THE DIGITALIZATION OF THE STRUGGLE FOR GLOBAL HEGEMONY

Introduction

In the age of technology and innovation, where digitalization dominates human behavior, states are reconstructing themselves and the international system as well. The rapid change in technology has an incredible influence on state behavior. Tech-leading powers like the US, the EU, and China also lead the industry and therefore the economy of the world.
The US, having played the role of world hegemon in the post-Cold War period, has been challenged by a rising power from the Far East, the People Republic’s of China. Achieving integrating the authoritarian socialist administration system of the country with the capitalist market economy of the West, China has been emerging as a different type of super-power in the last decade. Although China consistently emphasizes that it does not have any problems with the status quo and is content to be a part of it while trying to contribute more, the Chinese administration keeps claiming more power in the international system through different instruments, technology in particular. As pointed out before, even though the US, the reigning power in the system has not been challenged by the rising power of China within the framework of Thucydides Trap, they have already engaged in war in cyber-space. Both powers have avoided the trap in the physical world, cyber-attacks originating from China have been targeting strategic American data for a long while.

In this regard, China keeps developing its technological infrastructure and activity in cyber-space against the US dominance day by day and employs new comprehensive initiatives to accomplish world hegemony to the detriment of the US. While China started to implement One the Belt One Road Initiative as a regional economic connectivity initiative on the ground, the technological aspect of it, the Digital Silk Road aims at goals greater with a global perspective.
This paper mainly argues that China challenges US dominance in the technological realm and promotes revisionism as a rising power and benefits from economic opportunities created through One Belt One Road and the Digital Silk Road.
The paper is going to attempt at exploring China’s actions within One Belt One Road and the Digital Silk Road through a theoretical framework. Components of Power Transition Theory and International Political Economy with a specific emphasis on technology will set the stage to explain what China tries to achieve through digital means.

The Belt and Road Initiative: An Initiative or a Strategy

The Belt and Road Initiative was introduced to the globe as the strategy of One Belt One Road in the capital of Kazakhstan Astana, back then Nur-Sultan, in September 2018 by Chinese president Xi Jinping. In July 2016, the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Peoples’ Republic of China, as well as the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences revised the official translated name of the strategy as “The Belt and Road Initiative”, to avoid misinterpretations of the name One Belt One Road. The major goal of this international Project of China is to economically connect China with Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Russia, and Central and Eastern Europe. The Belt and Road Initiative reflects the changing status of China, which has emerged as a global economic power and become a dominant player in the international financial system over the past two decades and is willing to exert its soft power.
Furthermore, although China has been pretty cautious in discourse by naming it as an initiative rather than a strategy, it is obvious that through the Belt and Road Initiative, China premeditates a new kind of global order. Hong names the Belt and Road Initiative as a national strategy of China, however, he points out that Chinese authorities rather prefer the word initiative and continuously avoid the use of “strategy”, “project”, “program” or “ agenda”. It is argued that for the first time in history, China is on the eve of creating a new paradigm in global affairs, therefore has the chance to construct new global norms instead of benefiting from the current status quo. This is because the Belt and Road Initiative is not simply a kind of regional development model. It is more than that and is inspired by the notion of intra-regional infrastructure connectivity leading to new economic incentives.
Moreover, Fallon, referring to Chinese scholars, puts forward the argument that the Belt and Road Initiative is instrumental in a strategic race with the United States and Japan in her backyard, hence calling it a “grand strategy”. Within this grand strategy, mainly attributed to the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, China would be controlling a vast economic zone of 4 billion people, through the monetary mechanisms of the Silk Road fund, alongside the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank, known as BRICS.

The Digital Silk Road Inspired by the Ancient Trade Route in Central Asia

The Digital Silk Road is an integral component of the Belt and Road Initiative. Launched in 2015, the Digital Silk Road signifies digital connectivity concerning the interoperability of critical digital infrastructure such as land and underwater data cables, 5G cellular networks, data storage centers, and global satellite navigation systems. It is considered the biggest infrastructure undertaking in the world. Within the scope of the Digital Silk Road, China provides technological aid both to member states and to Chinese technology exporters. It is worth noting that Digital Silk Road underlines particularly emerging technologies of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, smart cities, big data, and mobile high-tech fields.
Although it is considered as a technological infrastructure and digital connectivity initiative, the Digital Silk Road is perceived as a foreign policy tool. From the perspective of western policy-makers, this tool is instrumental in expanding Chinese technologies to markets that had been dominated by western actors before, as well as to developing countries that have recently started experiencing a technological revolution. Tens of countries from Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia have been engaged in this extensive structure. For the West, the engagement of countries from the Western Balkans is precisely crucial as China tends to use this part of Europe as a springboard to expand to Europe. However, for the aspirant countries of Central Asia, accommodating vast hydrocarbon resources essential to the Western industry is much more critical for Europe.

Theoretical Framework

China, with its vast land, gigantic population, fast-developing technology, and aggressive commercial policies, is inevitably subject to such harsh criticism from the West regarding the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road. Nevertheless, officially China appears to opt for harmony, peace, and prosperity rather than to go for a geopolitical and diplomatic attack to change the subsisting international order. As Hong highlights, Chinese scholar Huang Yiping has already proposed the concept of “one superpower with multiple poles” to describe China’s new economic diplomacy, where the leadership of the US is acknowledged while enhancing the participation in the governance of the global economy. The global dimension of the Belt and Road Initiative is downgraded to a regional periphery policy of Jinping and tried to be trivialized. Furthermore, within the comparison of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Marshall Plan, Shen argues that the Chinese initiative is not drawn as a tangible strategy, though there are hidden strategic targets to balance the US in the Asia-Pacific region. According to Shen, boosting exports, exporting currency, countering a rival, fostering strategic divisions, and seeking diplomatic support are the five main goals of the Belt and Road Initiative. Nordquist on the other hand puts forward that there are more differences than similarities concerning global and local reactions.
In this regard, power struggle on the ground through peaceful means rather than military confrontation has a solid base within the framework of International Relations theories. Two significant but less referred theories might be employed to explain more about what goes around between China and the US.
The first one is Organski’s Power Transition Theory, where he underlined the rise of China in his book World Politics as early as 1958. According to Organski, China is a rising challenger and the United States is a declining hegemon, a combination of which creates proper conditions for a power transition, where rising power overtakes the dominant power. He argues that the rise of China would be “spectacular,” and “the power of China ought to eventually become greater” and Western powers will find that the most serious threat to their supremacy comes from China. As Organski underlines the fact that a “challenger”, a powerful nation dissatisfied with the global order might initiate instability, Levy’s contribution brings a mutual responsibility to the collapse of the international order by theorizing that the declining power would initiate the conflict. Thus, both China and the US are counted as prospective responsible for disorderly actions.
Taking into account the Chinese official discourse stressing that China is in harmony with international order and only seeks to contribute to it, the US is left alone as the sole troublemaker, trying to accuse China as much as possible. The Clean Network Program against the Digital Silk Road as of August 2020 is the latest example of it. The Clean Network is designed as a comprehensive mechanism to provide a secure environment for US citizens’ and companies’ sensitive data privacy. The Clean Network Program is officially defined as addressing the long-term threat to data privacy security, human rights, and principled collaboration posed to the free world by authoritarian malign actors, implying the Chinese Communist Party, and is rooted in internationally accepted digital trust standards.
The second theory, regarding the technological rise of China as a means to seek global hegemony, is the theory of International Political Economy. In particular, the emphasis on technology within this theory is worth mentioning to explain actions done by China. In International Political Economy, technology is defined as a social system, used by groups of people or societies that are created within a social and economic context. Innovation is a keyword in this context, where emerging technologies stemming from China, such as the safe city model, mark a model for the country. Within this scope, national innovation models are commonly used to describe different innovative patterns of countries. Innovative patterns of China are significant in understanding the course of the power struggle in contemporary world politics.
National innovation models are highly related to the Kondratieff Cycle, introduced by Soviet Russian sociologist economist, Nikolai D. Kondratieff, within the theory of International Political Economy. The theory argues that every innovative technology throughout history triggers a new economic development cycle and waves of change in the international system. Each Kondratieff cycle of about 25 to 30 years, associated with a deep recession and influencing the rise and fall of dominant powers, comes to life through a new technology that forms the basis of a new economy. Since China has been emerging as a world leader in emerging innovative technologies such as electronic tech, media Technologies, and software applications, a new Kondratieff cycle has been appearing within the international system. Even though International Political Economy highlights the technological leadership of companies rather than countries, in the case of China, as an authoritarian giant manipulating Chinese technology companies on the global stage, China emerges as a leading country in technology.

The Sixth Kondratieff Cycle through Chinese Digital Silk Road

As argued before, the Digital Silk Road is an assertive initiative at the core of China’s long-term plan to lead the world into global digital connectivity. The Digital Silk Road is about the development and interoperability of critical digital infrastructures such as terrestrial and submarine data cables, 5G cellular networks, data storage centers, and global satellite navigation systems. The digital initiative is considered as a solution that engenders a less US-centric and more Sino-centric global digital order. Leader technology companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi, which constantly recruit experts in artificial intelligence algorithms, cloud business, software, and computing infrastructure are an essential part of this larger plan.
Within the scope of smart city technologies, the safe city concept of Huawei, as a public safety solution is critical in the new Kondratieff cycle, which counts as the sixth of them. Artificial intelligence-loaded surveillance technology, defined as a safe city marks the basis of Chinese technological expansion in the sixth Kondratieff cycle, believed to have started by 2010. Accompanying Industry 4.0, where manufacturers are integrating new technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and analytics, and AI and machine learning into their production facilities and throughout their operations, Chinese safe city technologies present the sixth Kondratieff cycle with the integration of these emerging technologies into governance and public administration practices. In particular, after the Covid-19 pandemic, where the control of the population has become an issue for governments. In the post-pandemic world, China will use this technology to enable recipient countries to adopt its model of technology-enabled authoritarianism. Safe city technology has been appearing as an instrument of new technology within a new Kondratieff cycle for China to challenge US hegemony and export the Chinese style of authoritarian governance. This could be considered complementary to Xi Jinping’s economic politics, which calls for China to lead advanced manufacturing by 2025 with the brand MIC25, short for Made in China 2025, to lead standard-setting for new technologies by 2035, and to become a superpower by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Even though, the US has hoped for a Chinese transition towards democracy and helped enable China’s rise as a technology powerhouse, believing that technology could play a role in keeping the flow of information open, China has been able to benefit from post-Covid 19 discontents of countries both from democratic Europe and more authoritarian African and Central Asian countries.
Within this perspective, Central Asian countries stand at the heart of the Digital Silk Road, a strategic component of the Belt and Road Initiative. Geographical proximity is an important element in such a relationship. Nevertheless, ethnic and religious connections with the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Republic, the population of which has continuously been suppressed by Chinese authorities during the course of history, make much more sense in terms of close relations.
Inheriting the Soviet tradition of authoritarian repressive government structure, Central Asian countries are still far from internalizing the Western values of democracy and human rights. In the last decade of the post-Cold War international system, Central Asian republics, which have been still experimenting with democracy have come much closer to the Chinese way of surviving in the international system through a kind of socialist liberalism. While commerce has remained as the main tool to struggle in the international capitalist system, winning over the Soviet Union and authoritarian governance has reigned inside the country. The combination of such a complicated system with emerging technologies has contributed more to the complexity of the evolving system.
In this regard, Central Asian countries have been the main clients of Chinese technology companies consolidating their economic power within the Digital Silk Road. Specifically, mass surveillance systems are highly demanded by Central Asian countries. Biometric databases, safe city technologies, facial recognition, and geographical positioning systems of Chinese companies have been purchased by Central Asian governments within the digital connectivity goal of the Digital Silk Road. Chinese companies such as Huawei, Hikvision, and Beidou, which have strong connections with the Chinese government are the main suppliers of Central Asian state institutions. The digital connection established by Chinese technology companies not only provides innovative solutions for Central Asian countries, concerned with international extremist terrorism but also in a way carries the potential risk of backdoor transfer of big data to the huge database of China. Moreover, technology-based systematic control of the population, executed by China has been exported to neighboring Central Asian countries, which already have a history of repression due to the Soviet past.
In particular, safe city projects are high in demand. In collaboration with prospective Chinese global companies, national technology companies of Central Asia that have strong relations with their governments are rising as well. In Kazakhstan, safe city projects have been in progress since 2017 starting with Astana, back then Nur-Sultan. This pilot project, one of the most expensive public–private partnership projects in Kazakhstan, was launched to be implemented by a Kazakh company called Sergek, which has since expanded operations to Almaty and Shymkent, while Astana has remained as the center of facial recognition system development in all Kazakhstan. The Chinese way of technology producing and benefiting from it is being transferred to Central Asian countries.

Conclusion

As technology keeps developing day after day at a fast pace, concluding contemporary interactions with international relations might not be straightly accurate. Governments’ policies about technology, particularly with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet of things, are still being improved by the outcomes of this interaction.
China on the other hand is seeking full control over technological developments inside the country. Chinese companies are under the strict superintendence of the Chinese Communist Party and their regional and global activities are being inspected. It is a fact that Chinese companies have been instrumental in substantiating Chinese foreign policy actions both at regional and global levels.
Therefore, the Digital Silk Road as a Chinese initiative offers technological improvement at the regional level while carrying political risks at the global level. The Clean Network Program of the US government as of August 2020 is a significant indicator of this risk. En bref, The Trump administration’s decision states that Chinese technologies are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and threaten not only state security but also the security of American citizens.
Central Asian countries appear like testing laboratories for the expansion of emerging technologies by Chinese companies. Technology companies, emerging from China seem to be instrumental in carrying out Chinese internal security policies towards Central Asian Republics and contaminating their governance, which seems to be only too glad. Authoritarian characteristics of Central Asian Republics ease the way of Chinafication of their government systems through new technologies. What China started with the Central Asian Republics in the scope of safe-city technologies, has had serious outcomes in western democracies, mainly the European Union. The European Union Digital Identity wallets, introduced by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have been criticized by some European Parliament members. Cristian Terhes, the Romanian member of the European Parliament, has been warning of the European Union’s so-called Chinafication, as the Union made Covid passports mandatory, by naming it a “Trojan Horse for tyranny”.
Within the framework of Power Transition and International Political Economy theories, it is obvious that the power transition through the use of technology by China has been taking place for almost a decade and the process has accelerated recently. China, controlling and widening the expansion of emerging technologies through the Digital Silk Road and updating its use to the authoritarian character of her government system, specifically after the Covid-19 pandemic, has started changing the structure of international order, being predominantly western oriented. The new Kondratieff Cycle has been working in favor of China, with a gradual increase in the control of emerging technologies encouraging the implementation of authoritarian measures.
China keeps playing its role as a harmonious power contributing to the global economy, while the US tries to manipulate counter-initiatives against the Chinese Digital Silk Road. Only one question left aside: who is going to trigger the conflict first? Rising China or Declining US?

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