Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork interviews and secondary data, this paper shows a nuanced picture of alignment with DSR in overseas expansion for Chinese firms in the ICT ecosystem. Moreover, local stakeholders have agency in shaping the regulation and diffusion of Chinese tech to mitigate negative impacts.

Paper long abstract:

Once a more obscure part of China’s BRI at its inception, the Digital Silk Road (DSR) has become prominent in policy discussions in recent years, with views ranging from Beijing's strategy co-opting Chinese firms to control the global Internet, to win-win collaboration for ICT-driven growth and sustainability. Yet more grounded analysis converging top-down processes and bottom-up local perspectives of Chinese player’s engagement with the host countries is scarce. This paper fills the gap and shows a more nuanced picture of the firms’ behavior and the host countries' responses in Chinese tech firms’ overseas expansion. Drawing on Fransman’s framework of ICT ecosystem grouping players in the ICT sector into multiple layers, this study finds that Chinese firms at more foundational layers of network element provision and network operation have displayed more willingness to align with DSR-related Chinese policies and rhetoric in their expansion in emerging Asian markets. In comparison, Chinese firms at the upper layer providing platform, content, applications largely conduct their expansion driven by profit maximization, independent of the DSR-related policies and rhetoric, and some have carefully avoided direct alignment in engaging local players considering local sentiment towards BRI. Moreover, contrary to the common depiction of host countries as passive players, the study finds that local governments and stakeholders have shown agency in shaping the diffusion of Chinese-invested technologies and the development outcomes of projects. This study employs primary data gathered from fieldwork in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore) and secondary data from print and online documents.