Technical Standards: A New Realm of China’s International Influence?
Practical information
As its firms become more competitive, China is increasingly well positioned to define the standards that will shape the industries of the future.
This shift is not only a consequence of its growing economic importance, but also the result of clear policy orientations. While historically the Chinese party-state has used technical standards to protect domestic markets, official texts increasingly present them as instruments of international influence. China has made concerted efforts to not only boost key technical standards of its own, but has moved to proactively integrate the forums of international standards development while simultaneously forging its own path. Through the intervention of its powerful party-state apparatus, is China changing the terms and nature of this process of industrial innovation traditionally left to the hands of private actors? Can technical standard-setting be a space for constructive negotiation or will it increasingly be a realm of heightened competition and global fragmentation?
This round table will explore the role of technical standardization in China’s national industrial strategy and discuss efforts to deepen international cooperation on standards development at the bilateral and multilateral levels.
This webinar will be held in English
Introduction and moderation
- John Seaman, Research Fellow, Center for Asian Studies, French Institute of International Relations - Ifri
Speakers
- Olivier Peyrat, Director General, French Standardization Association (AFNOR) and administrator of the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the International Organization for Standardizatoin (ISO)
- Sarah Eaton, Professor of Transregional China Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin
- Juliette Genevaz, Research Fellow, European Institute for China Studies (EURICS), Paris, and Associate Researcher, French Research Institute on East Asia (IFRAE)
- Tim Rühlig, Research Fellow, The Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI), member of the China Task Force of CEN and CENELEC
- Daniel Fuchs, Postdoctoral Fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin
Round table organized by Ifri and EURICS (European Institute for Chinese Studies)
Register for the event via the EURICS website
Speakers
Our team
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China and the New Geopolitics of Technical Standardization
China is rapidly emerging as a formidable power in the development of technical standards, transforming the international standard-setting landscape and reintroducing an element of geopolitics into what are too often considered as benign, technical processes.
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