The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future

by Jonathan E. Hillman, Director of the CSIS Reconnecting Asia Project

From the ocean floor to outer space, China’s Digital Silk Road aims to wire the world and rewrite the global order. Taking readers on a journey inside China’s surveillance state, rural America, and Africa’s megacities, This book reveals what China’s expanding digital footprint looks like on the ground and explores the economic and strategic consequences of a future in which all routers lead to Beijing.

“The Digital Silk Road traces China’s rise as a digital superpower and provides a sobering analysis of its challenge to American technological leadership, economic competitiveness, and national security. Jonathan Hillman shows how private entrepreneurship and government support have enabled a technologically backward country to acquire leading-edge communications capabilities long thought to be the exclusive preserve of rich democracies. This important and well-crafted book should be required reading for American policy makers and industry leaders.”
—Minxin Pei, Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow, Claremont McKenna College

“A timely and fascinating account of how China is shaping the digital universe, redrawing the connections that carry data from the ocean floor to outer space, and harnessing the means by which both commerce and warfare will increasingly be conducted, framed in a century-defining contest for control.”
—Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, former U.S. trade representative

“Essential reading for understanding one of the greatest geostrategic challenges of our age: China’s technological rise and global push to dominate the vital systems upon which militaries, markets, and modern societies depend.”
—Admiral James Stavridis, sixteenth supreme allied commander at NATO and author of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

“An urgent, engaging look at China’s push to build digital influence and leverage, project by project, as it makes a play for global dominance.”
—Ambassador Jon M. Huntsman Jr.