Almost all products in American homes, from lamps to sofas, windows and Wi-Fi routers, conform to the standards and measures of a global system established to ensure quality and continuous operation.
Industry standards, created by the United States and its allies over decades, form an invisible matrix of rules that underpin the global market. As mundane as it may seem, this uniformity is critical for international trade, as it ensures that screws, USB plugs and shipping containers can be used interchangeably around the world. The standards reflect the consensus of international panels long dominated by Western technical experts.
China now wants to take the lead in the fields of the future. To the dismay of many Western countries, Beijing is employing state funding and political influence to try to set standards for all types of cutting-edge technologies that cover telecommunications, electricity transmission and artificial intelligence.
“The mastery of technical standards that underpin information and communication technologies and other emerging fields is an integral part of Beijing’s ambitions,” said the US-China Economic and Security Review Committee of Congress in its annual report in December.
China’s efforts are driven by a desire to overcome the West, as well as to accumulate profits. Standards based on patented technologies often require users to pay licensing fees. Nokia Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., for example, earn billions of dollars annually from patents that support cell phone systems made by rivals. China prefers to earn that kind of money by designing standards that match technologies developed by its own companies