The announcement is written in the style of a cybersecurity firm that has uncovered a major hacking network and is here to dutifully report current events while, by the way, offering cyber defense services. In other words, there is the news and then there is the message. Here, there is also the context of a company at odds with the US administration.

The news is that Anthropic says its “terms of service and regional access restrictions” were violated in service of “distillation” efforts, where the outputs of one model are used in the training of another.1 That’s a fair complaint for a company that has strong views on proper, safe use of its technology and is in a very competitive market. The company provides interesting and informative details about the types and volume of the detected activity. has a good read this morning about what it all means and doesn’t mean from a technical perspective.

For me the message is more interesting. The title calls the efforts “attacks,” though there is no indication of service disruption or data breach. The moral valence of the language— “attacks,” “illicit,” “fraudulent,” “threat”—aligns with the company’s broader stance that Chinese AI labs must be constrained lest their capabilities empower a geopolitical rival and authoritarian rights abuses.

The context of Anthropic’s policy advocacy with the US government is distinctive and important for the company. During my conversations in Washington last week with people in government, research, and corporate roles, the company’s voice kept coming up, favorably and unfavorably. The current stakes are especially high. Axios reported yesterday Pentagon officials have called in CEO Dario Amodei with a $200 billion contract in question. “This is not a friendly meeting,” a DOD source reportedly said. “This is a sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting.” Earlier, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reportedly threatened to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk.

So what is Anthropic’s message, amidst these high stakes?

• Under “why distillation matters,” the company argues “national security risks” result from lack of safeguards in models produced through the disclosed type of activity. They invoke “bioweapons” or “malicious cyber attacks.” Anthropic earlier announced that it had attributed use of Claude Code for cyber offense to a “Chinese state-sponsored group.”

• They raise the possibility of “enabling authoritarian governments to deploy frontier AI for offensive cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and mass surveillance.” More national security plus some human rights.

• If models are “open-sourced,” they write, “this risk multiplies.” Anthropic wants advanced models to be closed.

• Amidst distillation, “the apparently rapid advancements made by these labs are incorrectly taken as evidence that export controls are ineffective and able to be circumvented by innovation.” Anthropic is widely seen as a key advocate for export controls targeting China, and they seek to refute arguments that the controls don’t work.

What their message isn’t:

• Anthropic doesn’t emphasize the potential rise of competitors if distillation contributes to useful products in the same market.

• They do not emphasize theft of intellectual property or industrial secrets. (Perhaps this is because AI companies are not exactly morally pure on the IP front?)

In sum, the message is that Anthropic cares about national security and human rights, and, in service of this, wants the most capable models closed-source while maintaining export controls designed to prevent Chinese labs from meeting or exceeding US labs’ capabilities. And they portray themselves, accurately in my perception of the field, as a leader in this worldview—talking about “intelligence sharing” with other labs.

I find myself asking here about the mixture of a principled stance vs. strategic communication. On the principled side: Whether one agrees or not with the principles—and many disagree from many angles—there’s a lot of continuity here. Anthropic and Amodei have long been vocal about their view of safety and the geopolitical valences of AI. On the strategic side, it’s reasonable to ask if the national security and “attack” language was tuned or timed to ease the Pentagon discussions. At the same time, in “what their message isn’t” above, we see a foregone opportunity to pander to a skeptical administration where influential factions care about US firms leading AI globally. The company simply doesn’t make this about its own, or the country’s, bottom line—a frame that has been useful for others projecting alignment with the US government against China.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a lecturer and research scholar at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

Monthly: Back when this publication was U.S.–China Week, from 2015–18, the weekly rhythm was designed to keep me current and prompt distilled thinking through writing. This time, monthly will be enough.

Keep it brief: With the popularization of newsletters/the return of the blog, there is too much quality material. Reading through the excellent offerings, I see writers unleashed. The good news is we have more, better-informed voices digging and thinking than before the Twitter diaspora and the Substack hustle—maybe better than the blogosphere before tweets shrank our time horizons and attention spans. The bad news is that writers unleashed are often also writers un-edited (or LLM-edited) and undisciplined in terms of length. Brevity will take longer, but it will hopefully make things easier for readers and require me to think more clearly. My target will be 500–800 words, with a hard stop at 1,000.

While I’m making commitments, I might as well say that LLM products do not and will not touch my prose. I absolutely use them to surface source material, but just as with a search engine, the reading and characterizations—however flawed—are my own.

The first piece in fulfillment of this commitment is coming soon. For now, a very happy Year of the Horse (and 2026) to all!1

About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a lecturer and research scholar at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

I’ve gathered some insights over the years, in significant part from discussions in academic or think tank settings that happened under Chatham House Rule or other restrictive ground rules. I wanted to understand more of the story and share it, because I believe that while it was widely reported and discussed, people often don’t know why this happened and certainly don’t get much of how. It turns out to be a pretty dramatic story—a small group of policy entrepreneurs with a then-rare focus on national security and AI join with a US-China tech thicket already under way and get something big done at what counts as light speed for Washington.

Today, after interviews with more than 10 former officials and experts, WIRED published my attempt to get the basics of the story out there. Some sources I had heard from in private settings, and I asked if they’d speak with me for this story. Others I reached out to for the first time, and they agreed. I’m grateful for all the time and insights they shared and expect more work to come out of this.

For now, head over to WIRED and check out the story.

Final note: Before I was whatever combination of scholar and wonk and writer I am now, I was a journalism major. And before that I was a tech enthusiast. It was a blast and a dream to work with WIRED on this, and I’m grateful to all the editors who had a hand in the piece, especially Louise Matsakis, who took the chance.

Now I hope you’ll all read and tell me what I’ve got right and (hopefully minimally) wrong, and what else you’d like to understand about this.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

For the Tech Policy Press podcast, I spoke with Editor Justin Hendrix. Listen and read the transcript at their site:

https://www.techpolicy.press/unpacking-chinas-global-ai-governance-plan/

Here’s TPP’s intro:

On Saturday, July 26, three days after the Trump administration published its AI action plan, China’s foreign ministry released that country’s action plan for global AI governance. As the US pursues “global dominance,” China is communicating a different posture. What should we know about China’s plan, and how does it contrast with the US plan? What's at stake in the competition between the two superpowers?

To answer these questions, I reached out to a close observer of China's tech policy. Graham Webster is a lecturer and research scholar at Stanford University in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and he is the Editor-in-Chief of the DigiChina Project, a "collaborative effort to analyze and understand Chinese technology policy developments through direct engagement with primary sources, providing analysis, context, translation, and expert opinion." Webster attended the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. I spoke to him right after his return.

If you’re interested in timely and often critical views of the tech and AI policy landscape, you’ll certainly want to subscribe to their podcast. Meanwhile, let me know what you think about this one!

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

“China thought it had a truce with the US. Then Trump dropped two bombshells,” says a CNN headline writer. “Export controls are endangering the fragile US-China truce,” says NYT. says “US-China Geneva ‘détente’ may be breaking” and then rightly comments that “the ‘détente’ is not really a détente and, whatever it is, it is very fragile.”

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The Geneva deal, at the basic level, was not a “truce” but a unilateral US retreat met with a removal of Chinese retaliatory measures. Trump backed down on the tariff front in specific, and the Chinese government pledged to remove its tit-for-tat measures responding to unilateral US moves. That’s it. Neither side got anything else except an agreement to talk more.

Other policies dating to the first Trump administration and the Biden administration that put US-China economic ties, especially in tech, on a perilous footing remain untouched. Among them:

—Chip controls. The United States maintains and continues to tighten export controls that seek to hold back Chinese development in AI among other endeavors. Sources that suggested the Trump administration might not continue tightening chip controls for AI turned out to be wrong. That was before Geneva. The joint statement following Geneva said nothing about rolling back or pausing this kind of thing, and it should be no surprise that the US government reportedly took another step on semiconductor design software this week. Bottom line: The ratchet forward of US efforts to stymie China’s advanced computing sector, a major irritant to China that even US observers have called a “declaration of economic war,” continues apace.

—Critical minerals. It was never clear what if any restrictions on the export of critical minerals or rare earths to the United States China would reverse or pause as part of the Geneva deal. The joint statement said China would “suspend or remove the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2, 2025.” This might include the April 4 export restrictions on rare earths, but those measures could just as well be understood to be responses not to US tariffs but to the older, ongoing, and not-suspended chip controls. They don’t seem to have been removed, and it was never clear this was part of the deal. Meanwhile, China’s 2024 ban on gallium, germanium, and antimony exports to the United States is obviously out of scope and still intact. Bottom line: China isn’t giving up on weaponizing a bit of interdependence back at the United States as the Trump administration continues down Biden’s road on tech controls. US strategists won’t and shouldn’t stop worrying about mineral supplies.

Then you have the general, continuing US-based shocks to bilateral ties. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the United States would start “aggressively” revoking visas for Chinese students, he escalated Chinese citizens’ personal safety and everyday life concerns. AP reports that in the ‘23–24 school year, 270,000 Chinese students were studying in the United States. That’s a lot of people back home one- or two-degrees separated from someone who at minimum fears their future plans could be upturned at any time.

They can take no comfort from zero-credibility modifiers in Rubio’s announcement, noting they’d target Communist Party links or “critical fields.” Capricious, sloppy, illegal operations against non-citizens are a hallmark of the Trump administration, and Rubio personally owns the abuse of power to target individuals based on false characterizations and protected speech. It is fully rational for every Chinese student in the United States now to fear being taken off the street by masked “homeland security” agents at random.

This is a new US escalation that builds momentum toward full decoupling and comprehensive rivalry, with no braking mechanism in sight. But it has nothing to do with the unilateral tariff retreat the US made in Geneva.

There was no US-China truce. If markets and pundits can’t see past panicked Trump administration efforts to obscure their direction of travel and keep it off balance sheets, that’s their problem.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

On May 1 I wrote that “it feels a bit much to say China’s government ‘appears ready for trade talks.’” I was objecting to reports that read between the lines of two Chinese government–linked social media posts and identified an apparent opening. So it is fair to say, after the Switzerland meetings between US and Chinese officials and today’s joint statement (en, zh) on a partially-temporary reduction in tariffs: Didn’t see that coming!

What happened

The concrete outcomes of the Geneva meetings are limited but significant:

• The two governments each committed to lower tariffs and then establish “a mechanism to continue discussions (协商) about economic and trade relations” led by Vice Premier He Lifeng on the Chinese side and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the US side. There is no timetable for this mechanism, and it is explicitly noted that working level contacts may also continue.

• The US commitment to lower tariffs comes in two parts:

  • A 24% decrease that is to be effective for 90 days.

  • A 91% decrease that, according to the plain language of the joint statement, is permanent. This is composed of removing a 50% hike from April 8 and a 41% hike from April 9 during the tit-for-tat period last month.

  • (A 20% tariff Trump imposed citing the fentanyl issue, and 10% of the April tariffs remain, for a total of 30%.)

• The Chinese commitment to lower tariffs is parallel (indeed, unlike the original US action, it is reciprocal in the conventional, non-Trumpian meaning of the word):

  • A 24% decrease that is to be effective for 90 days.

  • A permanent elimination of a 50% hike from April 9 and a 41% hike from April 11.

  • China additionally agrees to remove or suspend unenumerated non-tariff countermeasures since April 2.

  • (A 10% reciprocal tariff remains.)

So the two sides cut overall tariffs by 91% in both directions and, for a period of 90 days, cut them 24% further. That 24% appears to be ready to “snap back” in mid-August.

Some things I seem to have gotten wrong, and right

(1) Attitude problem. I argued that China’s message was that negotiations would be possible when the US side showed a different attitude. I didn’t think that was happening, and, though I didn’t put it in my post, I did’t think it was about to happen. I certainly didn’t see it coming that Trump would publicly state that (lower but still very high) 80% tariffs “seem[] right,” but in many ways this public back-off before the high-level meetings may have fulfilled a Chinese desire to see concessions before any talks. After the Trump 80% statement, it seemed a lot more likely talks were coming. But I also failed to anticipated that the US administration would back off as far as it did.

(2) Word games about “talks,” “negotiations,” “dialogue.” In discussing Chinese denials of US statements that talks were under way, I wrote, “My hunch has been that there are indeed talks between US and Chinese government officials, but from the Chinese perspective these are working-level conversations about the logistics and conditions of potential future negotiations.” This seems to have been right.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson and others repeatedly made variations of a statement that “[d]ialogue and negotiations (对话谈判) must be equal, respectful, and mutually beneficial.” Neither the joint statement nor China’s Commerce Ministry statement refer to the Geneva meeting as “negotiations,” but the Commerce Ministry does characterize them as “equal dialogue and consultations” (平等对话协商). Here I think I was basically right, though I hadn’t foreseen the US side making concessions that would make the Chinese side call their dialogue “equal.”

(3) Chinese side less petty than expected. I wrote that US public statements that talks were ongoing while, probably, they were being negotiated would likely “piss off” Chinese diplomats. I’m pretty sure I was right about that! My embedded assumption, however, was that this would be a barrier to getting something like the Geneva meeting, and there I was wrong.

What have I learned?

In addition to a reminder that I don’t like predicting things and might do well to be more careful in that regard, I have learned:

• When goes all caps in a headline, he might be right, even if it seems flimsy to me based on the available text!

• Don’t take prideful public statements by the Chinese government OR Trump’s US administration at face value. (Duh, though I apparently need to be reminded that some texts do not gain value with close reading!)

• The economic pain and political consequences of total US-China economic decoupling appear to be too much for either government to bear, even if backing away from the brink makes them look weaker. (This is especially true for the Trump team, who retreated from rash moves with ZERO public concessions from the Chinese side. China only reversed retaliatory measures and changed nothing else.) Trump et al. appear to have fought to get the Chinese side to the table.

• The Chinese government never said they wouldn’t talk, only that there had to be vague appropriate conditions. The Trump team appears to have been willing to walk through that door.

• Speculation about bilateral conversations where I have no inside information is messy.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

I could be wrong, so to quickly present some of the cases people have made:

• , a former Xinhua staffer who then went on to the Beijing think tank Center for China and Globalization and is now a Princeton graduate student, writes in his newsletter that “CHINA APPEARS READY FOR TRADE TALKS WITH U.S.”
  
  He cites the Yuyuan Tantian post on Weibo, the contents of which I’ll discuss below. He also cites the “Chairman Rabbit” social media account, which is less/not authoritative but more directly supportive of talks.

• A trio of good reporters from the FT report the Yuyuan Tantian post as a “gesture” and lead with “Chinese state media has said there would be ‘no harm’ in holding trade talks with the Trump administration, indicating a softening of Beijing’s position as both sides look for a way out of their crushing tariff war.” They quote Wang, as well as Trivium China’s Andrew Polk, who I take quite seriously as an analyst.
  
  “By painting the US as the more eager, more anxious, more pressured party they are trying to portray themselves as coming from a place of strength,” Polk tells FT. “This should play well with the domestic audience and give them cover to start negotiations.”

The quotes both of these (among others) picked out from Yuyuan Tantian do seem to support the idea that there’s a Chinese government olive branch here. Here’s the original and FT’s translations:

• “但是美国如果希望同中国接触，现阶段对中国来说也没有坏处”
  “But if the US wishes to engage with China, there’s no harm in it for China at this stage”

• “谈，大门敞开，打，奉陪到底。”
  “If it is talks, the door is wide open. If it is a fight, we’ll see it through to the end.”

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Context gets in the way, for me

So why do I feel a bit hesitant? When I opened the underlying piece from Yuyuan Tantian, I found a relatively haughty piece that spends most of its time talking about how screwed the Americans are after Trump’s gambit, how the markets have been displeased, and how the administration has had trouble reaching deals even with more friendly governments.

The attitude is, as Polk suggests, one where the Trump people keep pathetically reaching out to talk, but honestly there’s not much to talk about unless they can get their head straight and clean up the mess they’ve unilaterally made.

In that context, it feels a bit much to say China’s government “appears ready for trade talks” based on one post by a popular audience-focused voice at the margins of authoritative state media and another by a prominent individual whose voice only carries any weight as an indication of government views because, in being allowed to be a prominent commentator on sensitive issues, they logically must have some coordination with propaganda/censorship authorities.

I got even more skeptical when I went to compare this language with the government’s prior position. Assuming today’s messages are a government signal, the relevant contrast is with official government denials that talks were under way, even as Trump insisted they were. On March 24, we have this excerpt from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing (my translation):

凤凰卫视记者：近来美方不断有消息称，中美之间正在谈判，甚至将达成协议。你能否证实双方有没有开始谈判？

Phoenix TV journalist: The US side recently keeps saying China and the US are in negotiations, and even that they will reach an agreement. Can you confirm whether the two sides have started negotiations?

郭嘉昆：这些都是假消息。据我了解，中美双方并没有就关税问题进行磋商或谈判，更谈不上达成协议。

Guo Jiakun [MFA Spokesperson]: This is all fake news. According to my understanding, China and the US have not engaged in consultations or negotiations on the tariff issue, let alone have they reached an agreement

这场关税战是美方发起的，中方的态度是一贯的也是明确的：***打，奉陪到底；谈，大门敞开。*** 对话谈判必须是平等、尊重、互惠的。

This tariff war was started by the US side, and the Chinese side’s position is consistent and clear: ***If it’s a fight, we’ll see it through to the end. If it’s talks, the door is wide open.*** Dialogue and negotiations must be equal, respectful, and mutually beneficial.

Does the quote I bolded above look familiar? That’s because it’s the very same language people are interpreting as an olive branch—except it originally appeared in China’s most vociferous denial of US suggestions that talks were under way. (I reused FT’s translation to emphasize that it’s the same.)

That wasn’t the last time MFA denied US statements that contacts were ongoing. On March 28, after Trump told Time Xi had called him, the spokesperson said, “According to my understanding, the two leaders have not spoken recently.”

What’s going on here?

My hunch has been that there are indeed talks between US and Chinese government officials, but from the Chinese perspective these are working-level conversations about the logistics and conditions of potential future negotiations. The MFA language does not deny that there’s any contact between the US and Chinese governments. “Negotiations” or 谈判 are likely regarded as an official meeting on a particular matter, rather than some diplomat’s contact with some staffer on the conditions for such a meeting.

It would be utterly consistent with the Trump administration’s general dishonesty to either fabricate talks completely or embellish working level logistics calls where the Chinese side says “no talks until you get your head right” into “talks.” But that kind of public embellishment would predictably piss off Chinese diplomats, who would resort to language like “fake news” and strong denials to counter it.

Nothing about the social media posts reported today substantially changes my hunch here, though—as always—I could be wrong. That said, my basic interpretation is that the governments very likely have been talking about how to talk for weeks—just that one of them doesn’t want to talk about it.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

On Bluesky, NPR’s Bobby Allyn confirmed: “all sides agreed on a TikTok deal, but after tariffs, China indicated to ByteDance it would not be signing off on the agreement. I’m told China will be holding deal hostage until they can extract some kind of concessions.”

Allyn has more: “The deal was structured to allow BD to own and maintain TikTok's algorithm. The new U.S. entity was set to license the algorithm from BD.,” Allyn wrote. “Was thought this would circumvent export-control laws, which are open to Beijing's interpretation. In wake of tariffs, China changed its stance on this.”

A few thoughts.

1. This makes it clear that, despite Trump styling himself as the dealmaker, “all sides” includes the Chinese government. No path forward is unobstructed without their consent.

2. It’s important to maintain a healthy skepticism about how close a deal really was, if Chinese government sign-off was not locked. Anyone who was saying it was done or nearly done—their versions of events need to be properly discounted.

3. If dealmakers thought they were going to avoid Chinese government scrutiny by licensing, rather than purchasing or transferring, the algorithm, they are not as clever as they thought they were. Much attention has been paid to the inclusion of recommendation algorithms on a catalogue of items that may be subject to export controls.1 But this specific legal mechanism is not the crucial point. China’s government has both legal and extralegal tools at its disposal to stop any deal if it wishes.

   1. There are probably even more direct legal levers I’m not thinking of, but another one comes to mind. The Data Security Law in Article 26 states that “the PRC may take reciprocal measures” against any country that “adopts discriminatory prohibitions, restrictions, or other similar measures against the PRC relevant to investment, trade, etc., in data, data development and use technology, etc.” What is a discriminatory prohibition, restriction, etc.? That’s up to the state. What kind of reciprocal measures might be taken? Unspecified. This is a provision sitting there to hit back when China’s government judges that it has been hit and using this provision would be convenient. There are others.

   2. Meanwhile, legal or not, ByteDance knows it can’t just disregard the state’s preferences if it wants to keep making gobs of money. See what happened to AliPay when Jack Ma resisted the state’s financial regulatory vision, or to DiDi when it went forward with an IPO after being told not to. Chinese firms are not all arms of the party-state, contrary to popular DC talking points, but they are subject to party-state’s exercise of power, legally or otherwise.

4. Meanwhile, back in the swamp, licensing an algorithm maintained by ByteDance, as recently noted, appears to be a flagrant violation of the TikTok divest-or-ban law. The “qualified divestiture” that the president must determine has happened to avoid the ban “precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between the United States operations of the relevant foreign adversary controlled application … including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” Pretty darn clear.

   1. In this whole discussion, the definition of an algorithm, or a “content generation algorithm” or a “personalized information push service technology based on data analysis” is vague. The specific architecture of the MacGuffin in this drama really does matter. I think it’s unlikely, but if the “algorithm” were frozen in time and licensed, never to be updated by ByteDance but never getting “exported,” maybe they would have found their hack. (It’s beyond my knowledge and the scope of this post to assess whether licensing would count as an export, but I do welcome experts to weigh in!) Anyway, Chinese government leverage discussed in item 3 above would still be present.

   2. It’s a US legal expert question what kind of risk Apple and Google and TikTok’s infrastructure vendors would be exposed to if they move forward in violation of the letter of the law but with explicit presidential blessing. But it still seems pretty risky to me, given the capriciousness of this president and the fact that, generally, we do change presidents in the United States.

5. If somehow a deal like the one being described goes through, US government oversight on the algorithmic manipulation and data security risks motivating the law will likely be less than would have occurred under Project Texas. We never got full details, but the proposal as reported by people who were briefed by TikTok included a bunch of government auditing and supervisory structures.

Whatever happens with TikTok, whether a deal goes through contrary to the law, or even if a ban is enacted or a truly “qualified divestiture” takes place, this whole saga will at best have only addressed the national security, privacy, and algorithmic manipulations of one app. Threats to US users’ privacy, bad behavior in the market, national security where it is implicated—the whole range of TikTok concerns and more—remain broadly unaddressed if the app at issue is not TikTok. Thats why, for years, I and others have advocated a regulatory approach that covers all services.

That’s all for now. Signing off for the weekend.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

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They frame the essay in a way that pushes my buttons, arguing this “may mark the end of the dream of a global Internet, in which everyone shares the same services.” The Internet, of course, is a constellation of computer systems connected by specific protocols—not the dominance of specific companies. As they acknowledge, there can still be a global Internet without satisfying a CEO’s dream of global revenue and market share. This pet peeve of mine aside, they describe well a shift among CEOs from portraying their dream in terms of the liberating power of technology to embracing geopolitical competition or nationalism.

Reading the essay made me think of another dream under threat.

The dream of a coalition of techno-democracies

Mainly during the Biden era, strategists advocated for a coalition of techno-democracies to counterbalance China and a potential bloc of techno-autocracies. At Foreign Affairs in 2021, Justin Sherman and I wrote skeptically of this idea and in support of a techno-globalism we already believed was under threat: “Embracing a trend toward politically delineated technological ecosystems,” we wrote, “will undermine the open ethos that fuels and benefits freer societies—and bolster the top-down, controlling ethos favored by repressive regimes.” We rather idealistically (dreamily?) argued that the global reach of US firms led to a global responsibility: “Cyber-utopians once dreamed of liberation spreading from an Ethernet cable; now Washington must ensure that its companies don’t spread exploitation and insecurity instead.” In our view, the US government needed to rein in its own tech firms in alignment with democracy and human rights to avoid bad outcomes both at home and abroad. The context would be inescapably global.

The Biden administration pushed hard to foster democratic solidarity, including leading “The Declaration for the Future of the Internet,” which had global ambitions but was announced with 60+ exclusively democratic partners. The declaration contained some laudable principles, but they were never seriously applied to discipline US firms in the way Justin and I would have hoped. The Biden administration never resolved a tension between reining in big tech and unleashing it to beat China.

Now the world is also trending away from the vision of a techno-democratic coalition, which although never achieving its highest ideals was not without strategic importance. As the US government turned decisively to “weaponize interdependence” (in Farrell and Newman’s memorable coinage) it became more important to the United States to bring some allies along, and it became more likely China would further its own weaponization of supply chains, which was once mostly a matter of what-ifs. Some key allies were crucial in reaching what may end up marking the high point of this techno-democratic alignment, when the Biden administration successfully put the screws to Japanese and Dutch officials to deny China access to semiconductor manufacturing equipment after unilateral US controls introduced in 2022. US strategists believed it was so important to hold China back in advanced computing and artificial intelligence that they pushed through ground-breaking export controls. Nearly everyone believed the effort would be self-defeating without others’ help, but the United States got that help—for now.

Going forward, it is reasonable to expect that China’s government will leverage its position in ways that will require even more coordination to withstand. So the big question is not just whether Meta and Alphabet get hosed in the European market—potentially a rather small economic or political matter compared to the effects of tariffs announced this week. The question is whether countries that, due to their regime type, are putatively natural US allies will be less likely to lend a hand in the future. Thinking pragmatically, could an unreliable United States have created for itself a more determined Chinese competitor, one that can make more credible assurances to erstwhile US allies? Thinking from a stance of democratic solidarity, will governments view a US government that increasingly sides with Russia against Ukraine and thrashes rule of law as a member of the democratic club, an enabler of autocratic power, or something else entirely?

No one can reliably predict macro geopolitical events at this stage, so the take-away has to be uncertainty. But the uncertainty can be a reminder of frames to question when they come back around. When policy advocates talk about democracy vs. autocracy, it cannot be assumed where the United States as a country or the political regime controlling its government stands. When people call for the development of “democratic AI,” it cannot be assumed that systems from the United States or controlled by US actors are in any meaningful sense democratic. If a self-styled coalition of “democracies” includes the United States, it behooves us to ask what actually is the commonality unifying the group.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

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Former US President Joe Biden left office with an urgent warning about the power of money and the technology industry. In his farewell speech, Biden said that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America” and compared the concentration of wealth and power to the 20th-century robber barons. It was a general warning with broad resonance, but Biden was not done, and he turned specifically to the dangers of the tech industry.

He invoked perhaps the most famous presidential farewell since Washington—Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of an emerging “military-industrial complex” and the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

“Six decades later,” Biden said, “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.” He expressed concerns about misinformation and disinformation, alluded (without naming names) to Meta’s announcement that it was ending fact-checking in the US, and called for “hold[ing] the social platforms accountable.”

In the next breath, however, Biden turned into a nervous cheerleader for those very platforms, at least the ones that develop AI. “Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it,” Biden said. “But unless safeguards are in place, AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation. We must make sure AI is safe and trustworthy and good for all humankind.”

Biden’s hedging, citing both great potential and grave risks, finally gave way to a clear statement in support of US AI development: “In the age of AI, it’s more important than ever that the people must govern. And as the land of liberty, America—not China—must lead the world on the development of AI.”

In just a 10-paragraph passage of his speech, Biden brought forward two visions of technology that both flowed through his presidency. On one hand, reining in the power of tech platforms and beginning to erect safeguards around AI development was a major theme. In this vision, technology and capital run amok could harm individuals, markets, and security. On the other hand, the Biden administration took extraordinary measures through its last days to ensure US technology and the associated centers of capital are ahead of their Chinese counterparts. In this vision, especially in AI fields, the US must empower tech companies and encumber Chinese competitors to ensure democracy, prosperity, and national security.

These ideas are not entirely incompatible. One can favor certain limits on tech platforms while seeking to enable their innovations through light regulation or direct support. In their application, however, these visions conflict when it comes to how to treat companies and the wealthy individuals connected to them.

A vision identifying unchecked social media platforms as threats to democracy and abusers of market power animated the Federal Trade Commission under Biden-appointed Chair Lina Khan and antitrust enforcers in the Department of Justice. The business model that profits from gathering intrusive data on users and leveraging it for ad targeting or outright sale has never been under such frontal attack in the US. Corporate and investor interests were so unhappy with this thrust from the administration that some reportedly lobbied Vice President Kamala Harris to oust Khan if she became president. It was a kind of tech populism wrapped in hotshot lawyering, and it drew enthusiastic support from digital rights supporters and figures on the left. Even some on the right broke with pro-corporate GOP norms to support Khan’s aggressive approach.

Meanwhile, the Biden team put a great deal of energy into another of its tech visions, the need to build and maintain as wide a lead as possible over China in “force multiplier” sectors, including semiconductors, quantum, AI, biotech, and clean energy. When National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan presented this case in 2022, he did so at a conference organized by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a subsidiary of the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation. Eric Schmidt, of course, is a former CEO of Google and an important policy entrepreneur advocating for greater US government attention to the national security implications of AI and tech competition with China, among numerous other projects. He is also an active investor in AI companies. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who must be understood as one of Biden’s targets in criticizing the social platforms, also has for years cited competition with China as a reason not to, in his view, over-regulate US platforms. Meta reportedly lobbied quietly but doggedly to ban its Chinese-owned competitor TikTok.

These billionaires are not the only advocates for a strong competitive stance toward China, and their policy stances are not unique to those with vested interests. Concern about Chinese technological power is widespread, especially among people who believe AI systems may soon vastly outstrip human capabilities and revolutionize military power. China’s offensive cyber operations, disclosed by the Biden administration, underline the degree of tech-related peril the US faces in the event of large-scale conflict, and Sullivan’s “force multiplier” frame for key technologies is not without merit. At the same time, there is an unavoidable tension between warning of a tech-industrial complex and advancing policies that are developed with the support of tech moguls and stand to benefit their bottom lines.

The administration’s approach to AI is another example of this tension. Biden’s centerpiece action was the executive order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” which incorporated thinking from critics who have long identified abuses of machine learning and other automated systems, as well as concerns that preoccupy many of the technology’s boosters, namely that future AI systems could bring about catastrophic risks. The order sought to ready the government for an AI era, and substantial work went into developing safety testing for AI models. Yet the administration did not take or even strongly advocate binding action to rein in discrimination, bias, or violations of privacy or intellectual property rights. Top executives from developers of large AI models advised the administration and participated in voluntary commitments, but they remained free from substantial binding regulations or safeguards.

The concrete outcomes from these competing visions are broadly in question as the new administration unfolds. President Trump immediately rescinded the AI executive order, Khan is out as FTC chair, and the fate of the Biden administration’s export controls targeting China’s semiconductor industry is uncertain. There was no apparent concern about a tech-industrial complex on Inauguration Day in the Capitol Rotunda, where multiple tech billionaires were seated in front of Trump’s Cabinet nominees.

Like the World War II General Eisenhower, the elder statesman Biden has seen the tensions behind his warning first hand. With luck, Biden’s warning will be more successful than Eisenhower’s.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

Reminder: Thanks for reading. Please don’t hesitate to share reactions or objections with me directly or on Bluesky, and please consider sharing with interested friends and colleagues. If you haven’t subscribed, sign up here for my ongoing work to understand the interplay of US-China relations, technology, and climate. If you especially wish to support this work and have the means, please consider a paid subscription.

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1. The Court’s choice to ignore the divest-or-ban proponents’ concerns about information manipulation may be legally sound, but it isn’t good history.

Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or a freedom of expression scholar, and although I have spent a great deal of time surrounded by lawyers and law professors, I’m an advanced amateur and welcome correction. (I think I have this bit right, though.)

In order to judge whether the First Amendment should block the TikTok divest-or-ban bill, the Court needed to decide whether to apply “strict scrutiny” or “intermediate scrutiny” to the law’s provisions. Under strict scrutiny, among other things, precedent would call for the government’s goals to be accomplished with the “least restrictive” means in terms of limits on speech in order to be constitutional. Under intermediate scrutiny, the law merely need not “burden substantially more speech than is necessary” to advance those goals.1

The lower court assumed strict scrutiny applied and decided the law passed muster. SCOTUS instead applied intermediate scrutiny. In doing so it said “the challenged provisions are facially content neutral and are justified by a content-neutral rationale” (10). This matters because applying intermediate scrutiny frees the Court from evaluating whether the law is the least speech-restrictive option for achieving government goals. Concretely, this means the justices can ignore the question of whether a law mandating something like Project Texas—which would have installed controls on user data and algorithm management at TikTok US ultimately overseen by the US government—would have addressed the goal of protecting national security.

The Court makes a pretty slick move to apply only the lower standard. First, it reasonably argues that one of the two driving concerns behind the law is content neutral: protecting US user data from possible Chinese government access. Second, it dodges the question of whether the other main concern is content neutral: the risk that China’s government might manipulate feeds for propaganda or information interference goals by pressuring TikTok’s Chinese parent company or its employees. The Court simply declares the second justification is irrelevant, ignoring its much more content-related logic—therefore avoiding applying strict scrutiny.

To eject the feed manipulation concern from their analysis, the justices assert that “Congress would have passed the challenged provisions based on the data collection justification alone” (18) On Bluesky, University of Chicago Law School Professor Genevieve Lakier wrote that this “gives govts space to whitewash bad content-based motivations by tacking on plausible-sounding content-neutral ones.”

I’ll leave that to legal experts, but I do have something to say about the argument itself that the law would have passed and been signed without the further propaganda concern. As someone who has watched the TikTok ban story closely for nearly five years, this does not sound like a strong argument. Indeed, while both data protection and algorithmic manipulation fears have been present all along, the data concern was dominant in the discourse at first. That argument met significant friction, however. Many experts have made the cogent argument (which I have also advanced) that banning TikTok wouldn’t at best only partially address the real risk that China’s government might gain access to large-scale US personal data and try to leverage it. Addressing this risk calls for more comprehensive data security legislation that would curb risks of personal information transfer through the data broker economy or through badly secured platforms Chinese security services could simply hack into. A comprehensive policy would certainly have something to say about TikTok’s structure and data access provisions, but it would focus on the data exfiltration problem holistically rather than zeroing in on one of many sources of risk.

As more and more people understood the data problem was too broad to justify a unique focus on TikTok, proponents of the bill before it was passed last spring shifted their attention to the argument that in an emergency, for instance a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Bytedance might tweak the algorithm to deliver content to millions of US users supporting China’s position. The risk of covert influence was the big red flashing light in the discourse as the bill passed. Data security was still there, but it’s just not reasonable to exclude the other, more plausibly “content-based,” justification from a history of what got this long-running effort over the finish line. Maybe the Court has blinders here due to the record, but its argument is not valid outside their narrow context. Both justifications motivated Congress and Biden. (Whether that means SCOTUS should have applied strict scrutiny I leave to First Amendment scholars.)

2. The United States doesn’t get to claim that it’s against national security–driven Internet censorship anymore.

It’s not clear today whether TikTok will indeed be banned, or if so for how long, but the three branches of the US government have spoken: Speculative national security concerns based on nationality of a company’s ownership are legitimate grounds to erect formidable barriers preventing US citizens from accessing information on or expressing themselves through that company’s product. In other words, Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court endorse censoring websites or apps on the Internet inside the United States if they say there’s a national security risk.

To be fair, there are several arguments against the way I have just framed this:

• First, one could argue the Supreme Court was at pains not to endorse censoring anything but TikTok. This is true. They write: “A law targeting any other speaker [i.e., other than TikTok] would by necessity entail a distinct inquiry and separate considerations” (12–13). Yet the law at issue gives the president the ability to designate other entities for the divest-or-ban treatment, and today’s decision signals broad deference to the government’s assessment of national security risks. There’s no obvious barrier to growing the censored list.

• Second, one could argue the result is not censorship, because there was the option of divesting. We could debate whether divestiture was ever a real option, but at present there is no concrete sign that it will happen. (Who knows, though!) At least for the moment, the effective outcome of the law is massive-scale censorship in terms of US citizens’ access to information and their choice of venue for speech.

• Third, one could argue that the national security concerns were so intense and specific, including necessarily undisclosed classified evidence, that this is a narrow action to address a serious threat and doesn’t signal a new comfort with Internet censorship. There are multiple weaknesses to this objection. At the Supreme Court level, the justices explicitly state that they relied only on the public record and not on the classified evidence (13), and the public record is pretty speculative. Meanwhile, the national security dangers identified are broader than TikTok, and it’s hard to take this seriously as an effort to address them absent a corresponding comprehensive effort. Finally, to deny that a TikTok ban is censorship is to deny that cutting off access to a huge range of information for one-third or more Americans is censorship, and I just don’t accept that. You can argue that it’s justified, but the interference with freedom of expression and access to information is undeniable.

So I believe my framing stands, and proponents of the law, the rest of us in the United States, and people around the world need to reckon with a massive shift on the part of the US government regarding Internet censorship. The US government has long been a loud critic of efforts like China’s Great Firewall, which maintains an online border to cut off citizens from large amounts of information in the name of public safety, national security, and sovereignty. Now, the US government is on the verge of erecting the first span of what could become our counterpart. (Call it a Cyber Border Wall, perhaps—a national security–motivated effort, still porous, but aimed at keeping out a reputed foreign menace while sacrificing erstwhile US ideals of openness.) The TikTok law is one tool the government might use. The ICTS rule developed over the Trump I and Biden administrations is another.

As I said this morning in resharing a post by David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor and former UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, this watershed moment in the US system’s willingness to censor the Internet is the biggest take-away for me today. Kaye said it better than I could: “can the United States ever again, with a straight face, argue that another country's internet shutdown, website blocking, app-banning, etc is a violation of the global right to freedom of expression? that it's unnecessary for national security? no. imo its prior moral authority is getting shredded.”

—

That’s enough for now. Like it or not, there will be more to discuss. And whether one likes or dislikes today’s outcome, it’s certainly a big deal.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

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The case for a TikTok ban has been multifaceted, but for the most part it has relied on imagined potential future harms. Today, writing a thread on what’s next for the ban, I found myself imagining some scary potential outcomes after a ban takes effect.

First, to recap, many ban proponents imagine:

• The Chinese government might exfiltrate data at scale and use it somehow to harm US national security. Location data, browsing data, social graph, misusing access to microphones or cameras on devices—all kinds of possible concerns. The fact that such large-scale misuse has not been documented isn’t relevant here, because it’s about what China might do. (And the fact that the company has done shady company things like try to track journalists’ locations in a leak investigation, or leave open access to Beijing engineers, doesn’t help their case.)

• The Chinese government could use physical access to ByteDance systems or personal leverage over staff to try to manipulate US public opinion. Evidence of this kind of thing being under way is quite thin, but some bleed between China-based content moderation practices and the global app has been reported, and the company’s assurances that mistakes were made and fixed aren’t convincing if you already don’t trust them. Moreover, you don’t need evidence of such a campaign now if you’re imagining this would happen in the context of a future contingency—the classic example being a Taiwan contingency.

• Persistent integration between Chinese and global software teams could give Chinese government actors a chance to insert or exploit cyber vulnerabilities.

I have long argued that these risks are indeed imaginable and worth taking seriously, but that they are largely not unique to TikTok and ought to be dealt with on a comprehensive basis covering all such services. Where there are risks specific to TikTok, I have argued that the Project Texas mitigation proposals, while not publicly detailed in full, looked like they might do a good job on all of this. I’ve never found it useful when people try to refute the possibilities, because you can’t prove wrong a speculated future. Anyway, the law passed, and the DC Circuit says it can stand, and comprehensive legislation isn’t forthcoming. You don’t have to use your imagination about that.

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Now for some imagined possibilities stemming from a ban. Allowing that we don’t know yet whether a ban will actually happen (SCOTUS, Trump, a divestiture, possibly further lawsuits, all could intervene), here are some slightly screwball1 but nonetheless plausible results that could come about assuming a ban. Imagine:

• Apple and Google could comply in removing TikTok from their app stores, leading large numbers of committed users to learn how to jailbreak their mobile operating systems and side-load an internationally available copy of the app. This would mean users lose the (imperfect but important) cybersecurity refinements of an up-to-date iOS or Android version and the similarly imperfect efforts by the companies to vet apps they distribute. Users could then be compromised by cyber criminals and adversary governments. Any effort to embed hidden malware in a TikTok app would be more powerful in a jailbroken OS, which would be more vulnerable in other ways as well.

• If the ban is enforced such that DNS for TikTok’s servers is blocked or unstable, users may turn to VPNs to tunnel into countries where access is unencumbered. Yet many or most would not want to pay for their VPN, increasing the chance that the VPNs themselves would act as data exfiltrators or attack vectors.

• In anticipation of a potential Project Texas arrangement with the US government, TikTok said it would base its US user data in US-based Oracle infrastructure. Under the ban, Oracle would be prohibited from providing these services, and US user data would be stored wherever convenient for TikTok. For people who worry about where US user data is stored and how, US authorities would lose visibility.

The purpose of this is not to argue over the ban. There’s been plenty of that, and the die is cast. Instead, I wrote this up because I have been thinking a lot about the imagined potential futures that animate the policies I track on technology issues in the United States and China. What AI might be, what military contests might emerge, what might decide who “leads” in what, and why that matters… Speculating about uncertain futures is unavoidable in policymaking, but the guesses we make are a big deal, and often the imaginaries seem to be the least contested part of the discussion.

I can imagine some good outcomes of a ban. Maybe people would spend less time on a media product designed to be addictive. Maybe they’d garden and read books and go to the coffee shop or the pizza parlor to sing and dance at each other. Or not: Stock performance today suggests many believe outcomes for Meta’s products would be good.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

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I. Climate catastrophe is still coming for us all. The United States now is likely to be even more of a spoiler of global mitigation and adaptation efforts. When climate factors add stressors to international security, markets, and populations, it is even less likely the United States and China will constructively cooperate. The world will have to try to navigate around the United States, but that might not work very well. Some recent policy improvements will be sticky, but we needed much more.

II. The specifics of US policy toward China will be very hard to predict, but in sum it will be disruptive. Deal-making and capricious targeting of punitive measures is likely. (TikTok could be spared, or not.) Overall, however, the era of selective “de-risking” is likely over and a trend toward more thorough “decoupling” is likely—even if its extent may be limited by economic realities.

III. US economic measures toward China will likely be even more disruptive than the existing tariffs, and China’s government will retaliate. How it does so is not predetermined. Will it help or hurt a company’s fortunes if its CEO is buddies with the US president? Overall, US businesses will wish to further mitigate their exposure by decreasing reliance on Chinese supply chains and markets. Trade negotiations may advance in parallel, but I wouldn’t hope for much: “Phase one” was both a joke and never worked out.

IV. The US government is likely to find it harder to bring allies and partners along on costly measures toward China. Already pushed beyond their comfort zone, how much appetite will the Netherlands and Japan have to undermine China’s chip industry “for democracy” if it’s an aspiring autocrat cajoling them? Any number of proposals in the name of democracy will be treated with deserved skepticism; democratic publics will demand this of their governments. But geopolitical bloc logic may still prevail.

V. The China Initiative, or something like it, will return and may be even more careless and damaging to innocent people. Anti-AAPI hate and violence may rise again. I hope I’m wrong.

VI. US human rights narratives about China, though often righteous on their face, will suffer even more from the perception and reality of hypocrisy. It has already been rich to hear about the rules-based order from a government unceasingly providing weapons used to kill tens of thousands of civilians. How about the religious freedom pitch from the folks who brought us the Muslim ban, or gender equality from the people denying medical care to women?

VII. Current trends in cyber operations attributed to China point to serious escalatory potential. Pre-positioning in critical infrastructure, exploiting telephone wiretap systems to target the campaigns before a presidential election, and no known bilateral mechanism for strategic stability in this area—this is volatile stuff in addition to the other present uncertainties.

VIII. US-China dialogue, official and unofficial, will be diminished compared with the hypothetical alternative future. We may still keep some momentum, and it’s hard to sink below the Covid nadir, but it will be more stressful and logistically challenging to get US and Chinese groups together to discuss problem solving or common interests.

IX. Fewer US citizens will develop up-to-date and grounded knowledge about China. Business travel, study abroad, academic fieldwork, etc., will seem more risky and less career-boosting due to a combination of repression and suspicion in China and questions about loyalties in the United States. Though still coming in large numbers, even more Chinese will think twice before studying in the United States. More US decisions about China will be made based on narratives, politics, and desk research.

X. In the United States we will hear—constantly—that problems are China’s fault, or immigrants’ fault… anyone but ours. But in most cases they will be problems created by a combination of macro realities (tech, climate, economic) and bad choices or a dysfunctional political system (industry capture, money in politics, bad information sources). Think economic inequities, job losses, housing costs, a strained care economy. Politicians in hurricane country were blaming the actual weather on Democrats.

That’s all for now. What to do about it will have to come another day. I’d love to hear your ideas.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

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Since I resumed regular work travel to China last summer and during five trips since then, it has still been hard to imagine US-China futures. The overall trend lines are concerning, even as some potentially stabilizing diplomatic lines have reopened during the Biden administration after the twin lows of the Trump shock and pandemic recriminations. In the context of technology, the future appears especially uncertain after another pair of events: the October 2022 US export controls on semiconductors and chip-making tools, and the November 2022 release of ChatGPT. There was always a mixture of cooperative dynamics (e.g. in basic science and complex supply chains) and adversarial activity (e.g. in cyber operations and military tech), but the balance has been tilting toward the latter.

There’s another factor that has kept me from developing any strong sense of US-China futures, however, and it’s one I have shared with many Chinese interlocutors: The United States and China both have leadership uncertainty. It’s just that the United States knows ours is coming on a Tuesday in November, and China’s will come at some other time.

When I have shared this observation in China, generally outside of the structured “meeting” part of an interaction and during the food/beverage part, I have seen a lot of agreement. In raising the issue I am explicitly expressing my unease about what will become of the United States politically, and there’s no shortage of similar unease in China. Before the pandemic, being a person who sometimes learns by (intentionally or not) pushing at the boundaries of comfortable conversation topics, I often got the sense that talking about Xi Jinping’s un-delimited leadership was taboo—at least with a US researcher. Now, however, the obvious questions about what happens when China’s top leader is one-way-or-another no longer the boss is barely if at all below the surface.

Flying home from Beijing yesterday, two days before a Tuesday in November, I realized that uncertainty and anxiety about short- and long-term political futures is the highest I can remember in both the United States and China. We are both at our political wits’ end, strained by challenges and divides with no clear solutions. So much of the focus among observers of and participants in US-China relations has been on the mounting strain between the two countries. Yet the strain within feels even more important and pressing on both sides.

In December 2020 I wrote:

For several years it has been a truism that there is a new bipartisan U.S. consensus on China, often summarized as an agreement that competition is the dominant feature of bilateral ties. That consensus is real, as far as it goes. But competition is vague, and there is nothing even resembling a consensus on the nature of that competition, let alone on what to do about it. 

This is just as true today as it was four years ago, and what happens this week will be immensely consequential for how the US government acts upon this vague consensus. Elections and scheduled leadership transitions mean no one can credibly argue US policy on major issues will be constant long into the future. At minimum, the unknown candidates in one or two cycles could have very different ideas. As Chinese observers often understand better than Washington strategists, US commitments and goals will often be upended on a Tuesday in November.

US and Chinese analysts both have a tendency to imagine that Chinese policy orientations will follow current trendlines forever. While we all know the top leader won’t reign forever, when and how things change are mysteries that may sneak up on us. It’s hard to figure an unknown event at an unknown time into guesses about the future. Still, the consequences for how China acts in the world will be enormous.

Well, the present Tuesday in November has arrived. We’ll see what happens, and I’ll be trying to keep the dual uncertainties in mind regardless.

About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

Thanks for reading. All-access subscriptions to Here It Comes are free. Readers who especially wish to support this effort, and have the means, can contribute directly through a paid subscription. I’m grateful for your attention either way. –Graham

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National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is set to travel to China next week, and by the White House’s telling, his agenda is unsurprisingly dominated by areas of friction between the two governments. A press briefer summarized an expected agenda including "key issues in the U.S.-China bilateral relationship and advancing counternarcotics cooperation, military-to-military communication, and AI safety and risk discussions”—areas where the two sides might be expected to produce modest cooperative outcomes—as well as a note that “areas of difference” would be discussed, listing China-Russia ties, the South China Sea, cross-Strait issues, etc.

In this portrayal, it’s really only “AI safety and risk” on the affirmative agenda. The other more affirmative topics listed, counternarcotics and mil-mil ties, are really areas of difference, with the US side hoping Chinese counterparts will do more to crack down on fentanyl precursors or establish channels to avoid real-time miscalculation. Some deliverables might emerge, but not without a context of friction.

In terms of messaging, the Biden administration has itself a bit in knots. Is the Sullivan-Wang channel simply about keeping communication going? Is it about advancing some beneficial outcome? This morning’s senior administration official goes preemptively on the defensive, acknowledging doubt as to the point of having a meeting at all: "We’ve said this before but it bears repeating that US diplomacy and channels of communication do not indicate a change in approach to the PRC. This is an intensely competitive relationship. We are committed to making the investments, strengthening our alliances, and taking the common steps—commonsense steps on tech and national security that we need to take. We are committed to managing this competition responsibly, however, and prevent it from veering into conflict.”

It’s worth dwelling on this, because it is indeed something they’ve said before. In my view, this rhetorical turn addresses an audience that is assumed to understand US-China relations as mostly characterized by rivalry or even enmity. It reassures this audience that the administration sees it this way too, hinting, “yes, we get it, but sorry guys—we’re have to look responsible.” 

In an earlier era, Obama administration officials would often lead with the problems (market behavior, South China Sea, cyber-enabled theft, rights abuses) but always mention climate and public health as areas for needed cooperation. This administration has ways of talking about China interactions that are more confident, too, with Secretary of State Blinken memorably saying "we’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” But here, this now-standard defensive line loses that balance, seemingly conceding ground to those who criticize any diplomacy as weakness and undercutting the affirmative argument for maintaining lines of communication.

AI anxiety as a unifier, but for how long?

Amidst all this, AI has been the novel area of dialogue the White House is willing to champion. Key people seem to believe there really is the potential for catastrophe that needs US-China discussion, opening a diplomatic space that is new by definition, because no prior topic except perhaps nuclear nonproliferation engaged such heights of uncertainty about both outcomes and magnitude of effects. If AI dialogue is productive, it could be de facto a confidence building measure as both governments are forced to think through what is competitive and what is a common danger across fields from military balance to biosecurity to economic disruption. There’s no guarantee the exchange will be effective, but there’s a big potential upside. 

That got me thinking: What if AI is no longer a space for unashamed US-China dialogue with support on both sides? Attitudes very well could change.

For one thing, there are already many people in Washington who think US-China conversations on the development and use of advanced machine learning models is worthless at best and maybe actually damaging. I don’t find these views persuasive, primarily because if you believe novel and emerging forms of AI could pose catastrophic risks or upset geopolitical stability, you’re not going to be able to meet this challenge without understanding the landscape in China, where some of the most powerful non-US systems are being developed. If catastrophic risk is really on the table, you’ll also probably want to see coordinated or parallel action by powerful governments and other actors to mitigate bad outcomes that don’t acknowledge borders. There’s such great uncertainty about what capabilities will emerge, where, and with what implications, it’s just unreasonable to be confident that no US-China cooperation will be needed to avoid very bad outcomes, that somehow “like-minded” governments can handle this on their own. Still, the people who think dialogue is surrender could well gain power in the United States; we have pretty extreme uncertainty tied to the election.

Even assuming a fairly steady perception of the value of US-China AI dialogue, there are other possible developments that could take this relatively hopeful, affirmative area out of the picture. It could be that “AI” in the way it is being portrayed now, essentially systems built around large language models with growing data and computational inputs, will turn out not to pose such deep questions as some people believe. Maybe the universe of training data, or the current paradigm of math applied to it, simply isn’t enough to constitute “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) or to help some wacko develop a diabolical pathogen. Maybe, in other words, the present portrayal of likely AI advances is over-optimistic, and the US-China discussion could become less urgent as this becomes clearer.

Or something could happen in China that changes its government’s willingness to engage. Maybe people feel the Americans are using talks alongside chip controls to advance their goals of containing Chinese development. Maybe Chinese officials decide to cut off conversations they think the US side values in order to demonstrate displeasure with an unrelated event—say some behavior from a new president acknowledging the legitimacy of Taiwan’s government.

One way or another, the main specific area for positive bilateral work the White House was willing to highlight has an uncertain future. Would we be left only with the “areas of difference”?

A central narrative drawing the heat away from cooler heads

In fact, the White House portrayal of Sullivan’s agenda is just a slice of the Biden administration’s China interactions. A meeting at that level, with Sullivan and Wang, is guaranteed more press coverage than some other official contacts, and the messaging about it is attributable straight to the center of the Biden-Harris administration at a time when Harris on a campaign sprint. I don’t think they need to be as defensive, but I don’t think they’re unreasonable to expect attacks.

Perhaps the lesson of the narrow portrayal of what’s ripe for constructive bilateral discussion here is that the highest level is a rough place for constructive bilateral discussion. 

There is one topic in US-China diplomacy that—no need to speculate about the emergence of superintelligence—is deeply tied to catastrophic global risk. And the word “climate” was never uttered by the briefer previewing Sullivan’s trip.

This was probably not an oversight. More likely, the Biden administration is trying to keep climate out of the mix when “areas of difference” are dominant. We can see a pattern of maintaining a less heated space (and perhaps one less exposed to the sunlight of publicity) for work on topics like climate change, while portraying the top officials as meeting the challenge where there is more friction.

In November 2023, when Biden and Xi met in Woodside, CA, Biden called out climate as an area “demand[ing] our joint efforts.” But the real action on climate took place in the days before and a few hundred miles away at Sunnylands, where Obama and Xi had their first major summit. There, far from the media circus around the APEC Summit in San Francisco, the two governments' climate envoys announced the "Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis.” It wasn’t earth-saving, but it was more concrete than the Biden-Xi outcomes, which mostly teed up future meetings.

Biden’s climate adviser John Podesta, as of a FP report by Lili Pike a month ago, was expected to travel to China for further talks on extra-potent greenhouse gasses “in a few weeks,” underlining that there are still separate tracks.

It’s not just climate. Last week’s meeting of the bilateral Financial Working Group between midlevel officials seemed to go off without unwelcome political heat.

A no-bumper-sticker China diplomacy

I’m still processing how to think about the Biden administration’s China policy mix. And it is a huge mix. But what comes into focus here is a US approach to China diplomacy that deemphasizes grand banners and big meetings that had worn out their welcome by the end of the Obama administration. 

Even if Hillary Clinton had become president, I am confident the massive omnibus Strategic and Economic Dialogue would have been significantly reconfigured. The big events piled difficult issues into the news cycle with those matters perhaps susceptible to calm, quiet problem-solving. This meant Clinton, then Secretary of State, had more or less the whole bilateral relationship on the table when, for instance, the self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng was seeking US Embassy protection after escaping home detention. S&ED also frustrated many officials, who felt they were talking for talk’s sake and wasting time in their particular areas.

In a new diplomatic rhythm where the marquee events are rare, problems and solutions can at least theoretically be handled without as much concern on both sides of how it will make the whole relationship look, or whether the leader will look weak. Could it be that “linkage” in US-China relations, where one side refuses to act in its own interest on one issue because they’re unhappy with how things look on another, is at a nadir? If so, this is a major achievement of the Biden team, and one they probably would like to be recognized for (if it wouldn’t defeat the purpose of keeping some efforts away from the heat).

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

Whatever one’s yardstick, if a narrow class of risks decrease but broader risks greatly increase, success is flimsy. In a more concrete caricature, if the goal is to reduce the risk of supply chain disruption in the event of conflagration around Taiwan, but the chosen measures drastically increase the probability of highly disruptive war, it would be pretty narrow-minded to claim victory. In short, one has to consider whether one is increasing risks in the name of de-risking.

The perceived risks, however, are all disputable estimates of actually unknowable probabilities. De-risking is more of a rallying cry than an empirically driven exercise in harm reduction. That risk-unknowability factor is what kept an earlier draft essay of mine from moving forward. But in the mean time, Adam Tooze has a part of the picture in today’s —looking at German automakers and their China trajectory—and I wanted to share and add some thoughts.

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Risk of dependence vs. risk of losing the plot

Tooze notes that China’s auto market is the world’s largest, and not by a small margin. Therefore, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen talk about de-risking from the China market, a German auto executive tells Tooze, “If we are in the business of making cars we have to be in China. If we aren’t here, we aren’t in the business.” Tooze continues:

To put the same point another way, rebalancing from China may reduce your risks in the event of a war over Taiwan. But car firms are car firms. They don’t organize their strategy around the war-games of military think tanks. Exiting China, if you are a car-maker, doesn’t derisk your business. It substantially increases the risk that you do not stay on pace with the trends in the world’s leading market. It increases the risk that you get blindsided by competition you did not see coming.

Tooze isn’t arguing that there’s no China risk for big foreign automakers. Indeed, they are losing market share dramatically as China’s market shifts to EVs, a market hugely dominated by domestic brands. Arguably, this was the risk the likes of VW and GM, and maybe their governments, should have been attuned to: the rise of an EV production ecosystem—lifted by industrial strategy, consumer incentives, supply chains, and innovation—that could devastate their position not just in China’s market but globally. More from Tooze:

[T]he gearshift in the industry is dramatic and, right now, non-Western firms are at risk of losing touch with the technological frontier being defined by China’s EV ecosystem. That is a far more serious scenario for German and other Western decision-makers to worry about, than wartime interruptions to the supply of scandium and yttrium. The shift in the balance of the global automotive market isn’t a hypothetical tail-risk scenario. It is happening before our eyes on a huge scale. We really don’t need to add drama to the global economic scenery. Reality is dramatic enough.

At the firm level, I think Tooze’s argument makes good sense. Where things get a bit more complicated is in a frame where “what’s good for GM is good for America,” VW for Germany, Toyota for Japan. Clearly, if corporate and national interests are fused, these countries should have seen China’s EV takeoff coming and raced to keep pace or overtake. That’s clearly not how it worked—and those firms were all very much in China. Whether strategists were truly blindsided or they calculated that the battery and EV ecosystem growing in China could also fuel their global efforts, it was also not realistic to imagine fielding an industrial strategy able to compete with the China-scale effort.

Firms then must indeed keep their attention to China, and hopefully make some money there, to know where the leading edge even is. The Washington mantra of “maintaining leadership” is often a bit rich, but it would clearly be misplaced here. At least in 2024, strategists recognize the competitive task for US firms is to catch up, if they can. And if US firms lose the ability to learn from competing in China, or to build with technologies licensed from Chinese firms, they may well be piling on the risk.

The risks not on the ledger

There is another kind of risk not always considered here, specifically for EVs and other decarbonization technologies. If the US goal is to reduce the use of Chinese products, either to reduce the risk of supply chain disruption or sabotage in the event of some contingency, or to channel domestic consumption toward domestic jobs and capital accumulation, this comes at a cost of making the products more expensive or less available.

In May, the Biden administration announced tariffs on Chinese EVs would rise from 25% to 100%. Potential bans on Chinese software in certain classes of connected or autonomous vehicles could fully ban many Chinese EVs in the name of national security. With US EV offerings few, (in my view) oversized, and expensive, this inevitably slows EV adoption here. Price is not the only factor in faltering US EV demand, but it’s surely part of the picture. This may be an acceptable tradeoff in terms of short-term costs, but it’s hard to estimate the climate effect of slowing the electrification of US mobility, especially because we don’t know whether US- and ally-sourced EVs will take off in short order. Similarly, it’s hard to estimate the effect of anti-dumping duties on Chinese solar panels that, while perhaps justified under an aging trade regime, slow solar installation. Domestic production in solar is unlikely to hit the scale and lower price point available from China any time soon.

There are trade-offs. Not every cost is worth it in the energy transition, and it’s not news that the US government is unwilling and unable to simply flip a switch to a Green New Deal–style economy. What is unclear to me, however, is whether a potential cost in terms of slowed decarbonization truly enters the US government’s decision making on China “de-risking.”

The urgency of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions is well established, to say the least. The urgency of de-risking from Chinese supply chains (one logic for the actions that may act as barriers to energy transition) is hugely debatable, even if the need is accepted. And de-risking is not the only goal on the table, with domestic jobs very much part of the politics, even if duties on Chinese products are far short of the scale of intervention that would change the economics of domestic production. I don’t have the answers, but from the outside, there is little evidence these questions are even being asked in the decision-making process. Certainly they are far from the mainstream public debate, and my modest hope is that these trade-offs will be more explicitly in mind. ###

Thanks for reading Here It Comes, my newsletter on the interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. All-access subscriptions are free. Readers who especially wish to support this effort, and have the means, can contribute directly through a paid subscription. I’m grateful for your attention either way. –Graham Webster

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

In 2020, we read about a sprawling “crackdown” on tech businesses in China, and now, we hear great enthusiasm for AI and other tech development there. I argue this is not so much a difference of approach by the Chinese government as it is a matter of emphasis and what is garnering media attention. Still, China’s internal and external circumstances have changed. With permission, the full column is reproduced below.

Thanks for reading Here It Comes, my newsletter on the interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. All-access subscriptions are free. Readers who especially wish to support this effort, and have the means, can contribute directly through a paid subscription. I’m grateful for your attention either way. –Graham Webster

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China’s Tech Turnaround

Beijing’s crackdown on the sector, followed by recent huge investments in AI and other areas, are part of a long pattern of shifts in the way the government has approached tech development.

By Graham Webster — Originally published July 21, 2024, in The Wire China.

Jack Ma’s fintech giant, Ant Group, had its initial public offering blocked after he publicly challenged government regulatory currents. Ride-hailing industry leader DiDi was hit with an investigation that would lead to $1.2 billion in fines, and its IPO in New York was ultimately reversed. Whole industries — online tutoring and mobile gaming — were banned out of existence or frozen in place by regulatory fiat. The future suddenly became uncertain for online delivery companies like Meituan, operating in a sector that had transformed urban streetscapes with an army of smartphone-guided delivery workers on ebikes. 

A new antitrust authority, established alongside an E-Commerce Law in 2018, was meanwhile flexing its muscles and paring back platforms’ market power in the name of competition. New laws on privacy and data security took effect, laying out a daunting and uncertain compliance burden for digital businesses. The Chinese authorities also banned revenue-enhancing tricks such as online platforms offering higher prices to customers who they thought would pay more. 

The universal media shorthand for all this was a Chinese “crackdown” on big tech. Investors grew wary of China’s digital economy after years of optimism which had helped place the likes of Tencent and Alibaba among the world’s most valuable companies. Some aspiring entrepreneurs in China kept out of the game, fearing the next government shift would snuff out their nascent idea or, worse, make a political example out of the CEO themselves. 

Yet by 2023, the story seemed to have changed. That spring, the government announced that the pro-R&D Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) would now be the operational office of a new Central Commission on Science and Technology — matching the status afforded the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) when its parent was elevated to Party commission-level in 2018. 

The CAC itself had become a highly active regulator on data matters, with its security- and propaganda-focused measures often coming at the expense of ease of doing business. So it was significant that at the same time, the government announced a new National Data Administration under the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, and tasked it with unlocking the potential of data “factors of production”— resources held across the digital economy but disproportionately by large platforms.

Meanwhile, national and local government support has recently been pouring into the exploding if amorphous field of AI, incubating startups, establishing labs, and building out “intelligent computing” data centers across the country. And though foreign observers may have criticized China’s longstanding support for other tech industries, especially in the renewable energy space, as producing overcapacity, China’s market share in batteries and EVs has become highly enviable. 

If you scanned headlines on China’s tech world over the last five years, you’d be forgiven for having a sense of whiplash. An unprecedented tech crackdown, followed by a government pinning its hopes on tech to lead the country out of post-lockdown doldrums? Did the Party’s top planners create a mess for themselves only to about-face?

In some ways, this has been quite a turnabout. While the most prominent and fastest-changing policies on technology sectors once sought to reshape by restriction, the standout policies today seek to reshape by boosterism. But the story is more mundane (if still somewhat dramatic for a narrative about government regulation) when you realize these seemingly divergent approaches are applied to different technological fields.

China’s tech “crackdown,” or in Chinese government terms “rectification,” was never particularly broad, and most of it has never, in fact, ended. It focused primarily on online services and platforms that help organize offline activities, such as delivery. And most of it should have come as no big surprise, because a lot of the action came after long and well-publicized efforts to draft a Personal Information Protection Law and a Data Security Law had finally come to fruition. 

Moreover, while DiDi may be out of the doghouse and Ant is still happily chugging along with its indispensable payment and portal app, 2021’s new data laws are still driving extra compliance burdens and uncertainty across the economy. Much of what looked like a severe yet temporary “crackdown” was actually caused by new legislation that is still in effect, with detailed obligations rolling out continuously.

Nor is the Chinese government’s tech boosterism a new development. Some of the most rousing language in recent top-leader rhetoric — touting self-reliance and indigenous or independent innovation — harkens back to the 1960s and ‘70s, when China proudly announced its nuclear and satellite achievements (with a little help from the Soviets). The current specific focus on fostering AI industries dates at least to the State Council’s 2017 New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan. China’s entire experience with the Internet, starting in the late 1990s, can only be understood if government efforts to advance tech-fueled development, while maintaining necessary controls, are taken into account.

If the “crackdown” mostly never ended and efforts to supercharge tech development are longstanding, the headline reader’s sense of whiplash is more due to a change in China’s circumstances than a change in party-state intentions.

China’s internal circumstances are certainly novel. Harsh and ultimately failed Covid control measures, widely derided at least in retrospect, contributed to an economic stagnation that has now lasted more than 18 months since the end of lockdowns. People only debate what kind of mess the property sector is in, not whether it’s a shambles. Anecdotally, even elites feel the future is economically and socially uncertain. 

From the outside, China is of course under a great deal of pressure, especially in high tech. Although the official effort to spur AI development is years old, it cannot be a coincidence that the public enthusiasm for AI spiked after twin shocks from the United States. First came the Biden administration’s October 2022 launch of an effort to block China’s access to the most powerful AI-training semiconductors and the country’s ability to develop any advanced chips in the future. While U.S. officials rather dubiously plead that the controls are narrowly tailored, the message was clear: China would have to go it alone sooner rather than later.

The next month, San Francisco-based OpenAI released ChatGPT, making clear to the world what a smaller community of observers and developers already knew: large language models (LLMs) trained with those advanced chips would do dazzling things, with untold economic and social implications. Chinese and outside observers immediately asked why such a breakthrough had happened in California and not in China, where state support for AI has been vocal, and wondered whether the U.S. chip blockade would keep Chinese developers behind for the long-term.

These new circumstances have intensified Chinese government efforts to develop core technologies at home. A lackluster effort to advance China’s domestic semiconductor industry is now being revamped and re-funded. The race is on among private sector, academic, government, and hybrid labs to reap the benefits of LLMs and other machine learning techniques despite U.S. efforts. Their prospects are uncertain, but China is home to many leading machine-learning scientists, and their efforts are readily framed in patriotic terms. With the United States explicitly trying to undermine a range of advanced industries in China, innovators not only seek to achieve results but look forward to showing the world they can’t be kept down. 

Neither ambition nor government regulation are novel in this story, and both have a history of uncertainty. Massive public investment failed once to significantly advance China’s chip sector; it could fail again, and investments in LLMs could similarly falter. In the decade since the then-new Xi Jinping administration formed China’s cyberspace regulator, we’ve seen lots of legislation but uneven implementation. Forces of ambition and breakthrough innovations could bear fruit and still run up against state control. Regardless, domestic doldrums and foreign factors are driving China’s tech world to try something different.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

Thanks for reading Here It Comes, my newsletter on the interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. All-access subscriptions are free. Readers who especially wish to support this effort, and have the means, can contribute directly through a paid subscription. I’m grateful for your attention either way. –Graham Webster

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First, there is of course a place for rules in international relations, and in US policy.

I’m simply arguing that rules, or “the rules,” should not be so central to how US foreign policy thinkers and decision-makers narrate their purpose and their sense of competition with China.

It just so happened that hours before I wrote my post here, my former colleague Paul Gewirtz, director of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, published an essay processing what is at stake for “China, the United States, and the future of a rules-based international order.” At least for the sake of argument, he accepts the premise that the US-China moment today is indeed a “conflict about ‘the rules-based international order.’”

As I suggested last week, I reject the idea that the present US-China dynamic is overall a contest about a state of affairs undergirded by rules, because the idea that the US government is championing an order where rules govern state behavior is conspicuously undermined by the many examples of the US government violating the rules it says should constrain other states. A rules-based order? To quote Indigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

A basic component of the “rule of law” is that law applies to the powerful, and critics reasonably distinguish some authoritarian governance patterns as “rule by law.” A “rules-based order” is a softer concept, but if powerful states may violate rules while championing them, it’s the power and not the rules that form the base of the order. I’m advocating that politicians and strategists drop the false implication that rules are the bottom line.

The Biden administration’s central boilerplate on the China challenge actually helpfully omits “rules” and argues that it’s the “international order” that China seeks to upset:

“China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.  Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years.” –Blinken, 20221

I generally don’t blame people for discussing policy using the commonly accepted terms, even if I think they shouldn’t be the commonly accepted terms. And if we can keep “rules-based” out of it, I find much to agree with in Gewirtz’s piece. Perhaps his central contention is that the United States needs to be realistic in its efforts to, in Blinken’s terms, “revise” the international order amidst new circumstances and contention from China. He reviews a number of public statements by the Chinese government on its preferences for international norms, rules, and institutions. These cannot be ignored, because there is real power behind some of these initiatives.

None of this is to say there is no role for rules, even if they are not the basis of the order. Rules or norms of behavior that actually are followed most of the time and enforced by powerful backers keep a lot of everyday things working, and some of these are international rules and norms worked out and agreed to through the 20th century institutions many people think of when they talk about “the” international order. Global aviation, maritime safety, Internet protocols…even the UN Convention on the Law the Sea—which does not officially constrain the United States due to lack of ratification, and which China has openly flouted after a duly constituted arbitral tribunal found against it—represents a broad consensus on how to resolve trade-offs through agreed text.

Any good future for the United States, China, and others will include these and more rule-sets. The most effective possible futures for climate action I can think of would involve international agreements and rules. Recent, likely, and potential advances in machine learning have brought governments around the world to the table seeking norms or rules to avoid a variety of bad outcomes. But these potential future rules would need power behind them, probably both US and Chinese power among others, and would not based merely on an existing order.

Second, there is evidence the ‘rules-based order’ meme is fundamentally part of a China narrative and not based in sober, methodical analysis of international politics.

I had always encountered the “rules-based international order” in the context of US-China relations, but this should surprise no one, because I read about US-China relations every day. It turns out, as the political scientists Adam Breuer and Alastair Iain Johnston write, “the [rules-based order (RBO)] meme is almost uniquely tied to analyses of China, in contrast to other synonyms for the RBO such as the ‘liberal international order’ or the ‘liberal order’ which are less commonly used in reference to China.”2

In a 2019 article, Breuer and Johnston (disclosure: one of my teachers in grad school), set out to trace the origins of the invocation of a rules-based order. They reference academic literature on narrative construction, where memes (such as the “rules-based order”) play a role as constituent parts. A few things stand out in my reading:

• As I had thought based on database searches, they find that US discourse seems to have adopted the RBO meme after its use emerged in Australian circles. They locate a meeting between then–Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, following which the US government used the term repeatedly. The ways in which Australian experiences with China and discourses about it have influenced US discourse and policy are widely discussed but under-studied. I find it fascinating that this meme I so strongly associate with US government self-portrayals was an import from down under.

• Their media analysis suggests a strong tie between RBO language and discussions of China. From 2011–2017, consistently more than 50% of “rules-based order” mentions in their searches (in Factiva) came along with mentions of China and not Russia. Only in 2017 did the proportion of RBO mentions coming alongside Russia and not China exceed 10%. (If the RBO language were organically based in respect for international rules such as territorial sovereignty, I would have expected Russia to rank higher after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine.)

  

• There’s a rich field of associations to unpack around the idea of an RBO and its resonance. They observe that “[f]air play is an element in American exceptionalism. … Newt Gingrich has identified ‘Rule of Law’ and its component ‘Honoring Principles of Fair Play and Justice’ as central to American exceptionalism. Thus, for some, challenging an RBO means challenging the American exceptionalist trait of fair play.” Indeed, in the same era the RBO or RBIO became a popular refrain, it was also common to talk about “a level playing field” in economics. Breuer and Johnston talk about other sub-narratives, around law breaking, Chinese trickery, etc. And they argue that these sub-narratives and memes “help constitute and empower a master narrative about China’s revisionism.” There’s more in the paper.

The paper’s effort to place the “rules-based” meme within a structure of narratives using fairly simple empirical observations helps underline the fact that political and diplomatic language around international affairs is rarely especially concrete, specific, or dryly literal. It’s about storylines, what stories are officially basic truths, and the bounds of discussion that allow one to be taken seriously. It’s an important reminder that these narratives play on stories people have about themselves, their countries, and others and are not manufactured in some scientific laboratory discovering laws of history.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

Even if Vice President Kamala Harris turns out to be the nominee, the party is at an explicit moment of discontinuity. She would celebrate and defend the administration, but she hasn’t been the boss these three-and-a-half years and is not so intimately tied to Biden’s foreign policy as he was in the Obama administration.

Any Democratic candidate will be coming in with a mandate for change, and Democrats should take this opportunity to lay to rest a tired and battered foreign policy bumper sticker: the rules-based international order (RBIO).

The RBIO has been an absolutely central talking point and concept in Democratic foreign policy since the Obama administration.1 The idea was appealing at a time when the US government was supporting the Philippine case at an arbitral tribunal convened under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) challenging China’s activities in the South China Sea. It meshed with an approach to Chinese economic behavior that turned to World Trade Organization (WTO) cases and the possibility of future agreements both without and with China (the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a bilateral investment treaty, respectively). But it never held up very well to the simple observation that the United States was not particularly interested in international law and the associated order when it came to war in Iraq, settlements in the West Bank, or indeed ratifying UNCLOS.

Some genuinely believed, despite these inconsistencies, the RBIO was a worthy ideal to champion. The 2016 Clinton campaign ran with it, and after the Trump years, the Biden administration (now containing major parts of the Obama and Clinton teams that had championed the RBIO) found it to be a good banner for what it now sought to restore as a US lodestar. It now competes and overlaps in the foreign policy macro-concept mindscape with ideas like “great power competition” and “democracy vs. autocracy.”

These new master labels are sometimes at odds with the RBIO. Is it OK for a state to break the order’s rules if it’s a democracy invoking a challenge from autocracy? Is great power competition about rules and order, or about dominance and primacy? How are the rules at the WTO doing, given bipartisan US tariffs? And even more today than in the Obama administration, the simple observation critique is impossible to avoid. As Obama-era NSC speechwriter Ben Rhodes writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs:

[A]fter Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, American rhetoric about the rules-based international order has been seen around the world on a split screen of hypocrisy, as Washington has supplied the Israeli government with weapons used to bombard Palestinian civilians with impunity. The war has created a policy challenge for an administration that criticizes Russia for the same indiscriminate tactics that Israel has used in Gaza…

Robert O’Brien, a former national security adviser during the Trump administration, attacks the RBIO from another direction:

The Biden administration … seems less interested in fostering good relations with real-world democratic allies than in defending fictional abstractions such as “the rules-based international order.” Such rhetoric reflects a globalist, liberal elitism that masquerades as support for democratic ideals.

While I’ve often had trouble with Rhodes’ arguments and policy proposals, it’s hard to find fault with him here. As for O’Brien, who presents a delusional-at-best and more likely consciously disingenuous argument that Trump was the better bridge builder with democracies, he’s not entirely off-base applying the term “masquerade” to use of the RBIO.

A rules-based international order might be a noble ideal (though we’d want to take a look at the rules and who can get away with ignoring them). But it’s not something well established today that the US government truly seeks to defend. The reality is messier, and there’s no sense in pretending the post-WWII or post-Cold War moment is either intact or desirable.

Harris, or whoever, should abandon the idea of defending a status quo that never really existed. Democrats should offer something realistic and new that Trumpist Republicans cannot. Rhodes offers some good ideas, but, in drafting, he was somewhat constrained by the assumption Biden would still be in the picture.

I’m not here this Monday evening to write this new foreign policy vision, but it should not be about defending something old. For the first time since 2008, Democrats have the opportunity and energy to take stock and offer something new. They should use it.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.

Today I’m introducing Didn’t See That Coming (DSTC), which I intend to be an occasional series at Here It Comes, in which I discuss things I got wrong—publicly or privately—or never anticipated. Readers are welcome to point out times where I’ve been wrong, which will become candidates for future DSTC entries. I already have a few in mind.

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The TikTok divestment-or-ban bill is law in April 2024. Didn’t see that coming!

As I told a number of people over the last few weeks, while I wasn’t confident what would happen to the TikTok bill that passed rapidly in the House, I thought it looked like the Senate (perhaps in coordination with the election-year Biden team) would let the matter lie dormant until after the election. While I’ve elsewhere predicted, most recently in this space, that TikTok most likely would one day not be able to operate in the United States with Chinese ownership, I thought this legislative effort would drag on longer or fizzle.

The source of my surprise: House leadership not only came up with a way to pass Ukraine and Israel aid, but also duct taped the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”1 to the side of the thing, setting it up for must-pass status in the Senate. Biden had already said he’d sign the TikTok bill if it reached his desk, so that was no surprise.

A smaller matter but certainly one I didn’t see coming: The law happens to have passed on a day when the deadline for divestment, now extended to 270 days, would land on the eve of next year’s presidential inauguration.

Assuming the “270 days after the date of the enactment” clock starts today, on inauguration eve: ByteDance will have divested from TikTok; some legal process will have blocked enforcement of the law; or Biden will face the choice of whether to let a TikTok ban go into effect or grant an extension of up to 90 days to get a deal done. TikTok could be seeking amnesty at the Resolute Desk alongside the usual stack of potential pardons and commutations.

A big f— deal

Timing and parliamentary maneuvering aside, take a moment to recognize the significance of this moment. Biden today opened a new era of US Internet censorship based on country of ownership (a proxy for “control”) and a presidential declaration of a national security risk. Well, more immediately he opened a round of litigation, testing of the limits of US and Chinese sovereignty and the US commitment to freedom of expression. I’ll try to refrain from developing any overconfident hunches about how this will all turn out.

Future DSTC candidates…

Why not preview a couple things I’ve considered writing up.

• China’s government was able to lock nearly all of Shanghai’s population in their homes for weeks on end. DSTC!

• The US pull-out from the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been enduring. DSTC!

• What else have I blundered on? Drop me a line if you have something in mind.

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About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.