TAIPEI, TAIWAN – AUGUST 03: Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), left; … [+]
One of the key events in the thaw between the US and China was Vice President Mike Pence’s speech at the Hudson Institute in October 2018, in which he expressed his hostility toward China. Two months after the speech, Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, was arrested in Canada by the Trump administration. During this time, the strained relationship between the US and China began to ripple through the global technology industry.
The Trump administration’s policy toward China was a rare example of fashioning and managing consensus within the American political, industrial, and military complex. Many US corporate leaders, who generally disdain the style and substance of Trump’s politics, are pleased with his criticism of China and feel that a watershed has been reached in the relationship, where China will no longer ‘incubate’ innovation. Westerners in response to export devaluation.
Oppressive China
For their part, Chinese policymakers, many of whom had studied in America to better understand it, felt that, faced with an unknown American leader, a watershed had been reached – China was now a world power and wanted it. to prove himself. Indeed, since then, China has managed to aggravate most of its neighbors across Asia (fighting with Indian troops, antagonizing Australia, and angering Japan, for example).
In that context, China’s response to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was itself a watershed. They might have simply dismissed this incident as a show of publicity-hungry Western politicians, but they didn’t.
The military leader’s response revealed much about Xi Jinping’s leadership, China’s military preparedness and its regional stance. A side effect would be an acceleration in the game-theoretic conditions surrounding the geopolitical competition at the center of Taiwan. I’m not an expert here so I’ll leave the framing of this to others, as we put it a few weeks ago, Taiwan is now featured mostly in thriller scripts (Thriller in Tanegashima).
From an economic and strategic point of view, what Pelosi’s visit will do is bring governments and tech companies closer together, following Huawei’s elbow (fittingly, her husband Paul’s track record in tech stocks is second to none!).
The semiconductor industry is a good example. In recent weeks, Taiwan’s MediaTek and Intel
INTC
HIPS
Great schism
The great disruption of globalization means that technology companies (especially in sensitive areas) must choose sides. This can be the same for consumer brands like Nike.
of
APL
There are several ways that technology companies can approach each other. A number of US data, internet and communications companies have actively assisted Ukraine, as has the US cyber security community. In particular, the invasion of Ukraine is reshaping the techno-defense industry across America and Europe.
Drones, AI, signals, space warfare (remember Trump’s spaceforce), rail guns, and robotics are just a few of the areas in defense research and development at a time when global defense spending is hitting a record $2.3 trillion. The arms race has taken on a new, technologically advanced dimension – we only have to read the South China Sea’s scenarios of what naval warfare might look like (hypsonic missiles, lasers, cyber attacks).
Away from the battlefield, across the three largest regions, technology companies at the center of strategic operations are being brought closer to their governments, and sometimes spending heavily to woo them. A race is underway not only to build lead technologies, but also to develop standards and regulations that govern them.
In this sense, the control of technology and information is also becoming more regional, and the activities of Chinese companies in Europe and America are causing more problems.
Defi
Other, newer technologies are also proving this. For example, one of the key battles in finance is between crypto-centric DeFi (or decentralized financial networks) and the old-fashioned world of finance. The withdrawal of liquidity from an “old” institution in the form of the Federal Reserve has led to a collapse in parts of the crypto world, with many exchanges failing and the entire crypto exchange sector being investigated by the SEC. Mostly this effort is aimed at limiting fraud and bad behavior, but there is also a strategic element, maintaining control over the ‘diff’ world.
‘Metaverse’ could very well see the same treatment. Although it exists beyond the real world, the companies creating Facebook/Meta are well grounded in “old world” public policy and issues.
So while the explosion of Chinese nationalism (wait for more) is a visible influence surrounding Pelosi’s visit, the event is just one of many that look at a world where technology — in its innovation, in its innovation, in its livelihood — is just that. More regional.
