Exploring Chinese Model of Techno-Nationalism: Creating Digital Borders Through Balkanized Cyber Spaces

The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with the third wave of globalization and the rise of the global internet. The arrival of new ICTs (information communication technologies) informed the globalization debate and the borderless narrative of the 1990s got associated with the internet. To an extent, this was a widespread trend but there was one glaring exception which problematized this intersection discourse of globalization since its inception. This was the Golden Shields Project (1997) which was popularized by Geremie Barmé as the Great Firewall of China. The return of political boundaries in the twenty-first century is salient but the erection of the digital borders on the basis of geospatial characteristics of Golden Shields Project was not given adequate attention in IR scholarship. The Golden Shields Project was consequential in creating Digital Borders which gave birth to the idea of digital nationhood. The conception of digital barriers was introduced and was executed across mainland China over time. This effectively led to the creation of cyber borders adjacent to the actual geospatial configuration of the internet infrastructure on the Chinese mainland. The cyber borders were operationalized on the geographical boundaries by limiting and monitoring the optical fibers entering mainland China. The Golden Shields Project midwife the birth of digital borders and Chinese policies reinforced Chinese nationhood in isolation of the global internet. Given the consolidation of the cyber borders, the meteoric rise of the digital economy and the rapid intersection between national security and digital economy, the Chinese state embarked on the ambitious project of the BeiDou satellite navigation system to decouple from the United States Global Positioning System (GPS) completely. The project is already online with the final two satellites ready to be launched by mid-2020. 70% of Chinese smartphones already are utilizing the BeiDou navigation system. This decoupling was intended and most likely leads to the balkanization of the global internet. However, the Chinese attempts to export the model of digital borders inside their navigation system has the potential to change the nature of the nationhood on a global scale forever. The International Relations scholarship must engage with this development to expand the understanding of Borders and nationhood dynamics. The proposed paper attempts to explore the nature of digital nationhood enforced and adopted in China on the other side of the Great Firewall. The paper will focus on the effects of this balkanization on the creation of new digital nationhood among the countries that are adopting the Chinese Beidou given the inbuilt configuration of Beidou and association of Chinese internet model with digital borders. The impact of the bordering and balkanization on the human rights and state’s power over their citizens in the global south by exercising the same level of control over cyberspace as China is analyzed. The re-education camps of the Uighurs and their human rights violation has a strong co-relation with the technological capabilities and can facilitate more human rights violations given the nationalist anxiety in Global South.