Quad’s joint statement likely to focus on countering China

The Yomiuri Shimbun

14:32 JST, May 23, 2022

The Quad will hold a summit in Tokyo on Tuesday, and, according to a draft of a joint statement obtained by The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan, the United States, Australia and India will set up frameworks to counter China in various sectors.

This will be the second in-person Quad summit. The first was held in Washington in September last year.

In consideration of India’s aversion to military alliances, the four countries are poised to cooperate in the high-tech and economic fields, where the United States is competing with China for hegemony.

Chinese firms such as Huawei Technologies Co. hold an overwhelming share of the telecommunications equipment market, so the Quad intends to form a public-private dialogue on the latest 5G and 6G networks. Behind this public-private partnership within the Quad framework is a sense of crisis in which few private enterprises in the Quad nations are competitive enough with Chinese companies. The leaders will also agree on efforts to diversify 5G operators and improve interoperability and safety.

The Quad governments also realize there is a gap in perception with their views of China compared to their private sectors, despite the fact that Beijing is promoting military-civil fusion to take advantage of cutting-edge civilian technology.

Quad leaders will further launch common principles on supply chains that are open and respect human rights as conditions for procurement. The United States passed legislation last December to ban imports from China’s Xinjiang region over concerns about forced labor. The idea is to share these concerns among the Quad’s major democracies and spread them throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

The four countries will also draw up common principles to lead to the creation of supply chains for semiconductors and other products that do not depend on China.

Another public-private dialogue will concern biotechnology. Genetic data analysis by high-speed computer processing has been used for drug development. The draft stipulated that the Quad will strengthen cooperation in the development of biotechnology by utilizing quantum computing.