Big Tech S3E17: Hong Shen On How Tech Really Works Behind the Great Firewall

July 8, 2021

Listen to this week’s new episode of Big Tech, where Taylor Owen speaks to Hong Shen, a Systems Scientist at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University about the production chain between China’s tech sector and the U.S.’ AI systems.

Western democracies and tech companies have long painted the Chinese tech sector as not only a threat to the US sector but also as operating in direct conflict with American companies. They say that China is walled off from the rest of the world, that these tech companies are just an extension of the state, and that they create and promote state surveillance and censorship tools. While China, the country, isn’t completely innocent — there are clear examples of state interventions and human rights abuses — this episode’s guest argues that a Western-centric framing of how the sector operates isn’t quite accurate.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Hong Shen, a systems scientist at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and author of Alibaba: Infrastructuring Global China. Shen’s research focuses on the global internet industry and the social implications of algorithmic systems, with an emphasis on China.

Shen explains how China’s tech sector is not walled off from the rest of the world but instead highly integrated with it. International venture capital has been flowing into the Chinese tech sector for years. And the artificial intelligence (AI) development that is popularly depicted as an “us” vs “them” arms race is in reality better described as a production chain, with Chinese companies providing the labour to develop American AI systems.