Trafficking Data
How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty 
featuring
Aynne Kokas
C.K. Yen Professor, University of Virginia

Speaker's summary:

In Trafficking Data, Aynne Kokas examines how China’s increasingly expansive digital sovereignty claims are shaping data security in democracies around the world, with particular emphasis on the United States. Who is watching out for consumers by protecting their data? Compounding China’s expansive digital claims, the powerful financial interests of Big Tech have created an oversight vacuum, leaving citizens in many democracies vulnerable to data gathering and extraction. 

Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives. 

Aynne Kokas is the C.K. Yen Professor at the Miller Center, the director of the University of Virginia East Asia Center, and an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. Kokas’ research examines Sino-U.S. media and technology relations. Her book Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, October 2022) argues that exploitative Silicon Valley data governance practices help China build infrastructures for global control. Her award-winning first book Hollywood Made in China (University of California Press, 2017) argues that Chinese investment and regulations have transformed the US commercial media industry, most prominently in the case of media conglomerates’ leverage of global commercial brands. Kokas is a non-resident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program. She has received fellowships from the Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Japan’s Abe Fellowship, and other international organizations. Her writing and commentary have appeared globally in more than 50 countries and 15 languages. In the United States, her research and writing appear regularly in media outlets including CNBC, NPR’s Marketplace, The Washington Post, and Wired. She has testified before the Senate Finance Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the U.S. International Trade Commission. 

The views expressed are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect East-West Center policies or positions.