New Delhi: China may be winning many of the contracts to build out Southeast Asia’s digital infrastructure, but Beijing is making less headway on the rules, according to an article published in The Diplomat.
The Southeast Asian governments are not adopting China’s digital governance model together with the technology. They are picking and choosing, taking Beijing’s hardware while writing their own rulebooks, drawing from European regulation, UN norms, regional frameworks, and their own political traditions, states the article written by Ilaria Carrozza.
It highlights the cases of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines which have used China’s technology. In Indonesia, the national cyber agency, BSSN, anchors its guidance in ISO 27001, the international standard for information security management.
Banks follow central bank regulations; fintech firms answer to the financial services authority; and all of it, as one member of the country’s cybersecurity community described it, aligns ultimately with international standards. Indonesian officials talk a great deal about digital sovereignty, but the rules their institutions actually enforce were mostly written in Geneva and Washington, says the report.
Similarly, Malaysia’s cybersecurity governance took shape in response to UN processes, and Kuala Lumpur has endorsed UN norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. Its capacity-building partners are Canadian firms and EU programmes. The Philippines aligns even more explicitly with the West: its Data Privacy Act was consciously built on the European GDPR model, and officials describe international cybersecurity governance as a Western-dominated affair, the report mentions.
“Thus, in cybersecurity, it seems that balance was struck long ago in favour of the incumbent powers rather than Beijing. Technical standards have enormous inertia. Once a country’s banks, telecoms, and certification regimes run on ISO and Western frameworks, the switching costs are prohibitive, and every new regulation layers on top of the old ones. And Beijing arrived to the standards race decades late,” the author observes.
On top of this, there is widespread official mistrust of Chinese platforms. Such sentiments were voiced repeatedly in interviews, even by officials in governments happy to accept Chinese infrastructure. Pei argued convincingly that officials abroad could never replicate the Chinese party apparatus.
The author’s research found that nobody in the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines seemed to be looking to Beijing for rules in the first place – even in areas where Chinese technology is most deeply embedded. Recipient states have their own institutions, values, and strategic calculations, which they seek to pursue while using Chinese technology.
The physical infrastructure matters less than Washington seems to think; the contest that actually matters is playing out in venues like ISO and ITU processes, regional regulatory forums, and ASEAN’s AI governance track, where the rules attached to the hardware get written. The West’s greatest advantage in Southeast Asia is that its standards are already the region’s default, but that won’t last if no one from Washington or Brussels shows up to defend and extend those principles.
Second, the United States must treat Southeast Asian agency as the asset it is. The instinct in Washington is to demand alignment, but ASEAN’s hedging culture rejects this mentality, according to the author.
The states best able to resist China’s normative influence are not necessarily the most loyal U.S. allies but the most institutionally capable. Supporting regulatory capacity, training, and legal reform – without requiring alignment – can strengthen the filtering mechanisms that have kept Beijing’s model at bay thus far. Third,
Washington must show up for the AI governance contest specifically, because it is here that the end result is most in question. That means funding Southeast Asian participation in international AI forums, engaging ASEAN’s governance process as a serious interlocutor rather than an afterthought, and offering frameworks worth borrowing from, the article further states.
(IANS)
