Too Big to PrevailMarch/April 2020 117
DESTINATION: CHINA
Competition with China will de¥ne U.S. national security conversa-
tions for decades to come, and Americans need to think carefully
about the role technology will play in this increasingly competitive
environment. But to claim that the likes o Amazon and Google are
helping counter China’s technological and geopolitical rise simply be-
cause they are American companies makes little sense.
Almost all big U.S. technology companies have extensive opera-
tions in China today. Google announced plans for an ³° research cen-
ter in Beijing in 2017 and is exploring a partnership with the Chinese
Internet behemoth Tencent. Microsoft is expanding its data centers
in China and has recently built an entire operating system, Windows
10 China Government Edition, for the Chinese government. Ama-
zon’s cloud service in China is second in popularity only to that o its
Chinese counterpart, Alibaba. Apple famously designs its phones in
California but manufactures them in China. Facebook, notably, does
not operate in China—but not for lack o trying. The company re-
peatedly attempted to gain access to the Chinese market only to be
blocked by Chinese government o¾cials.
Merely operating in China may seem harmless. Yet according to
scholars, U.S. government o¾cials, and even American business as-
sociations, any U.S. technology company working in China could
very well be supporting the Chinese state and the expansion o digi-
tal authoritarianism. In the course o their operations in the country,
U.S. companies routinely interact with Chinese companies, some o
which are run or partly owned by the state. Those that are not still
have informal ties to state and Communist Party o¾cials and face
strong incentives to behave as the state wishes even without direct
pressure from the government. Because the Chinese market and the
state are intertwined in this way, Chinese companies that partner
with foreign ones are highly likely to pass along operational and
technological developments to the Chinese government and military,
including in ways that could advance Beijing’s emerging surveillance
state and accelerate its ability to spread its model o digital authori-
tarianism around the world.
These challenges are particularly clear in the case o ³°, as commer-
cial innovations in that ¥eld can also have military implications. Under
Beijing’s doctrine o “civil-military fusion,” Chinese researchers and
private companies are working ever more closely with the government