A Quest for the Splinternet? Contending “New Cold War” Narratives in the Age of Digital Sovereignty and US-China Competition

The tight control China holds on domestic online information fluxes has raised fears of Internet fragmentation. Despite the blurred definitions of this concept, the debate is still open given its salience for the future of US hegemony and the Liberal Order in its free-market tenet. After all, the Internet’s ancestor Arpanet was a US Cold-war military communication tool, while the commercialisation of the Internet through the invention of the World Wide Web helped to accelerate market globalisation in the wake of the fall of the iron curtain. Managed internationally on a private-led basis, the Internet is representative of the Liberal Order’s global spatiality and free-market tenet. However, is China building a “splinternet”? This question has been widely addressed in academia, as well as in the media, amid fears that China is building a separate domestic Internet and transforming globally accepted Internet standards. Based on this, narratives on the “New Cold War” have been on the rise, especially amid the technological competition fuelled by the Trump administration around connectivity technologies such as 5G. This article showcases qualitative observation on public and private Chinese stakeholders’ engagement in Internet governance, looking at Internet standardisation at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), resources distribution at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and mobile connectivity standard making at the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Through expert interviews and thematic document analysis this article contends the “New Cold War” narrative and finds instead that China has accepted global interconnectivity, despite retaining degrees of normative contestation. To foster societal control, China is recurring to regulatory alignment rather than establishing a separate network. These findings have further implications for the future of the Liberal International Order and its capacity to adapt to the rise of non-liberal contesting powers.