China has successfully become a “standard-maker” – a country that actively sets and shapes international technical standards for a range of industries. What does this mean for China’s position in international relations and global governance? This article analyzes practices of standards internationalization in the cybersecurity sector that enact and represent China’s authority towards domestic and international audiences. Drawing on Chinese language sources and other documents, it introduces China’s academic debate on the internationalization of cybersecurity standards and examines a practice-centered case study of the authority of cybersecurity standards in China’s automotive industry. Three examples illustrate the different mechanisms of China’s authority in international standardization: participatory deference, pre-promulgated deference, and regulatory deference. The article contributes to recent debates on authority in international standardization by theorizing – against the intersubjectively constructed field of international standardization – the conditions of how standards are recognized as authoritative in the first place.
The article is forthcoming with China Law and Society Review.
A preprint can be viewed here (under review).