‘Progress is happening so quickly that governments and societies struggle to understand revolutionary and disruptive technology, much less mobilise effective responses.’

• This is an edited version of Justin Bassi’s opening speech at ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue taking place on September 2 and 3.

Most of you probably flew to Sydney to join us. And most of you probably didn’t think much about the shape of the windows in the plane—but let me tell you something interesting about plane windows. They used to be square.

The world’s first commercial airliner, the de Havilland Comet built in Hertfordshire England carried more than 30,000 passengers in its first full year of operation in 1953, including Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. 

But in 1954, two Comets came apart in the air, killing everyone on board in both instances. Investigations found that the fuselage around the corners of the square windows suffered metal fatigue from the stress caused by the sharp angles. And this was the cause of the crashes.

Plane makers around the world switched to rounded windows … and commercial aviation has gone on to contribute arguably as much as any technology to boost our civilisation—enabling most people to experience other parts of the world, conduct business face-to-face, share their thoughts and ideas, and learn from one another—as we’ll do over the next two days.

The point of the story is that technology improves our lives while introducing new risks. As with aviation, there’s a period of adjustment: we discover problems, we find sensible fixes, the cost comes down, the take-up rises and the technology becomes baked into our lives, contributing to our social, economic and cultural growth.

What is changing, however, is the speed at which new technologies are being developed and the impact they are having. We have galloping progress in fields such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing—to name a few. Technological progress is cumulative and cross-pollinating, so that advances in one field tend to drive advances in others. And as that progress builds, the stakes both in terms of rewards and risks grow.

As our first speaker Eric Schmidt has written of artificial intelligence: ‘Faster aeroplanes did not help build faster aeroplanes, but faster computers will help build faster computers.’

And that’s the challenge. Progress is happening so quickly that governments and societies struggle to understand revolutionary and disruptive technology, much less mobilise effective responses.

And if we don’t roll up our sleeves and wrestle with difficult policy challenges around emerging technologies, we yield the space to others who might be motivated purely by financial gain or political power. Then, technology isn’t serving the needs and interests of the majority of people.

Things don’t automatically break our way. People actually have to ask the right questions and start the right conversations.

In September 1984, 40 years ago almost to the day, the US introduced the first Presidential Directive on cyber, titled NSDD-145, establishing a comprehensive and co-ordinated approach to information systems security.

It came about because then President Ronald Reagan, after watching the movie War Games, asked whether the cyber attacks portrayed in the film could really happen. His question was initially met with derision but, after a review, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Vessey, returned with the answer: “Mr President, the problem is much worse than you think.”

The lag period between the development of technology and our ability to manage it is where the risk is most intense and the benefits most uncertain.

And the reason the Sydney Dialogue was established was to help shorten this period—to prompt those questions and conversations by bringing together political leaders, tech CEOs and the world’s top civil society voices to talk about how we can roll out the next waves of technology in secure and stable ways.

In just three years since we held the first Sydney Dialogue:

• The lingering lessons of COVID and the deteriorating strategic environment have combined to accelerate the trend of economic derisking—especially by the United States and China.
• Generative AI has demonstrated the immense power and mystery of deep learning and massive amounts of computing—leaving governments grappling with how to regulate a technology for which there isn’t really any regulatory precedent.
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated the chameleonic dimensions of hybrid warfare—underscoring the importance of cybersecurity and of mounting defences against threats ranging from disinformation and propaganda to attacks on power grids and other critical infrastructure.
• And disinformation—including deepfake-generated disinformation—has thrown our entire infoscape into question, raising fears of personalised content created at effectively zero cost yet targeting millions of people for malign purposes. This has profound implications for democracies that depend on public trust in the integrity of institutions and elections.

The Sydney Dialogue is proudly focused on the Indo-Pacific region—the most populous, dynamic and diverse region in the world.

These are conversations for all of us—and I’m very pleased to say that we have more than 30 countries represented here.

And by the end of the Dialogue, I hope that we’re a little bit closer to finding the right rules and norms that translate across borders to foster safe and secure access to transformative technologies; help distribute the benefits equitably; earn the trust of our citizens; and protect individual rights and democratic freedoms.

As the power of technology grows—and everyone in this room knows that’s the course we’re on—the stakes are getting higher and the conversations more vital. That’s why we’re all here.

The Strategist is running a short series of articles in the lead up to ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue on September 2 and 3. The event will cover key topics in critical, emerging and cyber technologies, including disinformation, electoral interference, artificial intelligence, hybrid warfare, clean technologies and more.

 

In 1922, Mr Norman J. Trotter, from the Pappinbarra region of New South Wales, wrote to the then federal Treasurer, the Hon Earle Page MP, complaining that the general election was being held when there wasn’t a full moon.

Trotter pointed out the safety implications of transporting ballot boxes over mountainous roads, on horseback, with insufficient illumination!

A century on, electoral administrators around the world are dealing with a radically changed democratic landscape.  Concerns about moonlight—or its absence—have been replaced by the pervasive presence of disinformation and false narratives, the rise of new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, occasional madcap conspiracy theories, threats to electoral workers, and the need to maintain citizens’ confidence in electoral outcomes.

Together, these dramatic changes will demand the ongoing vigilance of legislators, regulators and civil society. Increased focus and resourcing on this continually emerging space can harness the opportunities it presents while lessening the potential negative effects already being experienced.

The Australian Electoral Commission has been remarkably successful in maintaining the confidence of the Australian people: survey results show persistently high levels of trust in our operations, with nine out of 10 Australians expressing a high degree of satisfaction. That assurance is indispensable when the democratic legitimacy of governments rests on trust in electoral outcomes—the foundation on which all other actions of democratic government rests.

Yet maintaining these results may become increasingly complex with the rapidly expanding use of new technologies and an ever-evolving information ecosystem.

The attempted manipulation of information isn’t new.  In 1675, King Charles II tried to close London coffee houses because he was worried about false information being peddled in those places where people gathered to talk politics. Modern communications, including the ubiquitous use of mobile phones and social media platforms, has turbocharged the development and spread of information—both accurate and false. This has significantly affected all aspects of elections, from campaigning to the way they are conducted.

The relatively recent advent of generative AI heralds a potentially new epoch in electoral management. Globally, democracies are coming to terms with this new technology, and jurisdictions are trying different approaches from outright bans, through to mandatory declarations on messaging, and voluntary codes.

Regardless of the approach, democracies need to be aware that generative AI will have a significant impact on communications around elections. It will enable the generation of information—including disinformation—at a volume and velocity not seen previously and, perhaps even more troublingly, with a verifiability that may make it hard for audiences to discern the truth of the information they are receiving.

Legislators and regulators need to be alert to the potential impact of these ‘three Vs’. Meanwhile Australia’s regulatory framework needs to evolve to harness the benefits of new technology—including to democratic participation and political inclusion—while ameliorating the potentially negative impacts, and protecting the rights of citizens to express themselves freely.

Citizens’ electoral expectations have also changed dramatically. There was a time when the role of an electoral management body was simply to produce a statistically valid result. Such bodies must now also work to maintain trust by listening to the huge amount of feedback they get through social media and other channels—much of which reflects immediate feelings and does not necessarily take account of the legislation or resourcing realities by which an electoral body is bound. These bodies must swiftly respond to concerns and provide a constant stream of assurance about the electoral process.

The AEC has instituted several initiatives to manage these recent developments.  We have developed a reputation management system, which outlines a range of strategies to ensure citizens can trust election results. This includes arguably the most active media and social media engagement in Australia’s public service and the operation of a disinformation register during electoral events. These activities, and many others, are supported by an AEC command centre that provides real-time data, oversight and connectivity to the manual election operation like we’ve never had before.

We’ve also established a defending democracy unit that works with our partners across the government and social media platforms, and supports the operation of the multi-agency electoral integrity assurance taskforce.

AI-generated deepfakes—using audio, video, or a combination of both—have been used to sway public opinion in a growing number of elections overseas. In some cases, the use of AI has been clearly labelled; but in others, the material is presented as genuine. In extreme cases, voters can be steered toward or away from candidates—or even to avoid the polls altogether.

The next federal election is likely to be the first in Australia in which the use of AI-generated political communication could be a prominent feature of the campaign. The net effect, some experts say, is a genuine threat to democracy with a surge of AI deepfakes eroding the public’s trust in what they see and hear.

The AEC is watching global developments closely and is working to ensure voters are not misled about the electoral process, nor the role, capabilities and performance of the AEC.

We are also looking forward to the Australian Parliament grappling with this issue to produce national legislation to help regulate the use of this new technology. Education—specifically digital media literacy—will be fundamental to supporting voters and protecting elections.

Despite the wave of change, the actual process of voting remains reassuringly the same as it was for the very first federal election in 1901.  Australians use a pencil—or a pen, if they choose—to mark their paper and put it in the ballot box.  Those votes still need to be transported to be counted, and votes are counted by citizens working in a temporary capacity with the AEC, in the presence of party scrutineers. The results are published and certified by the electoral authority. Of course, there are some advances such as postal voting and pre-poll voting, as well as telephone voting for blind and low-vision voters, but the core process remains largely unchanged. (As an aside, Mr Trotter would be pleased that advances in electrification means moonlight is no longer a key concern.)

The AEC is very clear on its role in administering elections and maintaining citizens’ trust. We have never and will never—unless told to do so by Parliament—be involved in ascertaining the truth or otherwise of statements by candidates and parties.

Rather, we focus on protecting the integrity of the electoral system and ensuring citizens have the information they need to participate in the process.

This is becoming a more complex and challenging task. It is one that needs the active commitment and attention of every Australian to ensure trust and confidence in our elections remains strong.

 

Intelligence and defence are now data enterprises, which means they are AI enterprises. The volume and velocity of data is well beyond human scale. To extract actionable insights, shorten decision loops and empower our spies and warfighters, data must be handled at machine speed. Human-machine teaming is our only viable path forward.

The announcement by Amazon Web Services (AWS) today of a $2 billion strategic partnership with the Australian government for a top secret cloud is a much needed technology boost that will bring our intelligence and defence communities up to par with the US and Britain.

But this new technology should also trigger radical organisational changes within these organisations that reflect the new reality and the necessity of human‑machine teaming. Such changes will optimise the cloud’s capabilities, the value of the data that traverses it, and the power of the AI models it will feed. The conservative world of intelligence will consider these organisational changes heretical. But they are necessary.

Australia is not far behind the herd. The US was the first of the Five Eyes to get a top secret cloud service. In 2013, the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract with AWS was worth a reported US$600 million over 10 years. In November 2021, the CIA awarded the successor program, Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E), to five vendors—AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle—for probably more than US$10 billion over 15 years. Britain was next in 2021, again with AWS, in a deal worth probably up to £1 billion over 10 years.

In December 2022, the US Department of Defense procured the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, an up-to-top-secret cloud capability delivered by Microsoft, Oracle, AWS and Google. In this arrangement, the four companies will compete for task orders worth up to US$9 billion until June 2028.

In December 2023, Office of National Intelligence (ONI) Director‑General and AUKUS architect Andrew Shearer intimated that top secret cloud was coming to Australia. ONI had already approached the market in December 2020, leading to failed negotiations with Microsoft, AWS’s main hyperscale cloud competitor.

AWS’s partnership is Australia’s first ever top secret cloud, which has been a tough hurdle to clear. Defence, intelligence and other agencies have been progressively adopting lower‑classification cloud capabilities for years. The government created its cloud-first policy 10 years ago, and in 2022 the Digital Transformation Agency renewed AWS’s whole-of-government cloud agreement until May 2025. This can carry data up to the ‘protected’ level, which is the highest classification allowed for a public cloud, one available over to many users over the internet.

Extremely rigorous data security, localisation and control measures have meant that a top secret cloud must be a private cloud, available to just one customer. In this case, it’s ‘purpose-built for Australia’s Defence and Intelligence agencies’, AWS says. And this is why it comes with a $2 billion price tag.

It’s a very good thing that Australia has designed this procurement to deliver a capability for all Australia’s intelligence and defence agencies. This has maximised our purchasing power and taxpayer’s value for money. Considering the estimated costs for the US and British top secret clouds, $2 billion is in the ballpark.

Also, in the relentless quest for sharper intelligence, disparate agencies can resemble warring fiefdoms, each clutching its data and capabilities close to its chest. A unified top secret cloud will be a digital nervous system for the intelligence community. This fulfils a ‘central theme’ of the 2017 Independent Intelligence Review of ‘strengthening integration across Australia’s national intelligence enterprise.’

Australia’s choice to go with a single hyperscale cloud provider was probably the easiest and quickest way forward, given the urgency of the need. The contract with AWS may have provisions that allow the government to integrate other cloud providers down the road. A multi-cloud environment can increase resilience and offer better choice between offerings from various providers for storage, computing, analytics, applications and AI capabilities. This is why the US intelligence community and Pentagon have both signed multi-cloud deals that include four or more cloud providers. Having several providers dodges the problem of locking into just one and gives the customer more power.

Technology begets social and organisational changes. Data is increasing exponentially. AI capabilities are accelerating demand for new, higher quality data to train models. Intelligence and military operations now depend on massive data collection and management to extract actionable insights and shorten decision loops. In one example, the US National Geospatial‑Intelligence Agency collects 15 terabytes of imagery per day. This is expected to grow 1000 percent in six or seven years.

Dynamic, real‑time data collection and exchange will feed AI models of deployed edge capabilities. We may now think of UAVs and other intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms in that context, but real‑time data collection and exchange are moving into almost every piece of deployed equipment. Increasingly enabled by 5G technology, this includes weapons, communications and clothing—and will soon include implanted biotechnologies such as brain‑computer interfaces.

So, AWS’s top secret private cloud is more than just cheaper, scalable infrastructure for sharing and storing classified reports. It is the foundation for intelligence and defence agencies’ ability to utilise AI. The cloud is the ocean of data storage and processing power that will fuel AI’s catalysing effect on intelligence and defence agencies. Sensor feeds, human whispers, the electromagnetic hum of a thousand devices—these all converge. The data needs to be rapidly ingested, cleaned of noise and integrated into coherent intelligence.

Human-machine teaming is necessary. There is no other option. This is where our real challenge lies, which will make the policy and technology challenges pale in comparison. It will be the challenge of cultural and organisational change of intelligence and defence agencies. Australia’s intelligence and defence agencies are already using AI and machine-learning algorithms in their enterprise technology stacks, but so far this has been a process of augmenting existing roles, processes and organisational structures. We need to move away from the idea that the cloud and AI are there to enhance or support existing roles. It is about completely transforming these roles.

AI is the latest gale of creative destruction. In the 1780s, the introduction of the power loom helped kick off the industrial revolution. The power loom put hand weavers out of business and transformed the process of textile manufacturing. AI will transform intelligence and defence agencies to the same degree.

AI doomerism is the fear that AI will destroy humanity. Let me coin ‘AI loomerism’ as the misplaced idea that AI can be effectively integrated into organisations without radical transformation of roles, processes and structures. AI is not there to support the conventional roles of spies or warfighters, in the same way the power loom was not there to support the hand weaver. It was there to radically improve efficiency and force a reconceptualisation of humans’ role in the system, the value of their skills and expertise, and therefore their very identity.

In our quest to utilise AI technology to give our decision makers faster and more actionable insights, we must embark on a transformative odyssey, not merely tinkering with analytical tools or tradecraft. The intelligence community stands at a threshold. We are called upon to not just reassess the processes of spying and warfighting, but the very foundations of them.

Imagine, if you will, a complete restructuring, a rewiring of the very fabric of Australia’s intelligence and defence agencies. Legal frameworks, once rigid, must become adaptable. Policy and governance, once siloed entities, must enable data flows in real time, unlocking the full potential of AI. By streamlining these core functions, we unlock the potential for shared resources: powerful language models, cutting-edge infrastructure, and partnerships that bridge the chasms between agencies and missions. It is through this grand transformation that we can truly harness the power of cloud, data and AI, not just as tools but as paradigm‑shifting technologies.

The integration of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems is essential to ensuring that Australia is capable of defending its interests now and into the future, but we as a country must be careful not to abandon our humanity inadvertently in the race to modernise.

To ensure this does not happen, Australia needs better safeguards to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law as we develop new defence capabilities through emerging technologies.

Some in the technology industry have previously encouraged a ‘move fast and break things’ approach, emphasising speed and innovation above all else. This approach has seen human decision-making and intelligence increasingly replaced by algorithms and autonomous systems.

There are particular risks when this occurs in the military context. Humans must remain at the centre of our defence capabilities, particularly when strategic decisions are made that are literally life-or-death decisions. Technologies that take human decision-makers ‘out of the loop’ raise important questions about how these decisions are made, and who is accountable for them.

Lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) can generally be understood as weapons that independently select and attack targets without human supervision.

The idea of drones patrolling the skies, identifying and executing targets reads as science fiction, but as early as 2003, the US first predicted that AI and facial recognition technologies (FRT) would be used with limited human supervision to execute lethal attacks during military operations.

One of the first examples of LAWS being used was in 2020, in Libya’s civil war, when forces backed by the government in Tripoli were believed to have used STM Kargu-2 drones to attack retreating enemy soldiers, according to a United Nations report. Since then, LAWS have been used in the Ukraine-Russia war and Russia is known to be developing a nuclear capable LAWS called ‘Poseidon’.

Understandably, many people oppose the idea of machines making life-and-death decisions.

As part of our recent evidence to an enquiry by federal Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (JSCFADT) into the modernisation of Australia’s defence capabilities, the AHRC dedicated the whole of our 38-page submission to discussing the human rights and international humanitarian law concerns raised by Australia’s current approach to LAWS.

A key concern is that LAWS are incompatible with the jus in bellum principles of proportionality and distinction.

Under the Geneva Convention, attacks must be proportionate—that is, the harms caused by an attack must be outweighed by the perceived advantages gained. This subjective analysis is inherently a difficult and imprecise one for humans to undertake. It requires a weighing of the value of a human life.

To allow an algorithm to conduct this weighing exercise has been described by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as ‘politically unacceptable and morally repugnant’.

Equally as important is the principle of distinction, which prohibits the targeting of civilians or use of indiscriminate attacks as combatants must seek to minimise the impact of conflict.

While AI and FRT are becoming more advanced every day, they are currently incapable of determining whether a person is hors de combat (which means they have surrendered or are so badly wounded that they are incapable of defending themselves). That type of contextual interpretation is simply beyond the capabilities of these technologies.

This could result in combatants who are hors de combat being killed by a LAWS that cannot make this distinction. The problem is further complicated by the rise in ‘grey zone’ and irregular conflict, in which combatants are not easily identifiable or easily distinguished from civilians.

Despite these significant risks, Australia currently has insufficient safeguards in place to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law as the ADF continues to evolve its capabilities by integrating emerging technologies.

The Department of Defence, in its own submission to the JSCFADT, noted that under Article 36 of the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, new weaponry must undergo a legal review.

The Australian Government’s position appears to be that these reviews are sufficient to comply with international humanitarian law. But  Article 36 reviews have been widely criticised across the globe due to their inflexibility, lack of accountability and lack of compliance mechanisms. These concerns will be exacerbated if LAWS are, as expected, able to ‘learn’ from new data and missions. This could lead to Article 36 reviews approving a technology that may then operate differently after being deployed—rendering the previous review redundant.

Article 36 reviews are a necessary, but not a sufficient, safeguard with respect to LAWS.

It is due to these insufficiencies that many groups, including the AHRC, are calling for the regulation of LAWS.

There has recently been positive movement on this front, with Australia voting in favour of a UN resolution that stressed the ‘urgent need for the international community to address the challenges and concerns raised by autonomous weapons systems’.

However more must be done.

Australia should reconsider its 2018 position that it is premature to regulate LAWS. There are some military technologies, such as landmines and cluster munitions, that have been recognised as posing too great a threat to human rights and international humanitarian law, and therefore requiring regulation. It is our view that LAWS fall into the same category.

As Australia seeks to improve its defence capabilities, we must ensure that the swift pace of modernisation does not result in human rights and international humanitarian law being left behind.

What follows is an interview by Project Syndicate with Angela Huyue Zhang, author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs its Economy (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Project Syndicate: In 2020, Chinese regulators launched a crackdown on tech companies—a process that cost firms more than $1 trillion in market value. How has the crackdown changed the innovation and entrepreneurial culture in China? Has it had any positive effects?

Angela Huyue Zhang: The crackdown appears to have yielded few, if any, positive outcomes. Beyond failing to encourage new market entrants, it seems to have entrenched the dominance of incumbents. Moreover, it has severely undermined investor confidence, leading to a substantial reduction in capital flows into the consumer-tech sector.

As private entities recede, the state advances. For example, government-backed funds or companies acquire stakes in key subsidiaries of tech giants; these ‘golden shares’ enable the government to exert more control over content moderation and other business decisions. Finally, the crackdown has enabled the state to steer investment within the technology sector, leading both private and state-backed investors increasingly to focus on so-called hard tech.

PS: China does have a ‘strong reason to regulate’, you write in your forthcoming book, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, not least because its platform economy has ‘grown to be very unruly.’ If Alibaba’s ‘forced restructuring’ last year was not the right way to rein in a firm that had grown too large, how should the authorities have addressed monopoly concerns?

AHZ: The Chinese antitrust authorities should have intervened much earlier to curb the rapid expansion of leading tech firms like Alibaba and Tencent. Instead, they allowed acquisitions by these giants to proceed with little regulatory oversight, let alone constraints, for over a decade.

For Chinese firms, the key to circumventing the government’s investment restrictions was the ‘variable interest entity’ (VIE) structure, which enabled them to raise capital from overseas. Given uncertainty around the legitimacy and enforceability of the VIE structure, administrative authorities like the Ministry of Commerce avoided scrutinizing merger transactions involving firms that had adopted it. This worked for Chinese Big Tech firms, which amassed significant market power—so much power, in fact, that altering the competitive landscape now will be extremely difficult.

PS: Chinese regulators have lately been easing up. For example, you note that they are taking a rather lax approach to artificial intelligence, in order to give Chinese firms a ‘competitive advantage over their American and European counterparts.’ But this approach, too, carries risks. In High Wire, you compare China’s regulatory system to a particularly difficult balancing act, characterized by ‘hierarchy, volatility, and fragility.’ What are the implications of this ‘dynamic pyramid model’, as you call it, for Chinese regulation?

AHZ: Chinese regulation is characterized by repeated cycles of policy easing and tightening. Chinese regulators’ lax approach to AI today could sow the seeds for a regulatory crisis tomorrow. And because China’s regulatory structure is rigidly hierarchical, information transmission within the bureaucracy is sometimes very inefficient, so regulators often fail to respond to issues as they arise. Instead, they tend to wait until the problem has grown to be rather serious, so the costs of changing course are high.

PS: In your book, you note that ‘Chinese tech firms self-regulate’ with the judiciary’s participation. How do Chinese tech firms act as ‘quasi-regulators’, and how has the judiciary facilitated the platform economy’s growth?

AHZ: The vast majority of disputes arising from large online platforms are adjudicated primarily by the platforms themselves. That is because these claims tend to be very small, so rather than going through the trouble of suing, most consumers and merchants rely on the platforms themselves to resolve their complaints. But platforms sometimes require support from the court system, especially when enforcing claims proves challenging. Chinese courts have devoted enormous resources to adjudicating disputes involving tech firms and, in doing so, have enhanced the credibility of firms’ ‘self-regulation’. The government thus effectively lends a helping hand to tech firms.

PS: A number of ‘seemingly random policies’ that the Chinese government has introduced since 2020, you write in High Wire, ‘are all connected by a common desire to combat inequality.’ Which of those policies has been—or is likely to be—particularly effective, and which are misguided?

AHZ: All these policies appear to be well-intentioned, but the way the government has gone about implementing them has led to serious unintended consequences. Because of the power imbalance between business and government in China, any negative policy signal can cause tech stocks to plummet. Investors lack confidence in tech firms’ ability to counteract government intervention. Ultimately, the market’s deep-seated mistrust of the Chinese legal system is the primary driver of investors’ bearishness.

PS: How might regulatory trends in the United States and the European Union affect the trajectory of tech governance in China?

AHZ: Regulatory trends in the US and the EU are poised to influence Chinese tech governance in three ways. First, Chinese policymakers might emulate their Western counterparts in strengthening oversight over Big Tech firms. Second, America’s expansion of overseas surveillance and aggressive assertion of jurisdiction over overseas data are likely to prompt China to enforce more stringent cross-border data-transfer rules. Finally, China might use its control over data outflows as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the EU and other jurisdictions that are tightening their data-outflow regulations.