The Digital Silk Road

Its vast infrastructure projects now extend from the ocean floor to outer space, and from Africa's megacities into rural America. China is wiring the world, and, in doing so, rewriting the global order.As things stand, the rest of the world still has a choice. But the battle for tomorrow will require America and its allies to take daring risks in uncertain political terrain. Unchecked, China will reshape global flows of data to reflect its interests. It will develop an unrivalled understanding of market movements, the deliberations of foreign competitors, and the lives of countless individuals enmeshed in its systems. Networks create large winners, and this is one contest that democracies can't afford to lose.Taking readers on a global tour of these emerging battlefields, Jonathan Hillman reveals what China's digital footprint looks like on the ground, and explores the dangers of a world in which all routers lead to Beijing.

Jonathan E. Hillman is a senior fellow with the CSIS Economics Program and director of the Reconnecting Asia Project, one of the most extensive open-source databases tracking China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Hillman has testified before Congress, briefed government officials and Fortune 500 executives, and written on economics, national security, and foreign policy issues for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other outlets. He is the author of The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century (Yale University Press, 2020) and The Digital Silk Road: China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future