In its 14th Five-Year-Plan for 2021-2025, the ‘New Infrastructure’ [新基建] initiative is the aggregation of China’s governmental priorities on digital infrastructure, which serves as a bedrock of China’s industrial policy characterised by forward-planning economic statecraft and technological statecraft of emerging technologies. In this paper, I show that China’s technological statecraft aims to secure an advantage in interstate geoeconomic contestations, particularly in the context of the US-China great power rivalry.
Theoretically, this paper argues that states’ technological statecraft is a product of the social interaction between states, and it challenges the predominant view of technologies in the existing IR scholarship as an ‘independent variable’ - exogenous to and determinist in (international) politics. It shows that technologies can be both the product of international politics and the material context where international politics takes place.
This paper straddles the fields of STS and IR: it accounts for, through the case of China’s ‘New Infrastructure’, the input of global politics in the making of technologies. With topic modelling and semantic network analysis, this study analyses the co-occurrence of normative discourses and references to specific technologies in policy documents and technical standards, thus reconstructing why and how the Chinese state inscribes its foreign policy objectives into the materiality of technologies.
This study contributes to a broader understanding of development of strategic technologies in institutional settings through the lens of foreign policy making. Its concept of technological statecraft offers another conceptualisation of industrial policy, which is so far mostly understood as a form of economic statecraft.