From gallons to gigabytes: China’s Digital Silk Road and the Arab World
Alibaba group Headquarters
While the strategic expansion into the Arab region by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), driven by China’s insatiable demand for oil and other natural and strategic resources, has received both scholarly and public attention, there is hardly any research on the growing activities of the BRI’s Digital Silk Road (DSR) sub-initiative, and how they play out in countries of the region. This is not surprising considering that the DSR was launched in 2015 and only explicitly became a policy focus in 2017 when Xi Jinping declared that China should focus on its ‘...cooperation in frontier areas such as digital economy, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology...and advance the development of big data, cloud computing and smart cities so as to turn them into the digital Silk Road of the 21st century’.[1] The intensifying US-China rivalry and more recent global developments such as Covid-19, however, have attracted huge attention to China’s growing digital footprint and are putting the spread of its large tech giants in BRI countries, including the Arab region, under scrutiny. This growing interest in DSR tends to focus mostly on security-related concerns such as questions of data privacy and the perceived export of China’s so-called ‘techno-authoritarian’ model to BRI countries.
This exploratory piece, on the other hand, suggests the need to understand the DSR and the growing interest of Chinese tech giants such as Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Xiaomi and Didi in the Arab region in terms of competition over one of the fastest growing and more strategic global markets: personal data. The recent mantra, ‘data is the new oil’ captures the constant increase in the ‘harvesting’, ‘extracting’ ‘mining’, and accumulation of personal data through digital platforms and gadgets. For global capital, the value of data resides in its endless reusability and in its predictive analytical power. The smooth production and accumulation of this invaluable resource can only take place by moving as much human activity as possible to the digital sphere: from shopping, entertainment and e-banking to health care, transportation, surveillance, education and a lot more. More recently, ’data colonialism’ has emerged as a term which describes the capture of data by large tech companies from diverse populations. Data colonialism, a project propelled by tech giants, is described as a process of accumulation by dispossession; one which combines the predatory, extractive practices of historical colonialism with state-of-the-art methods of quantification (Thatcher et al. 2016, Couldry and Mejias 2019).
Understanding the scope of the DSR in this global market and tracing the volume of Chinese investments in the digital sphere in the Arab region is not an easy task. Official documents and the different Memoranda of Understanding signed between China and individual countries of the BRI do not explicitly refer to investments in ‘digital’ terms. Collaboration in the building of ports, Economic Zones and smart cities, for example, combines investments in both physical infrastructure as well as in AI-driven technologies such as broadband networks, cloud services, facial recognition and a range of other smart devices. Another challenge facing researchers is the lack of centralisation of DSR as a policy initiative. The DSR is not a top-down, tightly-managed plan that is directly backed by Beijing, as some would like us to believe. Instead, the DSR refers to loosely-organised projects driven by Chinese private companies that often use the DSR label in order to gain legitimacy and to secure state support for their oversees activities. [2] To complicate matters, the relationship between Beijing and Chinese tech giants is a highly complex and fluid one making it even more difficult to understand the dynamics of the DSR governance.
What is certain, however, is that across the modern silk route, Chinese tech giants have been rolling out massive digital infrastructure that facilitates the extraction, circulation, storage, and processing of huge amounts of data. This infrastructure includes platforms for e-banking and e-commerce, data centres and cloud storage facilities, telecommunication networks, and smart cities. Among their partners, Arab countries have been very keen to collaborate with Chinese companies in a bid to shore up their national digital economies. The more affordable, yet high-quality, Chinese technology gives these companies a comparative advantage over many of their competitors in the region.
Smart Cities
One of the main areas of collaboration between Chinese companies and Arab governments is the building of smart cities. Chinese tech companies are visibly involved in realising several Arab countries’ national strategic plans such as the Digital Tunisia 2020 strategy, Qatar National Vision 2030 and Saudi Arabia’s National Transformation Program 2030. In the span of only a few years, China has exported smart-city technology to over 10 countries in the Middle East. In 2017, for example, Alibaba announced a $600m plan to create a Tech Town that would accommodate 3,000 firms working in robotics, artificial intelligence and mobile apps near Dubai’s port Jebel Ali.[3] The first cloud data centre opened by Huawei in Egypt in 2019 is also part of larger collaboration, which includes providing AI and surveillance systems to the country’s new smart administrative capital.[4] Similarly, an agreement for Morocco’s, Mohamed VI Tangier Tech City is intended to host 200 Chinese tech companies while in Saudi Arabia, Alibaba has signed an agreement with the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) to provide Saudi cities with AI-driven smart city ‘solutions’. Huawei is further working with the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah in the kingdom in order to create digital infrastructure including smartphone apps, TV channels and control rooms in Mecca and Medina reception Centres.[5]
Smart cities, or safe cities as they are often promoted, are wired by sensors, facial recognition technologies, surveillance networks, digital gates and other gadgets which collect and transmit huge volumes of data, and create a constant flow of algorithmically-linked data points which feed into the development of more sophisticated technologies and future business ventures.
E-commerce and E-Finance
Creating digital commercial and financial hubs brings millions of customers into platforms that provide goods and services worth billions while at the same time generating personal data worth billions more. In the Arab World, AliPay, China’s largest online and mobile payment provider, launched its services in the UAE in 2019 in collaboration with the Mashreq Bank.[6] Furthermore, Alibaba and the e-fashion Jollychic company have become digital centres for e-commerce across the Arab region with Jollychic alone providing services to 50 million users in the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain and Lebanon. Jollychic is further expanding by creating a digital payment system and diversifying its ‘ecosystem’ to include food delivery as well as travel and transportation activities.[7] To facilitate e-commerce in the region, ByteDance has invested $350 million in iMile, a Dubai-based courier startup which services Chinese online vendors in the region. [8]Significantly, TikTok, owned by ByteDace, has been listed in the top 10 downloaded apps on Google Play Store and Apple App Store in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar. [9] TikTok, which began as a platform for music and creative content, is now expanding its ‘ecosystem’ into different spheres that provide online content and services in the areas of food, fashion, music, sports and education.
AliPay, iMile Delivery, Didi Taxi hailing platform, Jollychic and TikTok, among many other Chinese and non-Chinese companies operating in the region, collect enormous amounts of data from their customers. Online activities provide data on economic behaviour, time zone and physical location, phone models and IP address, customers’ preferences and mental states reflected in their written feedbacks, shared emojis, typing speed and word diction powered by AI technologies. In turn, AI uses the data to create sophisticated maps of consumer behaviour, to build predictive models and to help train and create new generations of AI technology.
Data Centres
The storing, processing and dissemination of all this data require large investments in the building of data centres. Chinese companies have become recently keen to launch various data centres in the region. In Dubai, for example, Huwaei is partnering with the airport authority to build a Modular Data Center Complex while at the same time collaborating with the princedom’s Electricity and Water Authority to launch a data centre, fiber-optic infrastructure and video surveillance facilities.[10] The company is also involved in the building of the largest solar-powered Uptime TIER III-certified data centre in the Middle East and Africa at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, the largest single-site solar park in the world.[11] Huawei has, further, signed a contract to build a data centre for the Algerian customs agency while working with the Abu Dhabi City Municipality to construct a Municipal Disaster Recovery Data Centre. In Oman, Alibaba is collaborating with the locally-based companies, Datamount and International Emerging Technology, to establish a cloud computing centre in the sultanate.[12]
Data Futures
This expansion of Chinese tech companies in the Arab World is expected to grow in the near future. This is mainly due to the huge US-led pushback against China’s growing global digital influence. Concerns over China’s data governance regimes and its (lack of) compliance with international standards have seen the rise of punitive action against Chinese firms that threaten their presence in several markets. Examples include the global anti-Huawei 5G campaign and the signing of the Indo-Pacific focused Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity partnership, which potentially threatens China’s interest in partner countries.[13] Several Chinese tech companies are also being banned in strategic markets including Dahua, Hikvision and SenseTime, which were added to the US Commerce Department Entity List in 2019.[14] In another move, TikTok was banned in India in 2019 for arguably posing threats to national security. At the same time on the domestic front, several Chinese tech darlings, such as DiDi, have also recently come under a tighter grip of Beijing over the companies’ handling of private data.[15]
The consequence of these worsening relationships with the US, growing global criticism over China’s initial pandemic response and continuing vaccine nationalism/wars, and fear of increased domestic regulation of their activities, has put Chinese tech companies increasingly under pressure to find new frontiers for data extraction. Arab countries offer ideal opportunities not only for Chinese companies to thrive but also for China to pursue a parallel technology regime with its own standards and governance systems that will find a more welcoming embrace than in other countries. This is not because of the claimed compatibility of the region with a Chinese ‘digital authoritarianism’ model but because Arab countries need China’s support to diversify their economies.
Extractive regimes have always been normalised through legal and philosophical frameworks such as settler colonialism’s justification of occupation and exploitation of land and other natural resources on the basis that resources are ‘just out there’ waiting to be exploited. Data extractivism operates within new frameworks, not least of which is the World Bank's logic of ‘bridging digital divides’ as a method for evening disparities between developing and developed countries. Chinese DSR projects further promote their work as operating within a ‘South-South’ cooperation paradigm in which Chinese companies are presented as best placed to support growing economies in countries of the global south based on a shared developing country identity and on the promise of mutual opportunity. However, extractive regimes, data being no exception, are first and foremost based on asymmetrical power relations and practices of dispossession, which need to be at the core of studying the DSR and its position within a global data market.
References:
Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). Data colonialism: Rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. Television & New Media, 20(4), 336-349.
Thatcher J et al. (2026) Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: New metaphors for daily data. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 34(6):990-1006. doi:10.1177/0263775816633195
[1] Speech at BRI Forum for International Cooperation, May 2017. http://2017.beltandroadforum.org/english/n100/2017/0410/c22-45.html
[2] https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/05/08/will-china-control-global-internet-via-its-digital-silk-road-pub-81857
[3] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/chinese-tech-investors-are-turning-towards-mena-heres-why/
[4] https://www.france24.com/en/20190226-egypt-host-huaweis-first-mena-cloud-platform-cairo
[5] https://www.tahawultech.com/region/saudi-arabia/saudi-arabia-inks-deal-with-huawei-on-smart-hajj-tech/amp/
[6] https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/alipay-expands-cooperation-with-dubai-bank-to-cover-85-of-merchants
[7] https://www.tellerreport.com/business/2020-01-24---dubai-is-the-fastest-growing-e-commerce-marketplace-in-the-region-.rJGsaWFOZL.html
[8] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-30/bytedance-backs-dubai-startup-building-logistics-chain-to-china
[9] https://www.dewa.gov.ae/en/about-us/media-publications/latest-news/2021/10/highlevel-delegation-from-huawei
[10] https://meconstructionnews.com/20878/alec-wins-contract-to-build-dubai-airport-data-centre
[11] https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/29otd6mddjpstggdg7vnk/news/huawei-to-build-largest-solar-powered-data-centre-in-the-middle-east
[12] https://www.omanobserver.om/article/1101963/business/economy/chinas-alibaba-to-invest-in-cloud-computing-centre-in-oman
[13] https://www.globalasia.org/v16no4/cover/us-china-rivalry-and-digital-connectivity-in-the-indo-pacific_miyeon-oh
[14] https://www.governmentcontractslaw.com/2019/10/hikvision-dahua-technology-among-28-added-to-entity-list-resulting-in-broad-impact-on-chinese-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-and-facial-recognition-firms/
[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/technology/china-didi-crackdown.html