Ganesh Sitaraman118 «¬® ̄°±² ³««³°® ́
and the military, which means that technological innovations that may
have originated with a foreign company active in China can ¥nd their
way to supporting the People’s Liberation Army. “I you’re working in
China,” Ashton Carter, a former U.S. defense secretary, has said, “you
don’t know whether you’re working on a project for the military or not.”
In addition to widely known concerns about Chinese espionage
and surveillance, integration with the Chinese market also opens Big
Tech—and the United States—to pressure from China, which can
use that inuence to hurt U.S. interests. Scholars refer to this tac-
tic—turning economic interdependence into political leverage—by a
variety o terms, including “geoeco-
nomics,” “reverse entanglement,” and
“weaponized interdependence.” What-
ever it’s called, China has a long track
record o doing it, across countries and
industries. To retaliate against South
Korea’s adoption o a U.S. missile de-
fense system in 2017, China blocked
Chinese travel agencies from oering trips to the country. And after
the dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010,
China temporarily blocked imports from Norway.
To avoid oending Chinese o¾cials and potentially losing access
to the country’s large market, companies are adapting their behavior
even outside China’s borders. Hollywood studios have been accused
o rewriting scripts and editing scenes for that purpose: choosing to
blow up the Taj Mahal instead o the Great Wall o China in the
movie Pixels, according to Reuters, and replacing China with North
Korea as the main adversary in the 2012 remake o Red Dawn, ac-
cording to the Los Angeles Times. In 2019, Daryl Morey, the general
manager o the ²Æ³ basketball team the Houston Rockets, tweeted in
support o pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; soon thereafter,
he deleted the post. In the days that followed, the owner o the Rock-
ets wrote that Morey did “NOT speak” for the team, and the ²Æ³
said it was “regrettable” that Morey’s views had “deeply oended
many o our friends in China.” (After a public outcry, the ²Æ³ clari-
¥ed that it would not censor or ¥re Morey.) A year earlier, Mercedes-
Benz had posted a quote from the Dalai Lama on Instagram. After an
online backlash in China, the automaker quickly erased the quote,
and its parent company, Daimler, said that the post had containedTo claim that the likes of
Amazon are helping
counter China’s rise makes
little sense.