ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Economy
AI Export and Digital Silk Road: A Comparative Analysis of China's Influences on Digital Economies and Geopolitics across Southeast Asia
Provisionally accepted
- University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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There is a lack of original research investigating the relationships between China's artificial intelligence (AI) exports and their possible impacts on strengthening Digital Silk Road (DSR) co-operation. This paper first studies the distribution of China's AI export projects to Southeast Asian countries (2006–2017) and then examines whether larger Southeast Asian AI importers were more active DSR partners (2018–2020). The analysis, drawing on data from the China's AI Exports Database (CAIED), the IISS China Connects, and the World Bank Open Data , employs a robust panel data methodology incorporating lagged explanatory variables and clustered standard errors to mitigate issues of heteroscedasticity and auto-correlation. Findings suggest that Southeast Asian countries importing AI technologies from China between 2006 and 2017 had not been statistically more DSR active between 2018 and 2020. Instead, the paper finds a positive impact that country-level economic freedom is a highly significant contributing factor to being an active DSR partner. This study enhances transparency in the dynamics of China's digital geopolitics by highlighting economic competitiveness as the primary driver of DSR partnerships, rather than prior AI import history.
Keywords: Belt-and-road initiative, Digital Silk Road Initiative, China, digital economy, digital geopolitics
Received: 13 Aug 2025; Accepted: 11 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hung. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jason Hung
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