Belt and Road Initiative Helps CCP Control International Technical Standards

Security guards walk past a billboard for the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation at the forum's venue in Beijing on May 13, 2017.Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images

News Analysis

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing’s global investment and lending program, not only spreads shoddy projects worldwide but also helps the communist regime seize control of technical standards in recent years.

BRI Threatens Life Around the World

In February, Indonesian police named two Chinese citizens as suspects in the explosion at a Chinese-owned nickel factory on the island of Sulawesi. The accident, which occurred in December 2023, resulted in the death of 21 workers.

Agus Nugroho, the police chief of Central Sulawesi Province, revealed that authorities are investigating whether negligence by the company involved led to the fatal accident.

A Chinese worker in Indonesia commented on the explosion: “This explosion is not the first time. They don’t value life. They value production ...”

In recent years, accidents at Chinese-invested companies in Indonesia have been frequent. In January 2023, Indonesian workers held protests demanding that PT Gunbuster Nickel Industry (GNI) Smelter, owned by China’s Jiangsu Delong Nickel Industry, raise wages and improve safety conditions.

Minggu Bulu, a former employee at GNI who participated in the protest, said that in the past year, there had been fatal safety hazards at the production facility, including a motorcycle colliding with heavy machinery and an explosion at the smelter.

The Indonesian Chinese-invested companies in the accidents mentioned above are all part of the BRI.

Indonesia is not the only country plagued by the BRI.

In 2023, thousands of cracks emerged at Ecuador’s China-funded hydroelectric power plant. The $2.7 billion Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric power plant, which is the biggest infrastructure project ever in the country, faces the risk of breaking down.

“We are suffering today because of the bad quality of equipment and parts” in Chinese-built projects, René Ortiz, Ecuador’s former energy minister and ex-secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, told the Wall Street Journal.

Despite the fatal accidents the BRI has brought to participating countries, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) commits to “firmly advancing the joint construction of the BRI,” according to a document released in late 2023.

Currently, 147 countries (accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population and 40 percent of global GDP) have signed agreements to participate in the BRI or expressed interest in doing so. For CCP leader Xi Jinping, the Initiative is a counterattack against the United States’ “return to Asia” strategy.

Through the BRI, Beijing is developing in Central, North, and West Asia, along the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean coast, South America, Africa, and the Atlantic region, signing contracts to build railways, bridges, airports, and ports, laying a tangible material foundation for Beijing to expand its influence.

However, the Initiative has another hidden role: to promote the “Chinese standards” to the world and seize the global technical standards-setting power.

CCP Promotes “Chinese Standards” to the World

Technical standards, developed by various standard development organizations (SDOs), are the detailed specifications for how pieces of technology should be built to meet performance thresholds and connect to other products, as explained in an article by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

An adopted technical standard can impact businesses and geopolitical power. When a company successfully makes its patented technology a globally adopted standard, it receives two rewards: gaining a first-mover advantage and earning royalties from patents deemed “standards-essential.”

“Countries that are responsible for larger shares of the IP baked into standards will accrue these two benefits at scale,” the authors wrote.

Laborers work at a construction site on reclaimed land, part of a Chinese-funded project for Port City, in Colombo on Feb. 24, 2020. Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images

Realizing these benefits, the CCP has intensified efforts to seize control of technical standard-setting in recent years.

In one of the largest standard-setting organizations, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the number of technical committees and subcommittees in which the CCP participates has increased from 465 in 2005 to 668 in 2021. This ranks third in the total number of committees involved, behind only the United Kingdom and Germany. In terms of leadership positions in standard committees, China had 69 ISO secretariats in 2021, ranking sixth behind Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan.

BRI Helps Push “Chinese Standards”

In recent years, there has been an increasing concern that the CCP is using the BRI to force countries to adopt Chinese standards.

According to a 2020 report by the Heinrich-Boll Stiftung, a German political foundation, financing deals offered by Chinese railway companies to BRI participating countries typically require the use of “Chinese standards,” whether they are de facto standards (embedded in key products) or legally recognized standards endorsed by SDOs. In such cases, Chinese companies may be the only ones with equipment that meets the standard, forcing recipient countries to rely on Chinese companies to maintain their railways.

In October 2021, the CCP issued the “Outline of National Standardization Development,” requiring Chinese companies to actively participate in international standardization activities, strengthen standardization dialogues with BRICS countries and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and deepen standardization cooperation in Northeast Asia, Asia-Pacific, Pan-America, Europe, Africa, and other regions.

The document specifically emphasized the role of the BRI, calling for “active promotion” and “docking cooperation” with participating countries in the field of standards.

The communist regime also attempted to manipulate standard-setting bodies.

In 2021, at two meetings related to telecommunications standards, Chinese participants were told they must vote in support of Huawei’s proposals, which obviously violated SDO norms and rules.

Akira Amari, Japan’s former trade minister, called it “a trap.”

Approval would mean that China “defines the standard, exports the systems, and then mines data from those systems and gathers it in Beijing,” he said at the time.