The focus for decades has been on the Belt and Road Initiative which in the Middle East and Africa has been associated with the construction of ports, railways, highways and power plants. Beijing’s rising world presence was adorned with large-scale infrastructure ventures, which sought to tie together markets in space with the creation of physical trade corridors. But a new chapter in China’s plan for the region is playing out a long, long way from shipping terminals and construction projects.
Influence is what’s measured now by who controls the data, not the ports. China is slowly developing the digital infrastructure of communications, cloud computing, smart navigation and smart city in MEA under the Digital Silk Road. It’s an evolution that should be kept an eye on, not due to its inevitability of being dominant but because in a digital era, it’s a different way to wield geopolitical influence.
From Physical Corridors to Digital Highways
Whereas today these ports carry containers, tomorrow they will carry information on submarine fiber-optic cables. Data is becoming a strategic asset like oil or maritime trade routes, as economies get digitized.With the emergence of a digital economy, data is becoming a valuable asset like oil or maritime trade routes.
A few major China-backed firms, such as China Mobile Corp. and China Telecom Corp., as well as HMN Tech, have sunk a lot of money into the international subsea cable efforts between Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. This is exemplified through the PEACE cable that connects Pakistan, Djibouti, Egypt, Kenya and Europe with a high capacity project.
These underwater networks are not only speeding up the internet but also provide several other benefits. They provide long-term digital infrastructure for Financial Services, Cloud services, Government and trading across various continents and countries.
Telecommunications: Building the Region’s Connectivity
China’s impact is most striking, perhaps anywhere else than in telecommunications. Meanwhile, African and gulf countries are seeing Huawei, ZTE and others grow to be major players in the development of low cost 4G and 5G infrastructure.
In the Sub-Saharan region Chinese vendors are estimated to provide the bulk of mobile network infrastructure today, providing integrated equipment and finance which many developing markets are struggling to compete with. The smart manufacturing, logistics and smart cities powered by 5G networks are also valued by Huawei, with the company being a major player supporting the service deployment in GCC countries.
These partnerships are more of an economic choice for many governments than a geopolitical one. Sometimes price and turnkey deployment have been more important than broader strategic concerns.
Data Centers and the New Digital Sovereignty
Cloud computing technology has become a factor in the digital world, far beyond cables and mobile towers. Data localisation regulations by governments have increased the demand for domestic data centres in recent years.
Over the last few years, however, Chinese technology vendors including Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent have reacted by setting up regional cloud infrastructure in cities like Riyadh and Dubai, and national data centre projects in nations such as Kenya, Senegal and Zimbabwe.
These institutions help to retain sensitive data within the countries from where their source is. Meanwhile, they build in long-term dependency to specific software ecosystems, cyber security norms and technical skills.
BeiDou Expands Beyond Navigation
Another aspect of the Digital Silk Road is the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System of China. From being simply a substitute for GPS, BeiDou has emerged as a key platform that can be integrated with various applications in the logistics, telecom, agriculture and industrial automation sectors.
The BeiDou satellites have been put to use in the port by tracking vessels and managing cargo, and in agriculture by guiding various equipment to deliver precision farming. Timing signals are also essential to telecommunications, for synchronization of 5G networks and financial transactions.
China’s extending its technological reach into several areas at once by rolling out the satellites into several sectors besides communications infrastructure.
Smart Cities and Embedded Influence
All of this has made China’s companies leading suppliers of smart city solutions in the Middle East and Africa region. The projects bring together systems of surveillance with AI, facial recognition, traffic management and centralized command centers as integrated urban platforms.
Consequently, different aspects of this have been taken up by cities in Kenya, Uganda, Egypt and South Africa to promote safety and city management. Supporters state that they raise the efficiency and security level of transactions, yet critics still pose concerns on the topics of privacy, software control, and lasting technological reliance.
The bigger issue is not the devices necessarily, though, but also the software ecosystems that enable urban data and public services.
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New Form of Strategic Influence
Digital systems are much more valuable when they are increasingly interconnected as compared to traditional infrastructure. The leap to a new provider, if and when that becomes necessary, can be very costly in terms of money and time, after a common technological architecture has been employed.
This forms a high switching cost for the economist. These benefits extend beyond trading ones, to granting China influence in developing their technical standards, cybersafety and the methods of digital governance on the developing economies more widely.
However, it is to be noted that there are many meals that actively diversify partnerships, successfully collaborating with both local, regional and Western technology suppliers in parallel. But most want to buy the best that they can without tilting at the windmills on one side.
FAQs
What does China’s Digital Silk Road mean?
Digital Silk Road is a part of the Belt and Road Initiative, dedicated to the development of digital infrastructure such as telecommunications, cloud computing, submarine cables, satellite systems and smart city technologies.
What is special about submarine cables?
Most global Internet traffic is transported over submarine cables, which are vital for international exchange of information, financial transactions, cloud computing and e-commerce.
What is BeiDou?
BeiDou is China’s satellite navigation system for positioning, navigation and timing services for transportation, agriculture, telecommunications and logistics.
