China’s digital expansion in the Global South: Special issue introduction

Keywords:

• China
• digital development
• Digital Silk Road
• Global South

In the past decade or so, China has emerged as a global digital superpower, with digital exports and activities reaching out around the world. This has naturally attracted attention from scholars but most research to date has focused on the digital economy within China or on impacts within the high-income countries of the Global North.

Much less-researched have been the implications for other low- and middle-income developing countries of the Global South, where China has a rapidly-growing digital presence. This presence is impacting across different areas:

• Infrastructure, for example, via Digital Silk Road (DSR) components of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and contributions to construction of smart cities;

• The economic sphere, for example, with Chinese e-commerce platforms allowing greater penetration of local markets;

• The social sphere, for example, via TikTok and other Chinese social media platforms; and

• The political sphere, for example, with export of Chinese surveillance systems, and growing influence on regional and global digital governance.

What little has been researched and written about China’s digital involvement in the Global South has often taken one of two distinct positions. Either from the perspective of China itself, tending to put a positive gloss on activities, or from the perspective of the US, seeing China’s digital growth as an economic or political threat. Scholarship from the Global South and/or from the perspective of Global South actors has been rare.

Recognizing this, the “China’s Digital Expansion in the Global South” project was initiated, with funding from the School of Environment, Education, and Development and from the Faculty of Humanities, both at the University of Manchester. The development of this special issue began with a track at the Development Studies Association conference in 2021, a systematic literature review (included in this special issue), and a call for case studies that elicited more than 60 proposals from which five papers were ultimately developed.

Following rounds of internal feedback, we held an international workshop in 2022 at which case studies were presented and discussed, leading to production as working papers. These papers were then submitted into the review process for The Information Society and now form the basis for this special issue.

In the remainder of this editorial, we introduce the articles in this special issue. They offer a range of perspectives across the different spheres, as outlined above, and draw on research from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The literature review – “China’s Digital Expansion in the Global South: Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda” by Richard Heeks, Angelica Ospina, Christopher Foster, Ping Gao, Xia Han, Nicholas Jepson, Seth Schindler, and Qingna Zhou – is based on analysis of 75 topic-specific papers. It reviews the general features of this literature, including its bi-modal (US- and China-based) distribution of authorship that correlates with Sino-phobic and Sino-philic perspectives, and its relative lack of primary data or theorization. It provides a chronological review of the gradual progression of China’s exports to Global South countries up the digital stack, from telecom infrastructure to devices, data services, and platforms.

The review then analyses key emergent themes from the literature These include the synergies and tensions between the various Chinese state, public, and private actors involved; the digital expansion strategies adopted by these actors including Digital Silk Road and tech firm internationalization; and the more micro-level approaches taken to design and implementation of digital projects in Global South countries. Evidence about development impact is considered, with concerns raised in some sections of literature about cybersecurity, digital colonialism, and dependency, inequalities within and between countries, and environmental sustainability. The review also explores two domain-specific issues arising in the literature: whether China is exporting “digital authoritarianism”, and the implications of China’s growing digital presence for digital governance at both global and national levels.

A number of these themes – most of which emerge from a very limited base of literature and an even-smaller base of empirical evidence – are then explored in greater depth by the other articles in this special issue.

Yujia He’s article, “Chinese Digital Platform Companies’ Expansion in the Belt and Road Countries”, investigates the relationship between three things: activities of Chinese platform firms in Global South countries, the Chinese state’s Belt and Road Initiative (including its Digital Silk Road component), and local context. Global quantitative data shows growth of Chinese platform firms’ investments to have been much stronger in non-BRI-participating countries compared to countries that are participating.

This matches results of an Indonesia-specific investment case study in He’s article, which show Chinese firms perceiving BRI/DSR as a high-level brand or slogan that may be useful in some circumstances or avoided in others, but which has limited impact on investment decisions. Instead, those decisions are driven much more by local market factors such as market size, and are shaped by other local contextual factors including national policy (both policy content and the nature and extent of implementation) and the state of the labor market. These are shown to have prompted Chinese platform firms to localize their business operations, to seek local partners, and to invest in local capacity building. They have also adapted to local circumstances in other ways; sometimes finding ways to work around local policy. The findings here thus move beyond the simplistic notion that China’s digital expansion is being directed by the Chinese government. Rather, they reorient attention to the interests and behaviors of the tech firms. The article also helps expose the importance of local policies and conditions in shaping that expansion; factors that have often been ignored in the literature to date.

The strategies adopted by Chinese tech firms in the Global South are also the topic of the article by Guillermo J. Larios-Hernandez, “Alibaba in Mexico: Adapting the Digital Villages Model to Latin America”. He researched the activities of Alibaba as it sought to grow its operations in Mexico. Alibaba has been emblematic in China’s broader digital expansion, with its “Electronic World Trade Platform” approach, said to epitomize the “inclusive globalization” vision – China’s alternative to the type of globalization fostered by the US and other Western states and digital firms. Echoing the findings of the previous article, this one charts the way in which local context led Alibaba – via its Mexican subsidiary, Atomic88 – to customize its approach. Given it had only a nascent position in a local e-commerce market dominated by US and Latin American platforms, Alibaba did not seek to compete head-on, for example, by directly promoting sales via its e-commerce platforms. Instead, it adopted a longer-term perspective that focused first on the digitally-enabled development of a relatively neglected sector in Mexico: small enterprise. It neither directly funded nor provided its e-commerce platform services to these enterprises, but instead facilitated local actors, particularly universities, to develop a training and consultancy intervention model.

The long-term impact of its initiative on inclusivity is uncertain, but what it has done is to help Alibaba build relationships with key digital economy stakeholders in Mexico. These relationships will potentially provide a valuable foundation for next steps toward a larger and more direct presence in the market. The article demonstrates the importance of local factors and local actors and the ability of Chinese tech firms to customize growth strategies based on context. It again shows the way in which expansion can often occur with little overt role for the Chinese state.

After articles studying China’s digital activities in two middle-income countries in Asia and Latin America, the next article turns attention to Africa; specifically North Africa. Where the two previous articles concentrated on the strategies adopted by Chinese tech firms, “Learning Along the Digital Silk Road? Technology Transfer, Power, and Chinese ICT Corporations in North Africa” by Tin Hinane El-Kadi focuses more on the development impact of those strategies. Specifically, it studies whether two Chinese tech giants – Huawei and ZTE – are contributing to an upgrading of local technological capabilities through their activities in Algeria and Egypt. These activities include not just major infrastructure contracts but also a manufacturing plant and a joint technology training center and innovation laboratory.

Despite this potential, the article finds that the two firms created no opportunities for knowledge transfers that could lead to meaningful technological upgrading in the two countries. There has been local skill building, particularly via relationships with North African universities, and a major diffusion of Chinese digital technologies but this has mainly served to reconfigure local digital ecosystems toward a domination of Chinese products, processes, and systems. This may well be a natural part of commercial competition for markets rather than part of a grand plan directed from Beijing, but it is creating a new set of dependencies on Chinese tech firms. Proactive local policies, which the two previous articles both showed to have an effect on the actions of Chinese firms, are therefore needed to promote stronger involvement of local organizations and greater knowledge spillovers.

The final two articles – “The Chinese Surveillance State in Latin America? Evidence from Argentina and Ecuador” by Maximiliano Facundo Vila Seoane and Carla Morena Álvarez Velasco, and “China’s Expansion into Brazilian Digital Surveillance Markets” by Esther Majerowicz and Miguel Henriques de Carvalho – both provide new insights into a much-contested aspect of China’s exports to Global South countries: the export of surveillance technologies. As discussed in the literature review paper, this has been painted, particularly by US-based sources, as the export of digital authoritarianism that is undermining democracy and strengthening autocracy. Anti-China rhetoric more broadly has also at times been replicated by politicians in Latin America.

Both articles present evidence that challenges partial and politicized views. Alongside the previous article on limits to Chinese tech firms’ technology transfer and the initial literature review, they question the idea of Chinese exceptionalism; finding a number of similarities between the actions of Chinese and Western digital firms. They show that both historically and currently, Western firms have been supplying surveillance technologies to Latin America; sometimes as part of the very same systems in which Chinese technologies are involved. Those technologies may well be part of broader emergency response or e-government systems; the kind of system widely promoted in the international development activities of Western states.

As do all of the articles in this special issue, the two final articles challenge the image of the Chinese state as the puppet-master directing and controlling matters. In all cases, organs of the Chinese central government have played only a limited and background role. Instead, the core relationships are between Chinese tech firms (albeit some state-owned), local state actors in the Global South, and, to varying extents, local or even Western firms. Rather than fears about digital authoritarianism, it is those relationships which are the focus for local concerns, with accusations of corruption in procurement, and worries about lack of accountability in the use of surveillance systems. The Argentina/Ecuador article in particular recovers local agency, showing how procurement, design and implementation of the systems have been driven by local agendas rather than by Chinese actors.

Those local agendas cut across the political spectrum, and the two articles comprehensively debunk the association in some US-origin sources between Chinese surveillance technologies and autocratic and/or left-leaning national regimes. Polities of all stripes from right to left, from less to more democratic, and from national to local levels have all procured these technologies from Chinese firms. This once again reinforces how an understanding of local context, local politics, and local history is essential to any analysis of China’s digital expansion in the Global South.

Overall, the articles presented here start to fill some important gaps in our understanding of China’s digital expansion in the Global South, and they challenge some preconceptions and one-sided views of this major, recent activity. The articles in this special issue provide a valuable foundation for future and more research on this important topic. That research can potentially be guided by the six research agenda priorities identified in the literature review paper:

• More voices from the Global South, both as authors and subjects of research

• Updating the scope of research to encompass: a broader range of digital technologies, the role of data and human infrastructure in China’s digital expansion, and the impact of recent trends in Chinese domestic digital policy

• Moving beyond the “Team China” monolith to understand the actual coherence, collaboration, competition, and conflict between different Chinese digital actors who are active in the Global South

• Steering between Chinese exceptionalism and identicalism, i.e. between the extreme positions that China is unique in its digital interactions with Global South countries, and that China is no different to other countries

• Evaluating the development impact of China’s digital expansion in the Global South: the distribution of benefits and disbenefits, the contribution or otherwise to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and specific impacts around sovereignty, dependency, inequality, and environmental sustainability

• Studying the role of local agency in the so-called “digital cold war” between the US and China, including room for maneuver of local policy-makers in both national and global digital governance, optimum strategies for local digital firms, and Global South countries as sites for learning by Chinese digital policy-makers and firms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).