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

A must read to those wishing to understand what lies ahead in the digital age. Although written from a USA perspective it does offer insights into some of the issues in the US- China relationship. Does not fully reflect that some of the arguments are really based on capitalist competition & not China doing something which other capitalist countries do & the USA & Europe have certainly done before.

Hillman does a very effective job identifying threats and opportunities relative to china,s digital silk road. His research is deep and well documented.

Maybe you have heard of Huawei, something about their "5G" communications equipment being too dangerous for American cities to use. This is a detailed, occasionally turgid but mostly readable, and not too technical, discussion of how Chinese companies, looking more like arms of their government than ordinary commercial companies, continue to quietly but aggressively build "soft power" for China by cutting costs and wiring (and wireless-ing) the world. Read how African companies sign up for cheap loans to do the expensive task of installing modern digital telephony, only to wind up over a financial barrel and having to transfer the loans to build something else that is of more value to China than them. Read how driving the cost way down for essential communication equipment forces ordinary Midwest towns to buy Huawei products or else not have Internet. This book does have a point of view, but also sheds light on a family of topics which need to be understood more widely by Americans.

I found it most enlightening a comment by a former US ambassador to an eastern European nation on the difference between state-sponsored infrastructure projects and those undertaken by corporations – that immediate profit is not the primary motive for the state while it is for the corporation. Thus without taking account of this reality, and given that the engine of action in the West is the corporation, thinking that it can maintain its hegemony and prevent China from reaching its goals seems to be rather wishful thinking, especially given that it is not only profit that is of concern to the corporation but risk-aversion as well, about which the state is not too concerned either. In this regard, another generic comment that I had come across by several renowned scholars would also be of interest – that while China is busy building, the West is busy preventing others from participating, that is, constructive vs destructive action. It seems to me that this negative/reactionary mindset of the West would weigh equally if not more towards losing its current hegemonic status than anything that China could do! For such mindsets would blind it to the reality and thus prevent it from forward-thinking and constructively planning ahead.

Describes China's process of obtaining technology, as I witnessed in the 90s where I worked in manufacturing.Received a complementary copy via #GoodreadsGiveaway.

Much of the viewpoints came from an echo chamber, pretty much echoed in most major English media. If our world is so black and white, good guy bad guy, Hollywood would have written the script and published as expert opinions.