The Digital Silk Road, Jonathan E. Hillman
The Digital Silk Road, Jonathan E. Hillman
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The Digital Silk Road
China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future

Author: Jonathan E. Hillman

Narrator: James Fouhey

Unabridged: 9 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 10/19/2021

Synopsis

An expert on China’s global infrastructure expansion provides an urgent look at the battle to connect and control tomorrow’s networks.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, Jonathan Hillman 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.If China becomes the world’s chief network operator, it could reap a commercial and strategic windfall, including many advantages currently enjoyed by the United States. It could reshape global flows of data, finance, and communications to reflect its interests. It could possess an unrivaled understanding of market movements, the deliberations of foreign competitors, and the lives of countless individuals enmeshed in its networks. However, China’s digital dominance is not yet assured. Beijing remains vulnerable in several key dimensions, the United States and its allies have an opportunity to offer better alternatives, and the rest of the world has a voice. But winning the battle for tomorrow’s networks will require the United States to innovate and take greater risks in emerging markets. Networks create large winners, and this is a contest America cannot afford to lose.

About Jonathan E. Hillman

Jonathan E. Hillman is a senior fellow with the economics program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the director of the Reconnecting Asia Project, and the author of The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century. He won the Financial Times/McKinsey & Company Bracken Bower Prize in 2019 and is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and Brown University. He lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Andrew on October 24, 2021

Fittingly for a book on networks, 'The Digital Silk Road' that helped me connect a variety of trends and data points around China's approach to the internet, digital infrastructure and the contest for influence. At the start of the 20th century, Britain dominated the global telegram network giving it......more

Goodreads review by Mohammad on January 07, 2022

Starts well with early chapters that document the incredible rise of Huawei and its strategic intent. The latter half is more hypothesis than fact based, putting forward a view of a hegemonic Chinese control of communications in a few decades time which seems binary and simplistic. The book is also......more

Goodreads review by Josh on April 15, 2024

The sumarial portions of this book were actually quite useful. The author does a good job untangling a complex web of Chinese owned digital infrastructure to provide a helpful overview of Chinese participation in the digital economy. I would read this book again just for the in depth studies of Huaw......more

Goodreads review by Ben on January 16, 2023

Scarier Than A Jack Ketchum Book I found this a very scary book. Some really concerning parts about Huawei and Hikvision. I would recommend this as a very important national security read for those cybersecurity-minded. This book got me very paranoid about all the facial recognition tracking that is lik......more

Goodreads review by Nahuel on April 02, 2022

3.5 Starts would be my actual rating. The books is we’ll researched and touches on key aspects of the Digital Silk Road. Often times the author goes into too many irrelevant details that adds no value to the key ideas and concepts of the book. Although the bias in favour of western countries is very......more

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