What, in reality, is the Digital Silk Road?
Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, Guangzhou, China. Source: Nabeel Hussain/Unsplash
This is the question that Weidi Zheng and I begin to answer in our article "The Digital Silk Road between National Rhetoric and Provincial Ambitions", just published in China Quarterly. We began working on this in the early days of the DIGISILK project, as we were grappling with the boundaries of our research. The more we read about the Digital Silk Road (数字丝绸之路，DSR), the less we were able to come up with a clear definition of it, that would allow us to at least determine which projects might be part of it. So we started asking: what, in reality, is the Digital Silk Road?
Since the DSR was announced in 2015 as, vaguely, the part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that deals with the digital, there has been plenty of writing about it, in the news and in academia. Typically it is described as a plan that "represents China's ambition to become a global technological leader and to reshape the global digital landscape" - this is how Google AI's Gemini answers the question of what is the DSR, and it is fairly representative of the general take on it. But once we go beyond such a generic definition, which quickly leads to any kind of project which involves Chinese tech or Chinese tech companies being labelled as a DSR project, it gets complicated.
What we know for a fact is that the DSR was first mentioned in 2015 as the "Information Silk Road" in the "Vision and action on jointly building the Belt and Road” plan issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China. The plan laid out a number of priorities for the BRI, the ambitious infrastructural and developmental plan that Xi Jinping had launched in 2013, and a modest and short paragraph of the document was dedicated to possible projects to strengthen digital connectivity among BRI countries:
“We should jointly advance the construction of cross-border optical cables and other communications trunk line networks, improve international communications connectivity, and create an Information Silk Road. We should build bilateral cross-border optical cable networks at a quicker pace, plan transcontinental submarine optical cable projects, and improve spatial (satellite) information passageways to expand information exchanges and cooperation.” (Source: Vision and action on jointly building the Belt and Road)
We also know that the Information Silk Road became the Digital Silk Road in 2017 (at least in English, although In Chinese alternative names are still in use, including Cyber Silk Road (网上丝绸之路）, Information Harbour (信息港) and Information Silk Road (信息丝绸之路）. However, other seemingly essential details are quite hazy. The number of countries that signed DSR Memoranda of Understanding fluctuates from 16 to 30 , this latter from a source that curiously refers to the same Eurasia document where the table showing 16 countries appears. All sources list England as a participant (which in fact should be the United Kingdom), but the UK has explicitly declined to sign the DSR MoU. If we try to "follow the money," things get even vaguer, with many citing the figure of USD 79 billion from a Bloomberg article citing a proprietary RWR Advisory Group source that includes projects that started before the DSR was announced and in countries that are in fact publicly and explicitly quite opposed to the BRI, such as India. Even the definition of a DSR project tends to be in the eye of the beholder.
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What is particularly striking is the portrayal of the DSR as a unified strategy to build China's alternative digital world order, from infrastructure to governance, by the way of e-commerce and 5G. Scholars of China, however, have long shown how decentralised, fractured, and often contradictory internal policymaking is in China - so could the DSR really be an exception?
With the help of Shalen Fu, Weidi and I set out to see if we could find documents related to the DSR issued by central and provincial authorities in China, and analyse them to see how the plan emerged and developed internally in China. Even using a very broad definition of DSR-related documents, we collected a mere 31 documents issued by central actors between 2015 and 2022, but an impressive 130 documents issued by 34 provincial-level bodies. From our analysis, we argue that the DSR has been a locus of power struggles – first among national-level actors and then among provincial-level governments – and has become a “legitimization mechanism” for local strategies that serve (and reflect) provincial goals of digital development, rather than a government-driven strategy to push Chinese tech to foreign countries. Provincial initiatives have mostly been ignored by the centre, rather than being incorporated into any further policy or funded through central finances. Provincial governments attempt to leverage the DSR to gain opportunities to grow and modernize the digital infrastructures of poorer areas, or to promote existing tech industry priorities in richer provinces, while mostly ignoring the international dimension evoked in central documents. As a result, the DSR is internally scattered among local plans that serve local interests and seek to build provincial connections to BRI countries that, for the most part, ignore them.
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In the article, we further articulate the strategies that different provinces have put in place, and recount in detail the fraught story of Guangxi province's China-ASEAN Information Harbor, one of the few projects mentioned and praised by central authorities, but alas not funded by them, and struggling to get any international partners interested.
So our initial answer to "what, in reality, is the Digital Silk Road" is:
that it is not a cohesive, unified project;
that the central government has been steadily disengaging with it, because of the changing international landscape, especially in the tech field, an inward turn towards state regulation of the tech industry and a renewed emphasis on self-reliance and indigenous innovation;
that provinces use its rhetoric selectively to serve their own goals (as do Chinese tech companies, which equally often avoid the DSR rhetoric to refrain from being conflated with the government - but this is another paper!);
and that the impact in BRI/DSR countries remains under-explored, with some notable exceptions.
The article is open-access and available here. An interactive visualisation of the DSR documents organised by the issuing body and date can be explored on our China page. The PdFs of the original sources are also available in Zotero.
Elisa Oreglia is DIGISILK's Principal Investigator and a Reader in Global Digital Cultures in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London