Paper short abstract:

This paper unpacks the contradictory stances between China's globalising internet and its concept of 'digital sovereignty' regarding cross-border data flow and how they are put in practice by Chinese tech companies doing business abroad by taking Alibaba Cloud and AWS as comparative case studies.

Paper long abstract:

Crossing the so-called Great Fire Wall, Beijing has been pushing Chinese tech companies to enter international markets, particularly through its Digital Silk Road (DSR) that could arguably connect the world’s data to a China-centered transnational network infrastructure (Shen, 2018). On the one hand, data flowing across the borders are an intrinsic part of the DSR. This contributes to raising suspicions about China’s motives, leading some to predict the rise of a fragmented internet (Hoffman et al. 2020). On the other, China emphasizes the concept of ‘digital sovereignty’(wangluo zhuquan), ‘data localisation’ (shuju bendihua) and ‘localisation of data compliance’ (bendihua hegui), domestically and internationally (Hong & Goodnight, 2020). How can these two contradictory stances towards data be reconciled, and how are they put in practice by Chinese tech companies doing business abroad? In this paper, we focus on Alibaba Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), two key players in China’s tech ‘going out’, as case studies, in order to understand the complex relationship between the Chinese State, Chinese tech companies, and foreign transnational enterprises regarding cross-order data transfers and compliance. Adopting document analysis, we start by reviewing Chinese government’s policies on globalizing its internet/tech industry and on localizing data, and frame them in the context of on-going debates among Chinese policymakers, industry insiders and academics on cross-border data transfers and governance. We then look at Alibaba Cloud and AWS’s transnational partnership strategies and specific data policies in the EU and China, to understand how such policies are put in practice.