Technology platform competition between the United States and China: Decoupling and sanctions against Huawei

Abstract

Decoupling, defined as the deliberate and state-directed severing of economic ties between the world’s two largest economies (the USA and China), is one of the most studied phenomena of contemporary international relations. The growing confrontation between the political systems and military machines of the United States and China extends into the economic sphere and increasingly affects the field of high technology. A number of experts consider the conflict of the modern superpowers for the leading position in the field of the new technologies as a manifestation of techno-nationalism, a new type of mercantilism that plays a key role in industrial policy and world trade of the leading economies of the planet. The article is focused on the new generation of interstate conflict, in which the technological giants act as proxy institutions of U. S. and Chinese state power. The distinctive feature of this new type of conflict is its overtly nonviolent nature. It manifests itself in the use by both sides of tools borrowed from economic sanctions and trade wars of the past. The China — US rivalry in the development and implementation of the latest technologies is a non-military reincarnation of the thermonuclear arms race of the Cold War era. Nowadays the most economically powerful states of the planet, led by the USA, choose instruments of economic coercion to protect the existing status quo in the global system. Such measures allow them to adapt elements of the arms race and power rivalry of past eras to modern conditions.