China's Digital Colonialism: Espionage and Repression Along the Digital Silk Road

Through the Digital Silk Road Initiative (DSR), announced in 2015, the People's Republic of China (PRC) is building expansive global data infrastructure and exporting surveillance technologies to dictators and illiberal regimes throughout the developing world.1 In some cases, these exports involve the trade of technology for access to sensitive user data and facial recognition intelligence. Domestically, China uses this type of technology to assert authority over its citizens, censor the media, quell protests, and systematically oppress religious minorities. Now, over eighty countries are enabled to do the same with Chinese surveillance technology.2 This report explores three primary concerns related to China's digital colonialism. China's DSR projects in the least developed regions of the world create a power imbalance between China and the recipient nations, resulting in a high risk for privacy and cybersecurity in those regions. China's export of intrusive artificial intelligence-enabled technologies and ideologies to illiberal regimes around the world enables authoritarianism and systemic oppression and degrades democratic values. Chinese digital dominance poses both a critical cybersecurity threat to the world and a growing threat to competitors' markets through the assertion of new Chinese-style standards of internet governance. As China builds new global internet infrastructure through the Digital Silk Road, it will co-opt billions of new Internet of Things (IoT) devices, servers, and foreign resources to its cyber arsenal. The author's firm, Recorded Future, posits that Beijing will conduct extensive influence operations in conjunction with the development of Chinese-style internet governance in participating Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries. If left unchecked by the rest of the world, China will reshape internet governance by replacing democratic values and standards with authoritarian principles.