APEC's innovation talk vs. U.S. tech hegemony

Editor's note: In this video published as part of CGTN's coverage of the 2025 APEC Summit in South Korea, John Pang, a former senior counsel to the Prime Minister's Office of Malaysia, noted how the U.S.'s attempts to disconnect the world through decoupling stand in contradiction to APEC's inclusive agenda and hurt not just China and ASEAN but the global economy at large.

This just has to be said… it's just a fact. Washington is systematically attempting to disconnect the world through decoupling. It is actively stifling innovation through unilateral tech sanctions on China and a coercive semiconductor war. That doesn't just hurt China. It hurts the global economy; it hurts ASEAN.

It's fair to point out that APEC's official innovation agenda sounds good. Its language is about inclusivity, especially after Lima last year. It talks about bridging the digital divide, supporting micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, and implementing the Lima Roadmap to help the informal economy. These are good things.

When we say inclusivity, it is necessary for the sustainability of the global economic order, for any order we build. It has to include the interests of marginalized groups and of the countries of the Global South. Now, this is the narrative that APEC sustains, and it's a good thing that it does have this narrative.

In the past, however, the function of APEC has, unfortunately, been to serve a different structural agenda, which produces the zero-sum outcomes it claims to oppose. It happens in several ways. One in digital trade, for example, is admirably a concern of this meeting in Gyeongju. The U.S. agenda with APEC was to push for the free flow of data and to fight data localization. It allows U.S. technology and U.S. interests to have its technology monopolies, harvest data from the 21 economies and process it on their own servers and sell digital services back to those economies. That works precisely against the digital sovereignty and sovereign AI interests of countries of the Global South. That's just not on anymore. I think this is not going to be accepted.

(Interviewer and script editor Lu Xiaoyi, video editor Zhou Qinlin and cover editor Zhang Ruixin contributed to the production of this video. If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com. Follow @thouse_opinions on X to discover the latest commentaries in the CGTN Opinion Section.)