China Metaverse Industry Plans to Use Stronger technologies to Prevent Imitation, Check Security Breaches, as More Companies Gets Involved
The Chinese government in partnership with the private sector is planning on coming up with a digital society that complies with the national security blueprint. To do this, they have joined the bandwagon of metaverse users, intending to use the metaverse technology in tackling subvention in the industry. They are working with the private sector to achieve this aim. In an interview with one of the industry analysts, he assured that the Chinese government, through whatever collaboration they are having with the private sector, doesn’t plan on competing with the United States, especially as it has to do with supremacy.
Other industry experts on the other hand had revealed that the Chinese government is planning on building a domestic metaverse that is compliant with the philosophies and ideologies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The government, through this collaboration, is providing the private sector with the enabling environment to come up with technologies that will help them checkmate subversion in the metaverse industry. Investigation shows that the government is making sure that whatever technology is being produced by these manufacturers is in line with what they called Social Peace: a government euphemized term.
The Technology, The Companies, The Efforts
Modalities are already in place to get this project up and running. In 2021 alone, China registered over 10,000 metaverse businesses. This number is less than the figures recorded in 2020 and 2019 respectively. At the moment, a report has it that there are over 16,000 new metaverse businesses have submitted trademark applications so far. Also, the Chinese top tech companies are not left out in this development. At the moment, companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are reported to have already started investing heavily in newer, and more advanced metaverse technology.
Other companies that have shown great interest in this new metaverse evolution are ByteDance: the company behind TikTok, the gaming platform BiliBili and the AR glasses: Nreal. According to a recent estimate by Morgan Stanley Analysis Rating, the Chinese metaverse industry (or Chinaverse) is measured at $8 trillion. And J.P Morgan, in another report, predicted that the Chinese metaverse market may cause the country’s gaming industry to triple, establishing a growth from $44 billion to over $131 billion.
Government Involvement
The report has it that the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR): a Chinese think-tank, has formally kicked off an initiative called the Chinaverse initiative in 2021, not long after Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company is going all out to dominate the metaverse industry. In a bid to keep the technology in check, making sure it doesn’t go against any security protocol, they had come up with “The Metaverse and National Security,” which contained a comprehensive analysis of national security challenges such technology might pose to the environment. The CICIR had said in one of their reports that the metaverse is most likely to have a major political, economic, and social impact on countries it is introduced, then went ahead to hind the effect on cultural security of any society.
