Mapping continental ambitions

Southeast Asia is home to many of China’s most high-profile Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, including Kyakpyu port in Myanmar, a high-speed railway in northern Laos, and now-stalled rail and pipeline projects in Malaysia. While these physical infrastructure projects have attracted widespread attention, China’s involvement in the region’s digital infrastructure has been far less examined despite holding the potential to have even greater strategic importance in the coming years.

Southeast Asia’s rapidly growing economies, buoyed by young populations living in some of the world’s most digitized societies, offer tremendous business opportunities for information and ...

Officially, a central purpose of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is to promote sustainable development. According to Chinese state media portrayals of the BRI’s objectives, “China is building a green ‘Belt and Road’ to protect the green ...