[INTERVIEW] “The Chinese approach to digital sovereignty”: 4 questions to Rogier Creemers

5 April 2023

By Tamian Derivry

In this interview, Rogier Creemers, Assistant Professor in the Law and Governance of China at Leiden University, discusses the historical development and main features of the Chinese approach to digital or cyber sovereignty. He also shares some of his thoughts on the much-debated issues surrounding recent proposals to ban TikTok in the EU and the U.S. The interview follows his intervention at our annual conference on “Digital Sovereignty and Geopolitical Crisis” held on December 6, 2022 (which can be viewed here).

1) How did the Chinese digital sovereignty strategy develop historically?

I would argue that the Chinese notion of cyber sovereignty is very much a function of the technological world confronted by China. We in the West sometimes forget that we created the technologies and originated much of the normative framework that surrounds them. This is particularly true in the US but also in Europe. When we say things like the “free and open Internet”, this corresponds to the values that have been central to the way we have organized our politics for quite some time now.

China, on the other hand, was a technological latecomer. For example, in 2000, only approximately 1% of the Chinese population were regular Internet users. In the United States, half of the population was already using the internet regularly. In addition, the normative framework that has come together with new technologies is not logically connected to the way the Chinese government conducts its business.

The Internet came to China in 1994, only five years after Tiananmen. At the time, the sense that the United States and its smaller allies essentially wanted a regime change through ideological subversion was very much alive in Chinese politics. From the beginning of the Internet, there has been a sense that China must somehow defend itself and maintain the integrity of its political system. The concept of sovereignty has been a key component of China’s foreign policy since the early days of the Chinese Republic, so it was very logical that China evolved in a direction where sovereignty in the sense of self-determination and non-intervention by foreign actors became a key element of how it runs the Internet.

This became formalized in 2010 after Google left China. Google complied with Chinese regulations when it came to censoring search results, but it refused to provide user data to the Chinese police, particularly in relation to well-known political liberals, who would be regarded as subversive in China. Chinese security services essentially hacked Google and pushed Google out of China. Two weeks later, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in which she elevated Internet freedom and openness as key elements of U.S. foreign policy. In Beijing, this was considered to be a direct attack. Later that year, the Chinese government released its first white paper on the Internet, which responded to the American policy. This was the first time China used sovereignty in relation to the digital world. This still forms the core of the Chinese Internet foreign policy .

2) What do you think are the main features of the Chinese approach to digital sovereignty?

First, it is sovereignty in the classical sense, a defensive understanding aimed at non-interference in internal affairs in order to maintain the integrity and authority of the communist party-led system. This was the core element. It is also a claim of the Chinese government’s authority against other governments and the very idea of universal norms. For the Chinese government, there are no universal norms, and governments are only bound by those things to which they have agreed.

The second element is sovereign equality, the idea that it is not because the United States has a preponderance in the technological field because of the historical path dependencies that the United States calls shots for the rest of the world. Rather, there should be multilateral frameworks, what China calls “democratic” government systems, in places like the United Nations. And by “democratic”, China essentially means “one country, one vote”.

The third element is the notion of sovereignty encompassing the supreme authority of the state. This means that China does not simply reject interference from the U.S. government or the existence of universal norms, but also the notion that the Internet should be governed in what Western parties call “the multi-stakeholder way,” where the technical community, the private sector, and civil society have a much bigger role to play in how the Internet is governed, and the government has a much smaller role. No, China says, in the end, governments are the ones calling the final shots. Obviously, the technological community has an important role to play but that role is limited.

These are the three components of the Chinese notion of digital sovereignty: sovereignty against other governments, sovereign equality in global governance, and sovereignty as the supreme authority of the state over non-state actors.

The notion developed in Europe that we need to consider individual sovereignty on the Internet is completely absent because, in Chinese teleology, the communist party represents the people, the communist party is the people, and therefore, the communist party is the holder of sovereignty.

We do not yet know how digital sovereignty will be operationalized. Obviously, China has agency, but it is not the only actor. On the one hand, China sees sovereignty as a legal entitlement in the ways that we just discussed, but sovereignty is also about capacity. It is one thing to say that you want to have sovereignty, but if you are completely technologically dependent on the outside world, you do not have the material means to actually act in a sovereign manner. This is also something we are discovering in the EU, which is why it is now pursuing strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty. The EU is building capacity for this, which means not just beefing up the regulatory framework but also more self-reliance in things like hardware and supply chains. And we see China acting upon that. The problem is that the U.S. is still preponderant and has used that preponderance to limit Chinese access to key technologies, such as semiconductors.

3) What are the main differences between the Chinese and Russian approaches to digital sovereignty?

The Chinese and the Russians agree to a significant level on what they oppose. For instance, they oppose the preponderance of the United States in the global technological order. However, what they do not share is a positive agenda for what the Internet should look like. For instance, Russia does not have the very ambitious technological development agenda that China has. Another element is that China is much more closely connected to the global economic order than Russia is. We see this clearly in the UN, where China has proposed that there should be norms against governments using their preponderance in certain technological fields against the rest of the world. In other words, the Chinese are essentially saying that the United States should not sanction them in the way they do. This is a very clear response to sanctions against Huawei, ZTE, and the semiconductor industry. Russia simply does not have that level of connectedness to the outside world and certainly not to the global economic order, so interests are structured in a completely different manner.

4) The recent ban of TikTok on government-issued devices in the EU and the US has been widely debated. What is TikTok’s role in the conflicting relationship between China, the U.S., and the EU with regard to digital sovereignty?

The big question we obtain with TikTok is access to data and influence. Part of the problem is that we are essentially in a big panic about TikTok, because it is a Chinese product. To a large extent, TikTok presents us with a big enemy, and our fears are not necessarily voiced or discussed in a rational manner. In essence, it is about striking back at a country that we simply do not like.

From the data aspect, a part of the problem is that it is impossible to prove that things are not happening. It is impossible to prove that no data from TikTok has ended up in China, or even in the hands of Chinese security and intelligent services. And it is even less possible to prove that TikTok isn’t controlled in one way or another by Beijing. This uncertainty essentially creates a carte blanche to act against TikTok on whatever grounds we chose to mention. All I am saying is that we are dealing with many uncertainties. The E.U. has a rigorous data protection framework, much more so than the U.S., and TikTok has spent a lot of time and effort trying to comply with these rules.

My answer to the problem of Chinese influence in the information space is always that China is going to try, but attitudes towards China in Europe have never been this bad in recent history, which suggests that it has failed so far. There are many things we need to do in Europe to make our information space more trustworthy, even before we mention China or Russia. Let me give an example. We very often say that it was Russian influence on the Internet that ultimately led to Donald Trump’s election. Yes, one could argue that Russia pushed the needle in a couple of states. However, that election should never have been that close anyway. So, it is very easy for our media and political actors to blame our political malaise with Russia or China. I would also like to invite them to look at the possibility of their responsibility in bearing that and come up with some constructive solutions that are not just targeted at China, but actually generate a quality improvement across the board in the way that our information space operates and, therefore, in the health of our democracies.

I am not saying that concerns are exaggerated: I say it is impossible to prove that they are justified. What I would highlight is that instead of taking the easy way out and blocking TikTok, which would not solve many of the problems we are worried about (as the Chinese influence in the information space), we need to make the information space much more robust across the board. We are not doing this.

Rogier Creemers is a Lecturer in Modern Chinese Studies at Leiden University. With a background in Sinology and International Relations, and a PhD in Law, his research focuses on Chinese domestic digital technology policy, as well as China’s growing importance in global digital affairs. He is also a co-founder of DigiChina, a joint initiative with Stanford University and New America.