The second summit of the Belt and Road Initiative concluded this week amid great fanfare in Beijing. Headlines proclaimed BRI’s inexorable expansion to new countries and China’s growing footprint. But it was the ‘Digital Silk Road’ project – one of 12 subthemes discussed at the summit – that could prove to be a game changer.

While the US keeps issuing warnings about the espionage risks of using Chinese 5G network equipment and the security threat posed by Huawei devices, China’s telecom infrastructure projects keep growing. Despite the lamentations of a Cassandra-like Washington, Huawei and ZTE are acquiring access to larger markets making an end run around their Western rivals. Less visible than ports and railways of BRI, China’s expanding control over the world’s digital communications networks would give Beijing unparalleled influence. Its growing clout in surveillance tech, combined with its lead in developing superfast 5G, promises to make China a global tech challenger to the US. This significant development comes despite repeated American warnings that it might reconsider sharing sensitive intelligence with allies that allow Huawei to build 5G networks in their countries. Even the UK, which as a member of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing group (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) once supported a tough stand against Huawei, has now decided to allow the firm to build parts of its 5G network. Major BRI partners don’t even have an option: they are required to use only Chinese 5G suppliers, which hold 36% of all 5G patents worldwide.

Ever since the Digital Silk Road was launched in 2017, China has begun building up an “information expressway” of fibre optic cable links to Myanmar, Nepal and Kyrgyzstan. It plans to connect Africa to China by laying cables across the ocean from Pakistan which is being linked to China through its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. China has offered help to countries as far away as Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to advance cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence (AI). China’s advance as a digital connector and leading provider of 5G technology – which would form the backbone of autonomous vehicles, facial recognition technology, and AI – to an ever-growing number of developing countries raises the possibility that Chinese-style surveillance states will proliferate. Its ongoing efforts to harness AI to master big data and its ability to harvest vast amounts of such data from connected countries would give Beijing greater political influence than by merely constructing trade and transportation hubs.

The export of surveillance technology would also add to the appeal of China’s authoritarian political model and its iron-fisted internet governance style. Zambia, which entrusted China with building its internet infrastructure from ground up, has already parted from its former tradition of free press and censored dissidence. Recent revelations by Human Rights Watch about how a Chinese mobile phone app has been developed to exercise “Big Brother” like control over the entire population of Xinjiang offered a real-life demonstration of China’s digital prowess. China’s advanced facial recognition technology has also been deployed to track, monitor and apprehend suspected dissidents. Similarly, a New York Times investigation uncovered a surveillance system manufactured by Huawei and a state-backed Chinese company being used in Ecuador to track individuals through their mobile phones. According to NYT, similar Chinese-systems are already being used in Venezuela, Bolivia, Angola and a dozen other countries.

For years now, China’s Great Firewall has demonstrated its ruthless efficiency in cutting off its internet from the outside world making irritating international news services and social media platforms disappear from China’s web. Though China loftily describes its Digital Silk Road as a “community of common destiny in cyberspace”, its growing control over the cyberspace – its own and that of its partners – would in fact allow Beijing to bend that common destiny towards the interests of its one-party rule.