The Cipher Brief | The Year of the (Digital) Dragon

“[China’s] digital ambition is not merely a quest for technological supremacy but a fundamental building block of the CCP’s vision for the future—a future where the global governance system advances the CCP’s authoritarian model with Beijing at its apex.”
Jennifer Ewbank, “The Year of the (Digital) Dragon,” The Cipher Brief, July 2024

Jennifer Ewbank has just published a timely and insightful essay on Digital China in The Cipher Brief. Her essay brings welcome visibility to a topic that, despite its strategic importance, still receives far too little sustained attention in U.S. policy and analytical circles.

What stands out in Jennifer Ewbank’s assessment is how closely it aligns with the conclusions emerging from a growing body of research into China’s national digital strategy. Jennifer highlights several elements that are central to understanding Digital China: Building Digital China as a formal term-of-art used in Party and state planning; New Type Infrastructure including its acronym NTI (coined on this website) and specific NTI budget commitments (aggregated on this website); and Digital China as the grand strategy behind China’s ongoing digital ambitions and transformation.

These are foundational concepts that appear consistently across Chinese primary sources and have been core themes of this website’s work for several years. It is encouraging to see strikingly similar frameworks like these both reflecting a broader analytical conversation and validating the importance of deep engagement with Chinese primary sources.

Of particular note is Jennifer Ewbank’s discussion of the deeper ideological and structural logic behind Digital China. Ewbank’s essay emphasizes themes that have also emerged in earlier research including the role of Marxist theory, the Party’s principle of Control of Data, and the elevation of data as a new factor of production. Most important, Ewbank highlights how these, as elements of the Digital China strategy, shape the Party’s broader approach to governance at home and influence abroad.

These linkages were examined in detail in the research paper John Hemmings and I published 18 months ago, “Digital China: The Strategy and Its Geopolitical Implications.” It is encouraging to see these ideas gaining wider traction.

Jennifer Ewbank concludes with a powerful and increasingly urgent point:

the CCP’s coordinated approach to technology, framed by Marxist theory and aimed at controlling data as a key production factor in the digital age, underscores the need for a robust and unified digital strategy among democratic allies.

If you are following this website because you are interested in how Digital China is reshaping global competition, governance models, and international norms, Jennifer’s piece is well worth your time. It opens with a statement that deserves to be taken seriously: