Matthew Gould is former U.K. director general for digital policy and now advises technology and data analytics firms.
President Donald Trump is probably not that interested in sub-terahertz frequency allocations or IMT-2030 specifications. But he should be. These are two of the technical standards that the world will soon live by. At the moment, Beijing is making sure they are written for China’s advantage rather than the West’s.
IMT-2030 is the official global framework for 6G, the next generation of mobile communication. Sub-terahertz frequencies are the ultrafast airwaves that 6G will use. Even those who recognize the jargon are likely to see the issues as technical details to be thrashed out in Geneva committee rooms.
The Trump administration has gone for quick results in its dealings with China regarding technology, using tools such as tariffs, semiconductor export controls and summits. Beijing is playing a more patient game. Across multiple U.S. administrations, China has been capturing the international bodies that write the global standards for technology.
While Western countries and firms arrive to standards negotiations each pursuing their own narrow advantages, China has corralled its companies and allies behind a tight national agenda. Before long, Western nations are likely to find themselves paying licensing royalties to Chinese companies and using infrastructure designed to achieve Beijing’s security goals.
6G is not simply going to be faster 5G. Phones will act as radar networks, capable of tracking movement, objects and environment in real time. Artificial intelligence will be built into network architecture to manage traffic and process data. The standards for integrated sensing and AI-native architecture will determine where encryption happens, how metadata is treated and whether there are back doors for states to access that data. The fact that China is setting standards matters a great deal.
This will not be the first time that Beijing done so. China holds crucial leadership roles within the International Telecommunications Union setting specifications for quantum key distribution, a cutting-edge cryptographic security technology. It secured the leadership of the union’s working group on smart cities, shaping global frameworks for municipal cloud networks that aggregate law enforcement, traffic and sensor data — architectures that Chinese vendors have exported to cities across Europe and Asia. Chinese tech firms wrote many of the global standards for biometrics and facial recognition, standardizing surveillance features, such as automated skin-tone indexing, to match China’s values rather than Western ones. The State Grid Corporation of China gained control of committees at the International Electrotechnical Commission, writing the global specifications for high-voltage power grids and forcing electricity companies across the world to buy components engineered to Chinese standards.
Standards for high-speed rail systems, rare earth separation and testing, cross-border digital currency settlement, lithium batteries — all are now being set in Beijing. The threat goes beyond who gets to write the rule book. Technical standards include mandatory “standard essential patents,” and when China sets the rules, it makes sure the technology under patent is owned by Chinese state-backed firms. Meeting global 6G specifications will mean paying royalties to Shenzhen and Beijing — or, for cash-strapped developing nations, buying Chinese hardware. This is already the case for 5G.
China has gotten this far thanks to its China Standards 2035 vision, created to reverse what Beijing saw as the West’s use of standards to constrain Chinese economic development.
First, China incentivizes its firms to submit and win proposals for technical standards in international bodies. Cities such as Shenzhen and Shanghai pay substantial cash sums for each technical standard achieved.
Second, it floods technical meetings with massive delegations submitting hundreds of amendments to texts, wearing down working groups until Chinese intellectual property is incorporated into global standards.
Third, China places allies across the international bodies that set the standards. From 2015 to 2022, Chinese official Zhao Houlin was secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union, during which time its mandate expanded into areas previously governed by more decentralized, multi-stakeholder internet bodies.
Finally, Chinese companies and officials present a united front. By contrast, there is little coordination between Western governments — and outright competition between Western companies. At the International Telecommunications Union, European telecom providers such as Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica have pushed for standards to enforce “fair share” payments from content providers to cover the cost of increased web traffic. U.S. tech companies — including Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon (whose executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post) — have lobbied against the proposal, saying it undermines net neutrality. Through neglect rather than intent, the countries that believe in tech as a force for freedom are losing a tech war that they barely know they are fighting.
If the West wants to win the war for the future of technology, then it must match China’s determination, strategy and unity. This is far from impossible: In 2020, an unusually coordinated effort led to the election of Daren Tang, a Singaporean, as director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, over the Chinese candidate, Wang Binying, to preserve the organization’s market-driven approach.
But one-off successes are nowhere near sufficient. Western countries must create mechanisms for sustained coordination between governments, allied nations and companies. Most of all, the West will need the political will to prioritize strategic unity over short-term profit, before it wakes up to a world where developing nations are locked into Beijing’s hardware and the West has become a rule-taker in technology it invented.