"President Joe Biden came away from his summit with China’s President Xi Jinping on Nov. 15 committed to prosecuting what he called “simple, straightforward competition” with China. Yet Beijing is already beating the United States and its allies in one crucial domain: data.
Data is the oil of the 21st century, the indispensable resource that will fuel artificial-intelligence algorithms, economic strength and national power. The wellspring of this data is all of us: our health records and genetic sequences, our online habits, the supply chain flows of our businesses, the terabytes of imagery guzzled by phones, drones and autonomous cars.
Through a latticework of recent laws and regulations, Mr. Xi has been hard at work making the Chinese Communist Party the world’s most powerful data broker. How does Beijing do that? By walling Chinese data off from the world, exerting new extraterritorial power over global data flows and putting foreign companies operating in China in a legal bind — all while absorbing other countries’ data by means licit and illicit.
The Biden administration has spoken about the importance of data in our competition with China. But no visible strategy has emerged. That threatens Americans’ privacy, economic competitiveness, national security and future global standing. This will be a major test of America’s China policy in 2022.
Washington’s blind spot to the centrality of big data in Beijing’s ambitions and to the ways our own data are being exploited in service of those ambitions is perplexing at a time when American politicians are growing more concerned about the collection and potential exploitation of big data by U.S. tech giants.
It is further perplexing because Americans in bipartisan fashion also are wising up to the ways that Beijing exploits and weaponizes other U.S. resources, like our capital markets.
That’s evident in how Washington is finally — if fitfully — beginning to address the self-destructive flow of U.S. dollars into China’s military and global surveillance apparatus.
A series of laws implemented in 2017 asserted the party’s power to gain access to private data on Chinese networks, whether in China or associated with Chinese firms such as Huawei overseas.
The impact of these laws is clear. Tesla, Apple and others have opted to build dedicated Chinese data centers — sometimes in partnership with Chinese state entities, lest they lose access to the large Chinese consumer market. Goldman Sachs faced pressure against sending memos to its U.S. headquarters.
Beijing’s recent actions complement its longstanding efforts to buy, steal and otherwise acquire data from foreign sources worldwide. Beijing hacks multinational corporate databases. It runs “talent recruitment” programs at foreign universities and firms. It buys foreign companies, such as an Italian maker of military drones. It funds its own data-driven start-ups in open foreign markets like Silicon Valley.
“Our strategic competitors see big data as a strategic asset,” the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said this summer, “and we have to see it the same way.”
This is clear and compelling language. But data did not appear to be high on Mr. Biden’s agenda with Mr. Xi, judging from official readouts of the summit.
And to date, U.S. policy remedies are idle and insufficient.
In June, the administration issued an executive order embracing a new regulatory process to restrict cross-border data flows on national security grounds. But the new process hasn’t yet been put to use — not against Chinese drones, Chinese access to U.S. data centers and biotech labs, or other potential targets.
In the meantime, U.S. diplomats’ and trade negotiators’ engagement on data issues is dominated by bitter fights with European regulators over privacy rules for American tech giants. The far greater threat from Beijing goes largely unaddressed.
In recent months, Mr. Xi has cracked down on private Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, forcing them to relinquish their data troves to state-controlled third parties. This crackdown, which helped erase more than $1 trillion in market value, will make these companies less innovative now that they no longer control their data.
But banking on Chinese authoritarian overreach to preserve America’s edge is no strategy.
Democratic allies must also work together to promote data sharing among themselves while limiting flows to China. A blueprint was introduced by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. This idea, called Data Free Flow With Trust, ought to become allied policy.
2021 m. lapkričio 30 d., antradienis
Who Is the Most Powerful Data Broker in the World?
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