Newswise — It's no news that China now sits at the main table of international commerce. China exports more goods each year than many countries produce. Last year, the country sent out about $300 billion worth, a number larger than the entire gross domestic product of Switzerland or Sweden.
What's less well known is that China is increasingly insisting on a similarly large role in standards debates. In digital cellular networks, for example, China isn't content to accept the latest generations of CDMA and GSM technologies developed in other parts of the world. China is, in addition, backing the creation of an alternative standard called TD-SCDMA that could markedly change the telecom landscape worldwide, even if adopted only in China's vast home market.
In another recent initiative, bolstered by a developing coordination with consumer goods heavyweight Wal-Mart, China has proposed a standard for tracking goods using radio frequency ID tags. Last year, Wal-Mart imported goods worth $18 billion from China.
In computer networking, China has a standard for Wi-Fi security, known as wireless local area networking authentication and privacy, or WAPI. The Chinese authorities would like to require that Wi-Fi equipment sold in China comply with the WAPI standard. That threatens to fracture the Wi-Fi world, because the rest of the world won't be using WAPI. Wi-Fi manufacturers would have to make two different chip sets for encrypted communications, one for the Chinese market and one for the rest of the world. China has also jumped into the contentious arena of DVD hardware and software, where it has proposed standards for both the next generation of red lasers and the encoding of music and video on videodiscs.
In this article, authors Philip Qu and Carl Polley, who are affiliated with one of the most important law firms in Asia, explain China's increasing interest in international standards, and take on four widely held beliefs about China: That Chinese standards are motivated by the desire to circumvent payment of royalties; that China's approach to standards is overwhelmingly controlled by the government, creating a "unified front" against foreign stakeholders; that China tends to adopt its own standards instead of international standards; and that China is using standards only to protect its domestic industries against foreign compeitition.
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