Description
Technology is political. Technological products can be leveraged for political purposes; the tech sector itself is a site of geopolitical tensions. For instance, Huawei 5G networks have been regarded as a national threat (National Archives, 2020). Likewise, TikTok has been faced with a ban for espionage concerns (The Washington Post, 2023). These cases underline that tech giants, as crucial infrastructure and digital service providers, are intertwined with global politics. In this sense, narratives around security issues are embedded with pre-existing social relations.
This paper asks: How do tech giants resist after they have been claimed as security threats? Unpacking tech giants’ resistance is not to examine their possessions to subvert state orders. This research can provide a nuanced understanding of Chinese tech giants’ interactions with Liberal International Orders. In so doing, I hope to see a bigger picture of power relations dynamics, legitimacy, and authority between private and public sectors in this digital age.
Conceptually, securitization theory, which argues that security threat is a product of social and discourse construction (Buzan et al., 1998), is taken as an intellectual point of departure to explain the emergence of security threats in the tech sectors. Drawing on Actor-Network theory (Law, 2009), this paper argues that tech giants connect human actors (lobbyists and influencers) and non-human actors (crucial infrastructure, technical standards, etc.) as a network to resist the securitization moves. However, the agency of human and non-human actors connected by Chinese tech giants is enacted within a web intertwined with Chinese social values.
Critical discourse analysis (‘CDA’), interviews, and ethnography are employed for research methods. CDA is the primary one. The data collected by interviewing and ethnography will be used to triangulate publicly available resources and for further CDA analysis.
