About
Is the Digital Silk Road creating an alternative to the US-centered digital world and exporting the “Chinese internet” to BRI countries? What are the politics and values that are embedded in the infrastructure, the services, and the policies that constitute the Digital Silk Road? Do they prefigure a future where the internet will be split into two areas of influence: one that is US-led and founded on market-driven values, and one that is China-led and inspired by state control and the re-establishment of national boundaries and governance over what started out as a borderless new space?
Research context
In 2013, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a set of policies and mostly infrastructural investments in countries along a loosely reimagined Silk Road. An increasingly discussed part of the BRI is the Digital Silk Road (DSR) which, at least on paper, is focused on investments in the digital field in BRI countries, from building physical infrastructures to localizing digital services and devices. This project studies the implementation of the DSR from the bottom up in China and three neighboring countries: Cambodia, Myanmar and Kazakhstan. It starts from a simple question whose answer is very unclear: What is the Digital Silk Road, exactly? What projects does it consist of and how are they coordinated? Who is investing in it, and how much? How are these projects connected with the goals of the Chinese State, and directly supported by it, and how do they deviate, following instead the goals of the corporations or people who materialize them? What specific consequences do they have on the daily lives of people who live in the three countries we focus on, as well as on the countries' economies and societies?
Research methods
Our team employs field research based on qualitative methods, digital methods, and document analysis to understand the emergence of the Digital Silk Road from the ground-up and from the comparative perspective of businesses, governments and ordinary people in the four countries. In China, where policies, finances, devices, online platforms and apps originate, we look at the strategies of tech companies, especially SME, to succeed in the markets of the three countries, and explore how they are linked to a general DSR strategy and how they diverge from it. In Kazakhstan, Myanmar and Cambodia, we focus on traders and small markets as well as people's use of Chinese tech. At the heart of our exploration are ethnographic methods, which we triangulate with document analysis and digital methods to bring a multi-layered perspective on the ground-up implementation of the DSR.