State-owned Chinese telecommunications champions, like China Unicom, have already taken up the mantle and are aiming to introduce early 6G applications by 2025.¹

The People's Republic of China’s (PRC) approach to 6G is the logical continuation and extension of how China frames, and why it emphasizes 5G leadership – and President Xi Jinping’s “network great power” strategy generally.² In its execution, China’s 6G ambition benefits both from Beijing’s industrial policy and the international leadership that China’s state-supported telecommunications equipment champions, such as Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp. have already established.

Technological gains despite geopolitical pains

6G promises gains analogous to those that have propelled 5G to the tips of the tongues of business and political leaders alike: This generation of advances in telecommunications capacity and bandwidth is projected to cement the long-awaited “Internet of Things” (IoT) future. The 6G world, even more so than today’s scattershot rollouts of 5G globally, will be one where not just everyone, but also every physical object, is able to connect and communicate constantly. It will be powered by constellations of terrestrial base stations and by low-earth orbit satellites. It will allow driverless cars to function in sync with their smart city environs and enable new networking and communications innovations. On a technical level, 6G is projected to use millimeter waves more extensively than 5G as well as higher terahertz frequency bands (100GHz-10THz); by comparison, the highest frequency band for 5G is the 24GHz-40GHz millimeter wave frequency band. Industry experts and researchers also expect 6G to deliver coverage, costs, and opportunities for network intelligence superior to 5G. In sum, augmented reality will be more efficient, and your 6G video teleconference may be with holograms and feature a variety of in-call suggestions powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Increased capacity and processing power will require far greater radio frequency bandwidths and specialized chips to power 6G devices. The expectation is that 6G networks will provide channels for more information to flow; they will do the same for security risks. As more legacy, industrial, and critical real-world functions become digitized by 6G networks, those functions will be at risk of disruption by 6G-enabled attacks.

The risks that will proliferate in a 6G world are not limited to ever larger cyber-attack surfaces: The hardware supply chains – think Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors that measure distance around a car and are critical to autonomous driving – to support 6G adoption and operations will also become potential attack surface and therefore a competitive battleground. As the experiences of COVID-19 supply shocks and the battlefield in Ukraine have proven over the past five years, technology supply chains are central to economic and security policy in today’s global geopolitical contest.

Those supply chain and security realities make 6G a geopolitical as well as a commercial contest: Technological and commercial success in 6G will beget not just broader information technology development opportunities, but also corresponding global influence. Any country’s AI companies, auto players, and network companies all stand to be empowered should their allied upstream telecommunications and networking players lead in 6G intellectual property and eventual operational deployments.

The geopolitical stakes are high: As a country’s national champions in downstream segments gain market share internationally, they rewrite the telecommunications rules globally – and therefore build out leverage and influence. For China, this ambition is reflected in and supports Xi’s “network great power” strategy; it also promises to deliver instruments of power projection for China’s military-civil fusion system.³

The economic and security implications of 6G guarantee that such emergent telecommunications technological developments carry geopolitical significance. And that reality affects every invested player, whether they report back to Washington, Beijing, or Brussels.

An open field, with fragmented turf

The race for leadership in 6G reflects the differences in interest and intent of Chinese and international players: Chinese industry observers and government voices have been concerned about US efforts to develop a “small circle” of allies intent on delaying Beijing’s progress. US, Japanese, South Korean, and European tech leaders have been characterized by Chinese sources as working to “curb the development of China's high-tech enterprises and China's development.”⁴ America’s “Next G Alliance” has similarly been framed as a bid for sustained geopolitical hegemony. This effort brings together American and European industry and government equities to compete across technology standards-setting bodies – a counter to the vision defined and pursued by Beijing through the China Standards 2035 banner.⁵ Japan too has been deliberate in seeking out global partnerships to support its Beyond 5G Promotion Consortium, further stoking concerns in Beijing of democratic encirclement.

But the “state-led, enterprise-driven” beat that China’s 6G effort marches to is not replicated in other national campaigns. The United States remains plagued by difficulty coordinating across government authorities and motivating public-private cooperation with a private sector still very much dependent on China. The same coordination challenges apply across other Western and democratic consortia. Qualcomm and Ericsson, for instance, have very different ideas on launch windows. This is a problem and a reflection of a persistent disjunction in the West between the technology sector needed to bring 6G to life and Washington policymakers aiming to regulate its rollout.