The Digital Silk Road has evolved into a separate pillar of China’s foreign policy, driven by the Chinese private tech giants.
The import of Chinese technologies poses serious risks, including surveillance, data transfer, digital dependency and authoritarian cyber norms.
Despite DSR investments and projects being widespread in the region, they have not yet determined the future of Southeast Asia’s alignment.
Although in recent years the term Digital Silk Road (DSR) has faded from Chinese media due to Western backlash and the vagueness of the term, the Chinese government’s drive to export its digital technologies worldwide has not waned. Instead of pushing catchy slogans, Beijing has increasingly focused on concrete, specialized tech products and targeted investments in developing countries, carrying forward its political agenda in opposition to the Western tech bloc. As a consequence, the shift in public discourse surrounding the DSR invites a deeper analysis of the core goals of China’s digital strategy, the variety of its technologies, the flip side of deploying Chinese tech products and the response of Southeast Asian countries.
Unpacking the Digital Silk Road
The DSR was launched in 2015 as a digital side initiative to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In 2017, it was established as a distinct pillar by Xi Jinping. Unlike the physical infrastructure focus of the BRI, the DSR is China’s strategy in expanding its tech influence by exporting its digital infrastructure. Whereas the BRI has relied on state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the DSR is carried out by China’s private tech giants such as Huawei, ZTE, Alibaba, and Tencent, under government incentives and directives.
Dr. Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, senior analyst of the Science, Technology and Innovation Program at MERICS, explained that among these companies, Huawei is more of “a national champion that needed to get closer to the government, operating as a quasi-SOE.” Conversely, the other tech giants, although they “have independent agency, agenda and interests,” they “don’t have full control over their own decisions,” fueling “antagonism” with Beijing, which views competition as a “political matter.”
Indeed, this initiative not only consists of building digital infrastructure, but also exporting Chinese cyber norms to shape the international framework of technical standards, also known as the “China Solution.” As Dr. Ilaria Carrozza, China tech and security expert at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), pointed out: “the DSR has three main objectives. The first is to strengthen Chinese firms’ market position in a region that is young, rapidly digitalising, and short of infrastructure capital. The second is standards influence: getting Chinese technical proposals into the systems that will be running in the future. The third is normative, building a constituency for a state-centric vision of digital order built around cyber sovereignty and development-first framing.”
Artificial intelligence is the perfect example of this normative shift. When we think of the power of AI, we tend to think of its performance. However, at a geopolitical level, the power of AI lies within its infrastructure, including data centres and chips, as well as its governance frameworks and tech standards, which guarantee strategic control of data collection and management. China has been using the export of physical AI infrastructure to establish its own AI regulations, governance and standards against the Western norms based on democracy and human rights, striving to achieve a world that reflects China’s authoritarian domestic policy focused on social order and national sovereignty. At the same time, since the Trump administration, China has increasingly been pushing its institutional strategy through UN resolutions and global institutions, taking advantage of Washington’s focus on domestic and commercial AI innovation over AI governance.
Risks Behind Chinese Technologies
Dr. Carrozza illustrated the different layers within the DSR, pointing out how, “at the base there is physical connectivity” (terrestrial fibre, subsea cables and BeiDou satellite positioning), then “network equipment” (5G networks), “data centres and cloud services,” “applications” (e-commerce, e-government and safe city packages), and “knowledge-building component” (training programmes, capacity-building workshops, memoranda on public security cooperation, and long-term service agreements), which aims at building “long-term relationships with host countries and socialize them into Chinese standards and practices.”
The competitiveness of Chinese technology is based on its quality-price ratio, allowing many countries to afford cutting-edge products to boost their national economies, providing the whole digital stack unlike pricier and fragmented Western options. However, “some significant risks include concentration risk and vendor dependency for upgrades and maintenance. Opaque procurement, (...) weak enforcement of data protection rules, (...) capability transfer to domestic security agencies that lowers the cost of surveillance, (...) data localization and data storage when this is provided by companies which host servers in China, as there exist concerns that people’s personal data or sensitive information could be siphoned online from the host country to China without their consent.” Dr. Carrozza specified.
According to Dr. Frans-Paul van der Putten, a China geopolitical analyst and senior research associate at the Clingendael Institute, the risks of Chinese technologies do not stem from the technology itself but from its political environment. As he stated, “from a Western point of view, surveillance used in a democratic society means more effective security. That’s generally regarded as something positive, whereas if you put it in an authoritarian political context, it flips around and then it’s seen as something negative, that it enhances the capabilities of repressive governments to suppress individual freedoms and human rights.”
China’s Digital Ambitions in Southeast Asia and the Regional Response
Southeast Asia constitutes a critical arena for China’s BRI and DSR, driven by geopolitical and strategic interests. Beyond Xi Jinping’s designation of the region as the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road in 2013, Southeast Asia’s proximity to China favours economic cooperation. Moreover, the region’s developing market creates crucial opportunities for investment, infrastructure expansion and tech projects. Lastly, as the region lies at the centre of the US “Pivot to Asia” and China containment strategy, Beijing seeks to counter the destabilizing impact of American tariffs and technological restrictions by strengthening its influence across Southeast Asia. China’s strategic projects in the region include 5G infrastructure in Thailand and industrial manufacturing nodes in Malaysia to strengthen and secure its semiconductors supply chain autonomy against the US “anti-China industry alliances.”
Despite China’s appeal in tech low costs, Southeast Asia has overall been resisting China’s pressure by balancing affordable tech infrastructure with compliance with Western standards, thus pursuing the so-called middle path. ASEAN has active agency in protecting its security and economic interests: In addition to the alarm of sensitive data being handed to the Chinese government after China’s crackdown on its own tech companies, the US export restrictions on China and the polarization of semiconductors supply chains, have made ASEAN countries more cautious in navigating the heated competition between the two superpowers. As Dr. Carrozza perfectly concluded, “states in SEA are assembling regulatory architectures from competing sources, taking European data protection templates, American security requirements, and Chinese infrastructure simultaneously, so China’s path from the provision of digital infrastructure to normative influence is not necessarily a straightforward one.”
Conclusion
The DSR has become increasingly essential in China’s geopolitical strategy, evolving from a BRI sub-initiative to a cornerstone of China’s foreign policy. Although digital infrastructure is less tangible than physical one, its power is not to be overlooked, risking becoming a tool for surveillance, authoritarian norm-setting, and sensitive data collection and transfer, and long-term tech dependency. Driven by a rise in awareness over the long term risks of deploying Chinese technologies, developing regions such as Southeast Asia have been increasingly balancing the benefits of DSR offers with their own national security interests. While on one side it is true that Chinese digital infrastructure is cheaper, on the other it comes at a greater cost.
Most cutting edge Chinese models being released as open weight models is the greatly under-appreciated advantage of the Chinese AI strategy vis-a-vis the Americans (Europeans don't matter, as we know)
As an unaligned country I can now leverage the power of AI without worrying that my benefactor can turn off access at will (as the US can, did, and will).
So given I have a preference for Chinese models, I then might want to have the infrastructure be built by the Chinese as well - because they can argue that their models perform better on domestic chip architecture. e.g..
In the future, that might lead to the Chinese deploying silicon-engraved models across the non-aligned group of nations, thereby exercising major control through purely economic incentives.
Now, of course, the EU could do exactly the same thing. Alas, we are not willing to build data centers at all even on our own continent because of water use and noise pollution. Oh the horror...