By Aynne Kokas
Aynne Kokas is the C.K. Yen Professor at The Miller Center and an associate professor of Media Studies at The University of Virginia. Kokas’ research examines Sino-U.S. media and technology relations.
Published by Oxford University Press, 2022.
In Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty, Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens, putting US national security at risk. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley’s disruption fetish, and Wall Street’s addiction to growth have fuelled China’s technological goldrush. In turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.
Host: Dr. Swapnil Rai
Co-Host: Haoming Zhou
Producer: Amber Hardiman
Editor: Sachin Sukumar