China’s Tech Crackdown: A Conversation with Adam Segal

China’s Tech Crackdown: A Conversation with Adam Segal

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Adam Segal joins us to examine Beijing’s ongoing crackdown on China’s technology sector. Dr. Segal argues that company blacklists from the Trump administration served as a driver for Chinese technological decoupling and caused an increasing domestic focus within China on data collection and security. He explains how China’s new phase of technology crackdowns closely aligns with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) goals on antitrust regulation, social inequality, innovation, cybersecurity, and political stability, and states that new regulations are a means of exerting party control. Additionally, Dr. Segal highlights the specific companies most affected by the new technology crackdown and what data is deemed sensitive for transfer abroad. Dr. Segal then discusses the new competitive landscape between Chinese state regulators and how such a landscape may impact domestic innovation. Lastly, Dr. Segal explains what these new regulations mean for US-China technology exchange and how these new dynamics will shape the future of the Chinese technology sector.

Dr. Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and also leads the organization’s digital and cyberspace policy program. Dr. Segal’s work on Chinese cybersecurity and technology issues has appeared in the Financial Times, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs. Dr. Segal is also the author of The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age, and a contributor to the blog, “Net Politics.” Prior to CFR, Dr. Segal was an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists and has been a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, and Tsinghua University, among others.