Description
With the Trump Administration’s attack on the current Liberal International Order, many are looking to China to fill this emerging gap in global leadership. Rather than frame this in terms of great power competition, the paper starts from examining how Beijing sees national prosperity and global order increasingly through the race to create frontier technologies and achieve sustainable development. Many have profitably studied technology and sustainability in China as separate national policies. This paper is innovative in two ways. First, it looks at how technology and sustainability interact, shaping each other in both supportive and contradictory ways. It uses Science and Technology Studies methods to explore not only how technology shapes society, but also how diverse social actors shape both technology and sustainability experiences. Second, see this as evidence of Beijing’s 'techno-nationalist' policy, the paper moves beyond such methodological nationalism to analyse these policies and experiences in a multi-scalar way that explores how national plans take shape through practice in local, national, and global spaces. With this nuanced multi-scalar analysis of the technology/sustainability dynamic, the paper will rethink China’s geopolitical impact by developing ‘techno-globalism’ as an ideological concept, asking is the PRC moving from techno-nationalism to techno-globalism?
