The Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) is the main driver of new technology standards in China, and is now trying to push Chinese internally-adopted standards on to international markets. The main rationale for this is that 1)China is a developing country and has a better feel for the needs of other developing countries and 2) to support other Chinese companies which are trying to go global. There is a large element of national pride in driving this, which is reflected in the government’s “go-out” policy, which encourages successful Chinese companies to go global.

The Chinese have problems with many of the standards which were developed over the past 10 years for the Internet because they feel that, at the time, they were not fully consulted in the drafting of new standards. This is their main complaint against Unicode, and why the Chinese government has not supported it.

The reality is that governments will play a larger role in managing the Internet. Different countries will use slightly different rationales, but in the end, they will ultimately use the same tools and controls, regardless of their different politics.