You're probably right, perhaps this happens as a natural extension/maturity of a development cycle. Since China appears to be the nation creating many of the new things at this time, they begin to become the ones to attempt to set the standards. This seems quite foreign to us in the west, since we have been doing it for so long now - however, at our current point in our development cycle, we are no longer creating as much as we did in the past.

Of course it was. Setting standards involves competing interests, bargaining, power dynamics... Obviously the stronger party will have the upper hand.

It's also funny how the article praises the freight container standard as kind of ideal, while in fact it was the product of "committee work worthy of the Bolsheviks":

"Being an ISO standard, the text is a little dry, but to me it’s a thing of great beauty, because of the collective effort it enabled. Naturally, I expected the process of creating such beauty to be a virtual Platonic Symposium of engineering prowess and disinterested advocacy. Nothing could have been further from the truth."

Read more at https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/12/the-romance-of-shipp...