China continually gaining on the U.S leads to perception that hegemony is shifting and raises the probability of conflict exponentially – the U.S will re-balance in more aggressive ways and cause conflict.

The exponential growth of emerging technologies (ETs),Footnote1 including 5G networks, Big Data, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence (AI), demands a reassessment of the role of technology in international affairs and its impact on the international system. Control over ETs is no longer limited to the private sector, having become “the new strategic national security fulcrum of the 21 century” (You 2021). This heightened sensitivity toward ETs arises chiefly from the unpredictable implications these technologies pose for national security, as well as their potential impact on shifting the Balance of Power due to the economic and military advantages they confer (Steff et al. 2020). And while ETs on the whole have been viewed as potential game changers in military and strategic affairs, resulting in a securitization of the high-tech sector (Sechser et al. 2019; Huang and Mayer 2023), special attention has increasingly been paid to China’s technological advancements and assertive technology policy through such initiatives as Made in China 2025, Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development, and Digital Silk Road Project (under the Belt and Road Initiative).Footnote2

Assessed alongside their international economic, geopolitical and military developments, and despite their limitations, China’s technological advancements have led to a widely circulated assumption that China is seeking to challenge the United States’ (US) global primacy (Allisson 2017; Eslami et al. 2023; Heath et al. 2021). As a result, China has been viewed as a strategic competitor of the US and a growing threat (in US and other countries),Footnote3 a notion that proliferated under the TrumpFootnote4 administration, with its emphasis on decoupling in the technological domain, and has continued during the Biden administration.Footnote5 The resulting heightened competition, reflected in the new “Tech Cold War” (Bremmer and Kupchan 2018; Culpan 2019; Wu et al. 2019) and “AI Arms Race” debates (Pecotic 2019; Scharre 2019), has characterized the relationship between China and the US ever since.

China’s advancements in the domain of ETs could conceivably equate to the acquisition of new capabilities, thereby inducing threat perceptions among other global actors. This corresponds to the realist perspective of international affairs: the US views its hegemony as increasingly challenged vis-à-vis a rising China that could adopt an ambitious strategy with escalating demands, thereby threatening a declining state’s vital interests and raising the potential for conflict (Mearsheimer 2015; Shifrinson 2018). The designation of China’s ET advancements as a threat, and their implications, deserves systematic academic engagement and theory-informed analysis. Two issues that remain unanswered in spite of the dynamically growing research field of ET studies are: What constitutes a threat in the context of ETs and how does China fit within these criteria? And, once a state is recognized as a threat, how do other states respond? Indeed, one could argue that state behavior and patterns of alignment in ET make an interesting case for thinking through the applicability of various International Relations (IR) theories and reassessing the existing analytical tools.

The state-of-the-art on ETs includes several important contributions, such as exploring the securitization act in the context of US–China overall competition (Moore 2023) from a securitization studies perspective. Given that ETs have been characterized as a critical frontier for national security and development, several scholars have examined how China’s advancements have raised concerns among other countries (Kania 2022), with China perceived as a technological threat and an existential challenge to the Western way of life (Zhang 2021). Others have explored security discourses on critical infrastructure, especially with regard to companies like Huawei or ZTE (Campion 2020), in addition to exploring China’s ascent as a science and technology powerhouse with its growing influence on the global stage (Segal 2019).

While the well-documented competition between the US and China has garnered significant attention (Yilmaz and Sun 2023; Khan 2021), particularly in the realm of ETs (Lee 2024; Christie et al. 2023; Harwit 2023), scholarly works have homed in on specific technological domains (Rim 2023; Wang and Chen 2018; Alderman and Ray 2017). China’s aspirations to dominate information and communications technologies (ICT) and related fields such as AI have further underscored its material capabilities and modernization initiatives (Inkster 2019). Especially relevant to the present research are those studies that have focused on the US and the competition in ETs as a threat to its hegemony (Xin 2021) and assessed the implications of the US–China ET rivalry for the international system (Sun 2019; Montgomery 2017; Wu 2020; Can and Kaplan 2020) by employing the Balance of Power theory and relating the idea of threat to the distribution of power capabilities (Jensen et al. 2020; Horowitz 2018; Haas and Fischer 2020; Fischer and Wenger 2021; Ayoub and Payne 2016; Williams 2019). This is in addition to more recent contributions that have employed the BoT theory to carry out a quantitative assessment of responses to the Huawei ban as indication of response to a threat (Christie et al. 2023). Finally, scholars have explored the stances of other international actors and whether they perceive China as a threat in light of their strategic behavior (Shah 2023; Christie et al. 2023; Saltzman 2023; Papageorgiou and Melo 2022; Can and Kaplan 2020), focusing on US allies in Asia, namely, Australia, Japan, and South Korea as they have navigated expectations of mutual support from Washington in the process of decoupling Chinese technology companies from global supply chains (Lee et al. 2022) while also evaluating how the ET competition has affected alliance dynamics (Payne 2018; Corcoral 2021), the notion of extended deterrence and strategic stability (Mehta 2021). Relatedly, Friis and Lynsle (2021) have distinguished between an approach of “macrosecuritization” of China by the US and a securitization limited to specific domains like 5G technology (termed “niche securitization”).

Aiming to contribute to these dynamically growing research fields, the present paper attempts to address two existing shortcomings. First, existing studies have often explored particular strategic decisions targeting Chinese companies (such as the Huawei bans). Second, the notion of China as a threat was mostly examined by focusing on aggregate power, even though supplemented by the analysis of pre-existing ideas among the US and its allies (Lee 2023), culture, geography (Payne 2018), and the political rhetoric and ideological tensions between China and democratic/pro-Western Asian countries (Salzman 2023; Mascitelli and Chung 2019), including the idea of a potential democratic anti-China coalition amidst the escalating technology race (Grotto and Schallbruch 2019; Scott and Bordelon 2023). A systematic, theory-informed analysis of what constitutes a threat in the context of ETs, especially including an unraveling of its individual components and how China fits these criteria, remains missing. Given the importance of ETs for a new distribution of power in the international system, it seems imperative to turn to theories capable of accounting for the respective dynamics.

We turn to Walt’s Balance of Threat (BoT) theory and adopt the associated quadripartite definition of what constitutes a threat and the proposed responses to it. The BoT theory, with the power distribution in the international system at its core, is especially relevant to the objectives of this paper, aimed toward examining the “game-changing” potential of ETs, while also “understand[ing] a number of events that we cannot explain by focusing solely on the distribution of aggregate capabilities" (Walt 1987, pp. 263–264). In this perspective, China’s growing ET power is a threat that urges states to (re)consider their balancing options. The latter may vary in intensity and assume different manifestations: first, diplomatic and policy coordination among competitors of the threat; second, the adoption of bans and restrictions/export controls aiming to undermine a rival’s power; and third, strategic alignment excluding or targeting the threat and stating a clear objective of targeting its advancements in the ET domain. All the outlined options include accepting and aligning with the recommendations made by the US, particularly those aimed at countering Chinese initiatives in ETs (Christie et al. 2023). We, thus, turn to a Neorealist IR approach, applying it to a recent, multifaceted, and dynamically changing international phenomenon of ETs. The plausibility probe of the BoT theory, a stage of inquiry preliminary to the testing aimed at probing the plausibility of specific hypotheses/assumptions (Eckstein 1975), is carried out by analyzing the available statistical data from different sources, ranging from market shares to budget expenditure, and key strategic decisions, including the export restrictions, bans, and the changing alignment options of Western states, between 2017 and 2023.