Author: Schiller and Yeo

China Executive Order 14105 Geopolitics

New US Attempt to Contain China: President Biden’s Executive Order on US Investment

By Schiller and Yeo

On August 9, President Joe Biden signed a long-anticipated Executive Order to restrict US outbound financial investments in a “narrow set of technologies” in “countries of concern” – China including the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong and the Special Administrative Region of Macau.[1] The Order covers three industries: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. This idea of limiting outbound investment came up during the Trump Administration as part of The Foreign Investment Review Risk Modernization Act of 2018,[2] but was removed from the bill due to pressure from the business sector.[3] There followed a series of measures against China focused on the tightening of export controls. With its embrace of restrictions on outbound investment, the new Executive Order constitutes a stunning reversal of US policy, which for decades has pressed coercively for open cross-border investment. Thus, it offers another sign that the US is turning away from freedom of investment and trade and toward digital protectionism.

The new rules mostly target US venture capital, private equity and joint venture investment, the key drivers of the US/China integration that nurtured the expansion of the Chinese internet sector even as they also enriched US investors. With the current geopolitical tension, US venture capital investment into China has already dropped to a 10-year low at $1.3 billion, down from a high of $14.4 billion in 2018.[4] Private equity plummeted to $ 1.4 billion in the first half of 2023 from a peak $48.48 billion in 2021.[5] It is an open question whether the Executive Order will be sufficient to choke off China’s tech power and Chinese tech start-ups from US capital;however, this move is sure to intensify the existing geopolitical competition and further divide the two largest global economies.

The Biden administration has stated that “national security risk” is the reason behind the measures, emphasizing that these are “narrowly targeted actions to protect our national security.”[6] It is clear, however, that the rationale is economic as well as military. It is intended to further contain and retard China’s tech power in advanced technology and, reciprocally, to make more room for the US’s own market and strategic interests in this key field.

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Broadband Fiber-optic cables Utility Poles

Greed, Fear, and Public Need in Today’s Telecommunications

By Schiller and Yeo

How are telecommunications network development priorities shaped? Recent news stories shed some light. A profit motive is overwhelming other social objectives in network infrastructure projects, from utility poles throughout rural areas to Arctic Ocean fiber-optic cables.

Utility Poles

In the US, it is a given that broadband infrastructure will not be built out unless there is money to be made – because business interests have been permitted to provide internet access across the country. The COVID pandemic made the results clear, as people in poor and rural areas struggled to access the internet – which is no longer a luxury but a necessity for work, school, and life in general.

The pandemic that claimed over one million lives in the US propelled federal intervention to expand broadband infrastructure, by allocating $65 billion as part of the Infrastructure Investment Bill and American Jobs Act (IIJA) in 2021.[1] In 2022, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that it would fund over $1.2 billion to expand broadband services in rural areas as part of its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund involving 23 broadband providers.[2]

This is good news to be sure; however, a contest between opposed corporate interests erupted around a 19th-century invention that is still crucial to today’s broadband infrastructure – utility poles – stymieing the FCC’s plan.[3]

Utility poles are so ubiquitous as to be nearly unseen in our built environment. However, in order to build broadband infrastructure, internet providers must either lease access to existing networks of poles, or install their own new poles to attach their cables and hardware. Both of these are expensive and politically-charged options.

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Labor Media Reform South Korea Strike

A Long Fight for Media Democracy in South Korea

By Schiller and Yeo

North Korea has been much in the news lately, but, for an object-lesson in how to combat news management by the state, we may look south of the 38th parallel. For, during recent months, the legacy of authoritarian rule in the Republic of Korea (ROK) has once again exploded into public view – not as an ancient memory, but as a continuing abuse of democratic freedoms.  Media workers’ response to the South Korean state’s controls over free expression merit our attention.

Thirty years ago, a nation-wide democracy movement led by intellectuals, students, workers, farmers and various other groups drew a global spotlight on the Republic of Korea.[1] It led, in 1987, to the toppling of the country’s long-standing military dictatorship. This regime change opened up additional opportunities for Koreans to pursue the process of political democratization. These, however, did not succeed. While there were continued efforts to reduce economic disparity, curtail corporate power and improve social welfare, successive liberal governments weren’t able to deliver the political and economic reforms that they had promised. Instead, South Korea subordinated itself to a market-driven neoliberal system.[2] Regaining power, conservative administrations, first under Lee Myung-Bak and then Park Geun-hye – whose father, General Park Jung-Hee, had imposed a military regime on the country until his assassination in 1979 – have again undermined Korea’s democratic path.

The seesaw has now thankfully swung the other way. One year ago, millions of Koreans filled the streets for a period of six months: students, women’s groups, labor- and farmers unions, and the general public. The trigger was a corruption scandal that the president proved unable to contain. But the underlying factors included widespread anger about increasing economic inequality, rising youth unemployment, contingent labor[3] and the deteriorating conditions faced by public sector workers. This “candlelight movement” ultimately succeeded in bringing down President Park Geun-Hye in December, 2016. In the wake of historically massive protests, Park was impeached for her corruption and abuses of power.[4] A new president, Moon Jae-in of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, took office in 2017.

But the movement, the latest incarnation of South Korea’s decades-long struggle for a democracy that would include media reform as well as government- and corporate accountability and workers’ rights,[5] is still far from finished.

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Higher Education Surveillance

Academic Surveillance Complex

By Schiller and Yeo

A corporate-driven society overseen by a complicit state, the United States is being steadily saturated by surveillance tools and practices; indeed, surveillance studies is today a substantial field of academic inquiry, with research published regularly in Surveillance and Society, as well as in a growing number of books.[1] After Edward Snowden’s exposures of the National Security Agency (NSA)’s mass surveillance in 2013, thousands of academics rightly signed a letter condemning the US government’s spying program.[2] However, surveillance-sensitive academics have turned a blind eye toward academe itself.

Surveillance technologies have encroached far into the work-lives of students and faculty, to the point that we may speak of an Academic Surveillance Complex (ASC). To “improve” student performance and to “scientifically” smooth and speed student progress, “data driven education” programs are capturing, tracking, collating, and analyzing data on student learning and social behavior; on students’ interactions with teachers; and on the labor of teachers themselves.

The pretense is that this is all positive – an enhancement of the educational process. The emergence of an ASC, however, is better understood as an offshoot of a multifaceted structural transformation of higher education, which has been underway for half a century.[3] This metamorphosis is both technological and institutional. By enabling the social relations of learning and teaching to be revamped, networking technologies are driving forward a sweeping trend to commodification: they are helping to turn education into a profit-making business. Today’s emerging ASC is a part of this encompassing shift.

Wiring Education 

At its outset during the early postwar decades, robust US economic growth and robust state and federal support for public universities both stimulated and restrained the process of wiring education for profit. (A convenient historical marker is provided by an organization called Educom, which has tried since the 1960s to insinuate networking technologies.) In today’s context of chronic stagnation, by contrast, “disrupting” education in order to render it a site of capital accumulation has become a determining trend. As we write, for example, Purdue University has signed an agreement to acquire Kaplan Higher Education – a for-profit chain – and to re-establish it as a free-standing subsidiary of the Indiana-based university system.[4] All told, global education is estimated to be a $5+ trillion market, eight times the size of the commercial software market and three times that of the entertainment market.[5] Already prominent in South America and East Asia, for-profit educational institutions are today making additional inroads in Africa.[6]

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