There’s no need to panic.

Cameron F. Kerry, “Small yards, big tents: How to build cooperation on critical international standards,” Brookings Institute, 03-11-2024, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/small-yards-big-tents-how-to-build-cooperation-on-critical-international-standards/

The U.S., the EU, and other democratic and liberal economies should recognize China’s efforts to steer international standards for its own aims, but they should not exaggerate China’s role or overreact to it in response. For a long time, it was a talking point among the U.S. and other Western countries to urge China that it refrain from imposing its own national standards and instead engage with international SDOs. Now that China has made a significant turn in this direction, they should not ring fire alarms at Chinese involvement in SDOs.

Indeed, Chinese experts can bring considerable expertise and practical knowledge to the table to contribute to standards. This is especially the case when it comes to AI, where China is a leader in the field. Our roundtables and our individual interviews with both private sector and SDO participants in standards development indicate that these stakeholders do not view China’s role with great alarm. They report that Chinese participants make constructive and substantive contributions to significant standards (in 3GPP, for example). In some processes, Chinese participants may submit poorly developed proposals to support Chinese interests, sometimes in response to government incentives for making standards proposals. But participants note that governance procedures, transparency, and consensus decisionmaking in SDOs operate to weed these out and work against gaming the system. And even where poor proposals manage to be adopted in standards, they generally do not win acceptance in the marketplace—the ultimate measure of a standard’s success.