China Is Quietly Rewriting Rules That Run the World
Standardized shipping containers helped revolutionize global trade, enabling China’s export-led development in recent decades. Now, Beijing is looking to build influence in global standards-setting in an emerging area of tension with the US and Europe.
Photographer: Peter Boer/Bloomberg“Economic nationalism is about to disappear. And technical nationalism has disappeared!”
So declared Olle Sturen in 1969. At the time, he headed the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), an institution that created the intermodal freight container (known as the twenty-foot equivalent unit), those ubiquitous metal boxes that utterly transformed global trade. A Swede who championed China’s entry into his Geneva-based organization in the 1970s, Sturen had an optimistic view of how the ISO’s work would bring the world together. It’s unlikely he would have envisioned how those standards would instead become a geo-strategic battleground between China and the West.