Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty, by Aynne Kokas, is a timely engagement with debates on the extraction, commodification and protection of data amidst sharpening US–China tech relations. The book sheds light on how pervasive exploitative data-gathering practices by both Chinese corporations and the Chinese government constitute an arresting challenge for the US government and the conventional understanding of sovereignty in the digital age. This volume, given its accessible writing style, might be of interest to students of data governance, communication industries and international relations.
Kokas defines data trafficking as “the commercial extraction of consumer data to support a government outside the legal regime users consented to have protect them” (p. 2) and argues that “the movement of data from tech firms in the United States to China threatens digital sovereignty around the world” (p. 2). Elements of data trafficking are further unpacked in three dimensions: the erosion of national boundaries, exploitative agreements between consumers and platforms, and monetization of cumulative data flows.
Before moving onto specific case studies, the author draws a distinction between two modes of tech development and governance that facilitate data trafficking: a US corporate-led model characterized by regulatory fragmentation and policy short-termism (chapter two), and a Chinese state-directed model undergirded by stringent governmental control and military–civil fusions (chapter three). The author depicts the compartmentalized relationship between the federal government and state governments in the US, while a parallel central–local discrepancy in China is oddly missed. Chapter four reveals how transnational Chinese tech corporations augment the Chinese government's ability to expand and operationalize its model of digital sovereignty outward in strategic industries. By looking into different sectors, including social media, online gaming, fintech, bioeconomy and domestic appliances, chapters five to nine flesh out how data trafficking can be enabled by the collusion between allegedly docile Chinese corporations and the seemingly all-powerful Chinese government.
The book concludes by envisaging multifaceted data stabilization as a framework to support “continued US industrial development while mitigating exploitative practices that are bad for both consumers and national security” (p. 187). Proposed strategies provide helpful insights for remedying existing regulatory loopholes, but the stabilization approach seems like a continuity of the normalized multi-stakeholder model that could be compromised by both corporate power and political agendas. One might wonder how affected countries from the Global South could respond to unscrupulous data transfers, lacking the technological capacities and economic resources that are possessed by the US?
Based on an underlying assumption that Chinese corporations are always at the mercy of the party-state, the argument of the book is occasionally articulated in a teleological way by conflating the geopolitical strategies of the Chinese state and commercial interests of Chinese corporations without concretization and contextualization of the interplay between state and corporate power. Despite the pervasive presence of state power in the Chinese context, chapter seven corroborates the fact that the Chinese financial sector is far from being impermeable but leaves manoeuvring leeway for the private sector to navigate. The analysis of new dynamics brought by private fintech firms to a state-controlled financial system is spot on, but it should be recognized that monopolistic tech giants have also circumvented, influenced and benefitted enormously from techno-nationalist state policies. Neither state–business entanglements nor the multi-layered Chinese government itself should be essentialized in a monolithic manner. Similarly, activities of Chinese actors abroad also need to be situated historically in the broader changing dynamics of global capitalism.
Theoretically, Kokas's study of data trafficking extends the scrutiny of surveillance capitalism from corporate practices to digitally extractive governments by ushering in a geopolitical perspective. However, as many issues related to data trafficking are derived from unruly elements of economic liberalism, the frequent use of the disputable liberal/illiberal dichotomy to describe US–China tech relations and their respective tech governance systems is conceptually oxymoronic. For example, under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dominant liberal framework struggles to respond to the epistemic challenge posed by the tension between health data as a global public good and bounded individual privacy. In addition, the book's discussion of data trafficking often invokes the notions of market competitiveness and network effects; it is unfortunate that Kokas misses the opportunity to extend the analysis to a more theoretically productive dimension that could have problematized the monopolistic rule of the data-driven digital economy.
Empirically, the absence of any discussion of methodology is a main limitation of the book. A brief introduction to the adopted methods for data collection and interpretation could make the argument more convincing. Readers might need to search for more robust sources and nuanced evidence about the actual purposes, processes and outcomes of data trafficking.
Amid the replicated Cold War rhetoric that chimes with refurbished “China threat” varieties in both popular and academic discourses, US–China tech relations have been easily framed as a frontier of confrontation between two conceptually incompatible systems. Nevertheless, as the book has already demonstrated that a wide range of globally interconnected industries are potential targets for data trafficking, it might be problematic to approach data governance and sovereignty as a zero-sum game between two economically powerful countries. The ongoing contestation between poorly regulated transnational data flows and sovereign concerns crystallizes the continuous conflict between territorial boundaries and the de-territorialized impulse of capital accumulation. What is needed to confront the peril of transnational data governance is moving beyond outmoded methodological nationalism and essentialist forms of binary oppositions that neglect the ruthless expansion of digital capitalism as a global condition, of which both China and the US are crucial parts. Caricaturing China as an existential threat to the interests of the US and the globe could be rather counterproductive when tackling the challenge of data governance that has been besieged by the logic of capital.
