Impending showdown in China-US techno-sphere

The year 2025 has begun on a bad note for Chinese tech companies with the United States (US) designating social media and gaming giant, Tencent, and battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) as military companies.

- Harsh V Pant Kalpit Mankikar

Tencent's interests span the spheres of finance, cloud computing, media, messaging, video-streaming and movie production. Under American law, a list of entities that may be aiding and furthering the Communist Party of China's military-civil fusion strategy, which aims to leverage private firms in improving technologies that have defence applications, must be maintained.

With this development, the US-China technology contest is heating up, ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump as President. Significantly, Trump's first term saw technology restrictions imposed on Chinese majors like Huawei and ZTE. Then, Trump had taken on Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (the BAT trinity in China's techno-sphere). He promoted the Clean Cloud initiative that sought to build public opinion against the cloud-storage services of the BAT trinity that were trying to expand in the American market. The US government also moved to counter Beijing's influence in submarine-internet cables, telecommunications infrastructure, mobile phone app ecosystems, and cloud computing.