Competing in Information Communication Technology: Trump's Cybersecurity Policy, and Its Implications for Information Technological Developments in China and the World

This paper focuses on US foreign policy behavior and cybersecurity policy during the Trump administration in light of Sino-US tech competition. The paper reviews US deployment of Information Communication Technology policies to confront China in the digital domain. The digital structural shift described here started in 2013 with China's proposed One Belt One Road initiative, and accelerated when the US Trump administration reacted with its Blue Dot Network and Clean Network Initiative. This paper adopts an International Relations analytical approach to foreign policy to investigate the Sino-US interactions in the digital domain, with structural factors of the wider Sino-US technical environment taken as the independent variable, and the agential factor of Trump's intentions is recruited as part of the intervening variable. In this way, it is hoped the analysis will make possible an examination of the contextual development of digital competition, and unpack the implications for China and the world in relation to cyberspace.