Turning the virtual into reality: China's role in the metaverse

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduced by Neal Stephenson in the novel Snow Crash, the idea of the metaverse has gradually come to the attention of the Chinese government through critical achievements in advanced virtual reality (VR) technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality, cloud and edge computing, blockchain, and digital twins.1 As the concept first began to develop, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) neither explicitly objected to the expansion of metaverse technologies nor did it show great support for them. However, since the American company Facebook, now known as Meta, began proliferating the concept, the metaverse has become a buzzword of interest to Chinese investors. The CCP has quickly strategized its metaverse policies and taken actions to align China’s metaverse development with national strategic goals. As the United States and its partners seek to counter China’s rise through technological decoupling,2 China is pursuing an “all of nation” model to compete with the United States, which requires massive efforts of economic and technological mobilization. According to the state’s news mouthpiece Xinhua, the development of the metaverse could have significant impacts on this geopolitical competition.3 The CCP sees the metaverse as an area where China can beat the West, making the question of how to materialize the concept to advance Beijing’s geopolitical agenda salient in China’s technological development.4 The Chinese government is redefining how the metaverse works at the domestic and the global level. Intuitively uncomfortable with the de-borderizing nature of the concept, the government has displayed a targeted approach to developing certain sectors of the metaverse conducive to its national strategic goals while cracking down on those considered to be a disorderly expansion of capitalism. In particular, after Chinese think tanks and regulatory agencies raised alarms regarding national security, the state has taken serious suppressive actions against some metaverse sectors like cryptocurrency.5 China banned all domestic cryptocurrency transactions and mining in 2021. Beijing is clearly beefing up its competitiveness in the global economic order and aiming to build itself as an innovation power using the metaverse. The government’s strategies for developing the metaverse have significant implications for U.S.-China technological competition. By studying the perceptions and actions taken in boosting the CCP-designated metaverse, this essay argues that China’s push to control the metaverse according to its standards will likely intensify the tensions and frictions with the United States and Western technology producers that already exist.