industrial development say that in recent years, China has focused more than Western countries on aligning research and standards for new technologies with national interests.
Chinese officials are leading at least four global standards organizations, including the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency that governs telephone and Internet connections, and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the industry organization that governs electrical and electronic technology. Between 2015 and 2017, the industry’s leading organization, the International Standards Organization (ISO), was headed by a Chinese official. The organization provides standards for everything from footwear and management systems to essential oils and erotic toys.
China’s rise in standardization comes at a time when the world’s longtime leader in the field is stagnating. About twice as many secretariat positions in ISO and similar organizations are now held by Chinese representatives than they have been in 10 years. These positions hold sway over proposals, debates and priorities. The number of positions occupied by established countries such as the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom has remained relatively stable.
EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said last June that Europe’s competitors are “very active in setting international standards in key markets to protect and enhance their competitive advantage. Failure to respond, he said, would risk undermining “our economic competitiveness and technological leadership.
Virtual reality products and technologies on display at the International Telecommunication Union’s World Telecommunication Congress in 2019.
Germany and other developed economies pushed China to adopt global standards in the 1990s. Chinese business executives and government officials now have a common saying: third-rate companies produce products, second-rate companies produce technology, and first-rate companies set standards.
According to official documents, China’s central and local governments offer annual stipends of up to 1 million yuan (about $155,000) to companies that lead the development of international standards at ISO and other bodies.
Western funding for standards development has dwindled; standards development can require years of costly research and negotiation. Christoph Winterhalter, chief executive of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), said that if no changes are made, “we should not be surprised if the end result is to play by China’s rules “.
Unlike the State Standardization Administration Committee, an official Communist Party body, DIN is a private organization that receives funding primarily through sales of standards and corporate membership fees. Less than 10 percent of its funding comes from the government.
Breaking with tradition
China’s ambition was evident at an international conference held at the Peppermill Resort in Reno, Nevada, in 2016. (huawei Technologies Co.) called for its preferred error-correction standard for 5G data transmission, a way to overcome communication glitches that can confuse messages. A competing proposal from Qualcomm has gained widespread support.
At that meeting of the Third Generation Partnership Project, Huawei broke with the tradition of obeying consensus. The organization is the global body that sets 5G standards. The tense debate over the final decision lasted until midnight.
Tong Wen, a Huawei researcher involved in the effort, said Huawei management told executives of other Chinese companies in attendance that they wanted them to support Huawei’s proposal. of course, they all understood, according to Tong Wen.
The impasse ended with an unprecedented compromise: the simultaneous adoption of two standards that embed different elements of 5G technology.
A year later, Huawei fielded a candidate seeking to lead one of the organization’s most important working groups, challenging a candidate from Qualcomm. Before the vote, the moderator cautioned the Chinese delegates not to bring their phones into the voting booth. Bringing cell phones in is a practice that Chinese delegations have done at some U.N. meetings.
One person familiar with the matter said he suspected everyone would have to prove they voted for the Huawei candidate. Chinese delegates from other companies confirmed that suspicion. A Huawei spokeswoman said the company acted “with complete transparency and collaboration, in line with the spirit and rules of standard procedures.
Huawei holds the most 5G patents of any company and is also the leader in standard proposals for third-generation partner projects, with more than 35,000, according to German data analysis firm IPlytics. A quarter of these have already been approved.
Huawei displays a smartphone at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Berlin last year.
“It’s a Catch-22”
As the world got its first taste of the new crown Epidemic last April, China’s representative to the ISO proposed high-tech city plans that could play a role in the outbreak. The plans involved standards for collecting municipal data such as traffic flow and health emergencies. One delegate to the online meeting said some doubted whether the proposals reflected the Chinese government’s strong penchant for collecting data.
“It’s a trap,” former Japanese Minister of Economy and Finance Gan Liming said at the time. Getting approval, he said, would mean China “defining relevant standards, exporting systems, and then mining data from those systems and collecting it for the Chinese government.
Wan Biyu, chief scientist at the Smart City Joint Labs, a Chinese think tank, and author of the proposal, denied Gan’s allegations. He said national data protection laws can prevent the collection of personal information.
China is leading the way in standards proposals for many next-generation technologies, as it is a leader in related fields. When EU officials recently launched a project to build advanced lithium batteries, they were surprised to learn that China was already preparing an ISO lithium committee, with a Chinese secretariat and appointed committee managers.
The Chinese government is also using its “One Belt, One Road” initiative to promote Chinese standards in mature industries such as railroads and power transmission, in projects ranging from Indonesia to Nigeria. Industry officials say China provides subsidies to countries to acquire projects and then uses Chinese standards to lock in partner countries; these countries face significant costs to switch to international standards.
China has little interest in promoting standards that touch on its sovereignty. in March 2019, the ISO committee responsible for language input systems around the world on Western-style keyboards received a draft of a standard for Cantonese input methods. Cantonese is spoken by about 65 million people in Hong Kong and southeastern China.
The draft was prepared by technical experts in Hong Kong in the hope of helping to preserve the city’s cultural identity. A former European ISO representative who saw the information said a Chinese representative sent an email expressing opposition, saying the existing standards for Mandarin, the official language of the Communist Party, were sufficient.
The draft was discussed by delegates at a meeting in Canada two months later. Supporters from Hong Kong said Cantonese and Mandarin are not compatible with each other, although they use similar written characters.
An unusually large Chinese delegation then released dozens of slides slamming the draft, unsettling some participants, three people familiar with the matter said. A member of the Chinese delegation told The Wall Street Journal that the proposed writing system would be used only in Hong Kong and not by the 60 million Cantonese speakers in the rest of China.
The proposal won support from countries including the United States, Canada and Russia, but failed over an administrative technicality. In May of that year, proponents reintroduced the proposal, and in September, the head of the French commission confirmed its passage and pushed for its adoption, according to people familiar with the matter.
Shortly afterward, Russia withdrew its support without any explanation, halting the program’s adoption, at least temporarily. Officials at the Russian standards agency did not return a reporter’s request for comment.
Recent Comments