The Digital Silk Road

Concerns about China’s ambitions to return to global centre stage as a great power have recently begun to focus on the Digital Silk Road (DSR), an umbrella term for various activities – commercial and diplomatic – of interest to the Chinese government in the cyber realm. Part of (or a spin-off from) the 2013 Belt and Road Initiative, by 2020 the DSR had become a focal point of China’s foreign policy. But the DSR remains ill-defined and poorly understood. At the heart of such concerns is not that