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The Washington Post

PostEverything Perspective

China’s digital protectionism puts the future of the global Internet at risk

Its policies appear tailored toward undercutting foreign competitors and boosting homegrown platforms.

By Nithin Coca

In January, Microsoft’s Bing search engine was temporarily unavailable for users in China. While it remains

unclear why the service was locked down, many observers interpreted it as yet another instance of China’s

inclination toward digital censorship. Bing was, according to this view, just the latest in a long list of foreign

apps, websites and platforms to run afoul of Beijing’s extensive digital surveillance and cyber-control

apparatus, which restricts Chinese users’ access to the global Internet.

However, the incident shows another, more worrying face to China’s Internet controls — one that has more to

do with its global ambitions than its attempt to control its own population. Microsoft had already complied

with China’s official censorship standards long before the outage. Within China, Bing’s search engine only

shows approved results on sensitive topics such as 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protests; the Dalai

Lama; the banned Falun Gong spiritual sect and others. Some Microsoft products such as LinkedIn similarly

accept China’s content restrictions, while others, such as Skype, have given the government direct access to

user data. In this context, the Chinese government’s possible willingness to block Bing shows that the space for

foreign digital platforms to compete fairly in China is shrinking. In fact, China is increasingly blocking foreign

apps and platforms for little reason other than protectionism, which it pursues as part of its quest for greater

control of the Internet.

China blocks many digital platforms that are neither seeking to expand political discourse nor provide access to

sensitive information. It tends, instead, to target platforms that are potential competitors to state-connected

Chinese tech companies. China blocks e-commerce sites that could compete with Alibaba (e.g. Rakuten,

Amazon), business apps, including Slack, Dropbox and Slideshare, and nearly every chat app that could

compete with WeChat — including ones from Asia such as Line, KakaoTalk and Viber.

“We’ll see a continuing role for natural gas—even if it shifts over time—not just as a bridge fuel but as a foundation for

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the future.”

 

These restrictions are understandable, at least from the perspective of economic development. Countries that

allowed open access to the United States’ digital giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple —

are finding that one or more of these companies now dominate search, social media, chat or video and music

streaming. While there are some local upstarts (Naver in Korea, or Viber in Myanmar, for example), they are

rare and, in most instances, steadily losing ground to their U.S.-based counterparts.

That’s not the case in China, which has its own digital giants — Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. Protectionism was

no doubt crucial to the rise of these titans. To facilitate their rise, China took steps similar to those Japan took

with automobiles in the 1970s and ’80s, when it restricted foreign competition from the United States to allow

homegrown brands like Toyota, Honda and Nissan to grow.

Today, however, China’s giants need no protection. They are large enough to compete and are benefiting from

their access to what is, quite possibly, the world’s largest digital market, which they have mostly to themselves.

That’s to their benefit as they prep for international expansion, not just into established markets like the

United States or Europe, but into emerging economies in Asia and Africa, too. Chinese apps dominate India’s

mobile space, and the mobile-payment platforms WePay (owned by Tencent) and Alipay (owned by Alibaba)

are making huge inroads into Southeast Asia.

The spread of these companies raises concerns that the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism is creeping

abroad, putting the future of the Internet at risk. The D.C.-based Council on Foreign Relations says China’s

policies, including censorship, data localization and its onerous privacy rules, are “meant to undercut foreign

competitors and boost Chinese companies,” with censorship being key tool. A 2017 report from the European

Center for International Political Economy found that China “imposes more trade and investment barriers,

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discriminatory taxes, and information security restrictions than any other country by a vast margin,” and that

these restrictions were increasing, not decreasing, over time. Moreover, it found that China “blocks not just

politically sensitive content, but also the majority of foreign commercial platforms and intermediaries.” A

report released last month by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation rated China as among

the worst countries for digital protectionism, highlighting a newly passed standardization law it said “could be

used to favor local tech firms and their products.”

If China’s blatant digital protectionism continues to go unchallenged, it could lead to the Balkanization of the

Internet into different segments — one dominated by American tech giants and the other by Chinese

behemoths. For now, Bing is back, but its temporary disappearance is a reminder that it could easily follow in

the footsteps of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — all of which have been blocked in China. Worse still, that

model could be coming soon to a country near you.

Nithin Coca Nithin Coca is an Asia-based freelance journalist who covers regional issues and technology from a social and economic perspective. Follow 