Christopher D. Booth
China’s “Digital Silk Road” is an amorphous program spanning, among other things, surveillance technology, telecommunications, sea-based sub-surface data cables and landing stations, the BeiDou satellite navigation system, and, of course, China’s internet guarded by the so-called “Great Firewall.” The Digital Silk Road was first described in 2015 as part of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. In The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future, Jonathan Hillman describes what he found after exploring various aspects of the project by, among other things, attending academic conferences, taking online sales training programs, and even visiting Huawei switches installed in a rural Montana network provider. In the late 1990s, former Chinese General Secretary Jiang Zemin directed that the primary purpose of the tech industry in the People’s Republic was to support the Chinese military. Hillman illustrates how at this time Western political and business leaders speciously believed that opening global markets to the People’s Republic of China, admitting it to the World Trade Organization, and exporting technology to China, would liberalize the communist state. His book repeatedly demonstrates how these policies (in combination with Chinese intellectual property theft, cyber-attacks, and reverse engineering), in the words of former Director of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, led to the “single greatest transfer of wealth in history.”[1] While many are now aware of the problem, the book documents how disjointed and scattershot any response to the threat has been.
This short, yet comprehensive, and extensively documented examination of the Digital Silk Road and the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to develop world-dominating technology (through collaboration between the military, state-owned enterprises, and closely associated parastatal private companies), will be of interest to policymakers, national security professionals, and hopefully U.S. and Western business leaders. That said, the book regularly engenders feelings of disgust, disappointment, and anger as Hillman recounts episode after episode of short-sighted, wrong-headed, and greed-fueled decision-making carried out by Western companies and governments. Vladimir Lenin’s taunt that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” seems as accurate pronounced with a Chinese accent as it did when the Russian communist made the statement a century ago. IBM’s 17-year consulting project with Huawei, in which it billed more than $1.6 billion in fees to teach the Chinese how to challenge and surpass its U.S. competitors, is one example of the short-term thinking that has provided China with potentially ruinous long-term strategic advantages.
Some of the most alarming anecdotes documented in the book are those in which customers and partners of Chinese tech companies believe they are engaged in above-board business transactions, when in reality they are being set up to be robbed and exploited. Examples abound. One of the Netherlands’ largest mobile phone providers—using Huawei switches—found that by 2010 Chinese intelligence could listen in on all calls carried by the service including those of the prime minister. Additionally they learned that Chinese authorities could see all numbers monitored by Dutch police and security services. The African Union (AU) had its headquarters financed and built by the PRC, and in 2018 it was discovered that for the previous five years the data from its servers was being sent nightly to China. In 2020, the African Union learned that its surveillance cameras were sending their footage there as well. Nortel Networks Corporation—once Canada’s largest and wealthiest company—went bankrupt after partnering with and then being victimized by its Chinese telecom partners. The Canadian ministry of defense purchased the defunct headquarters for $200 million, only to find it extensively penetrated with spy-gear. After spending an additional $790 million in remediation efforts it was still unable to certify the space as secure.
Hillman demonstrates the disconnect between American government policy and private industry’s goals. He makes a convincing case for the importance of government intervention in markets as part of a national security policy for critical topics such as rural broadband, given private industry’s lack of profit incentive to do so.
Where the book is perhaps less persuasive is in the final section, in which it proposes greater Western collaboration and cohesion. My enjoyment in reading The Digital Silk Road, was enhanced by serendipitously finding it in the small English-language section of a European bookstore. Unfortunately, the European Union and major economies such as Germany and France have their own stakeholders, and appear to be seeking their own path rather than siding too closely with the United States. The early November 2022 visit to Beijing of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the heads of 12 major companies (including Siemens, BASF, and Volkswagen) demonstrates Berlin’s interest in ever greater business ties with the People’s Republic.
Hillman’s work deserves to be discovered and read by a wide audience. Throughout the book, he documents how the Digital Silk Road poses a threat not only to U.S. economic interests, but potentially to wider national security interests as well. As an example, China’s undersea cable system, and access to the trunk-line landing stations, potentially provides them access to U.S. fiber-optic cables carrying trans-continental data, which may introduce questions of the reliability and security of U.S. communications. Similarly, the work focuses on how China intends for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) to compete to replace the lead position occupied by the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS). In a war, BDS could provide the Chinese military with an alternative method to employ precision guided weapons, while at the same time using their well-known counter-space systems to blind U.S. GPS. This eye-opening and disturbing book is a welcome addition to the literature on the rising multi-spectrum threat posed by China, and deserves attention by the military, diplomats, and anyone considering doing business with entities engaged in China’s Digital Silk Road.
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