Chinese Standardization: From Space to Cloud, Xi Jinping's Normative Assault on Global Dominance 🚀

The approval of the ISO 14620-5 standard, announced on October 14, is a high-profile strategic achievement that is the first-ever Chinese international standard in the field of manned spaceflight. Far from being the initial sign, this milestone is the latest in a long series of successes in regulatory matters, reflecting an escalation in Beijing's strategy to achieve global preeminence and rewrite the rules of global governance.

This victory in space precedes the release of the "Guidelines for the Complete Cloud Computing Standardization System (2025 Edition)" by only a few days. Promoted jointly by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工信部) and the National Standardization Committee (国家标准委), this cloud plan marks a further acceleration in China's strategy for technological autonomy and the expansion of its digital influence.

Standardization, from the cosmos to the cloud, is thus a critical component of the comprehensive plan under Xi Jinping to redefine the rules of the digital game internationally and project China's power on a global scale.

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The Latest Success: Space and the Next Move on Cloud

The ISO 14620-5 Milestone

The ISO 14620-5 standard on safety requirements for manned spacecraft was proposed and drafted under the guidance of Chinese entities, notably the Fifth Academy (China Academy of Space Technology - CAST). While its adoption involves the consensus of member countries, the initiative and content reflect the Chinese engineering and regulatory approach. Having established the first Chinese international standard in manned spaceflight is a victory of legitimization, allowing Beijing to define the safety and technology parameters for a high-value strategic sector. Chinese companies thus gain an intrinsic competitive advantage, as their technologies are already aligned with the regulatory framework that China itself helped create.

The Strategic Escalation in Cloud Computing

The swift move from the space domain to cloud computing, indicated by the impending release of the new Guidelines (2025 Edition), highlights the urgency and pervasiveness of the Chinese strategy. The cloud is the foundation of artificial intelligence, big data, and all digital services.

• Autonomy and Standardization. The Guidelines aim to consolidate technological autonomy and standardize cloud systems based on national standards. This process is crucial for export: by standardizing its own ecosystem, China facilitates the international expansion of its cloud platforms (such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud), ensuring they become the default base for global digital infrastructure.

• Projection of Control. Cloud computing is central to data processing and surveillance systems (from smart cities to commerce). Standardizing cloud systems the Chinese way also means projecting the Chinese vision of "cyber sovereignty" (网络主权). This doctrine, which emphasizes state control over data and the network, starkly contrasts with the Western ideal of an open Internet and is being normalized globally via the adoption of Chinese standards.

Standardization: The Geopolitical Offensive (Data and Institutions)

China has realized that defining international standards means controlling the future. Consequently, it has launched a serious offensive within international standardization bodies.

• Institutional Penetration (ITU, ISO, IEC): Within crucial organizations like the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), and the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), China has become an extremely proactive player, submitting a growing number of proposals for new standard definitions. The objective is to make Chinese architectures, protocols, and technologies—from 5G to AI-oriented cloud systems—the global norm.

  
  

• Competitive Advantage and Market Barriers: This approach allows China to bypass or marginalize standards developed elsewhere, creating a competitive advantage for its own enterprises and, simultaneously, establishing market barriers for competitors who must comply with standards they did not define.

The Digital Silk Road: Showcase for Chinese Standards

The standardization strategy finds its most powerful accelerator in the Digital Silk Road (DSR), the technological component of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI - 一带一路).

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  Exporting Dependency: Through the DSR, Chinese companies fund and build 5G networks, data centers, and cloud infrastructure in dozens of countries. When a country adopts this "turnkey" infrastructure, it implicitly embraces the Chinese standards and technical specifications upon which those systems are based.

• Technological "Lock-in" and Sphere of Influence: This creates a powerful "technological lock-in" effect: once critical infrastructure is built on specific standards, it becomes extremely difficult and costly for a country to switch to systems based on different standards or non-Chinese suppliers. This dependency is a form of geopolitical leverage. Standards, in this context, act as an "extended arm" for the projection of Chinese power.

  
  

Standards: The New Currency of Global Power

The convergence of efforts, from the space standard success to the imminent cloud plan, demonstrates that standardization is considered the New Currency of Global Power. Defining standards is crucial to Beijing's strategy for four fundamental reasons:

1. Competitive Advantage and Market Dominance: Defining global standards creates a playing field favorable to Chinese companies in international bidding processes.

2. Extended Security and Surveillance: Exporting security standards that mirror its own domestic laws (such as the obligation to cooperate with intelligence agencies) extends China's potential capacity to access and control international data flows that pass through its standard-based infrastructures.

3. Projection of a Digital Governance Model: Standards are a vehicle for projecting the values and principles of the Chinese model of digital governance, which emphasizes state control and stability, challenging the Western liberal paradigm.

4. "First Mover Advantage": Being at the forefront of proposing and adopting standards in emerging sectors like space, AI, and smart cloud consolidates China's position as a technological leader, allowing it to influence the future direction of global development.

In summary, China views the battle for standards as the battle for 21st-century hegemony, utilizing every technical success to transform it into geopolitical leverage.