China's Belt and Road Initiative contains an effort to create a Digital Silk Road that will allow it to shape the future of the global Internet and reinforce the Communist Party of China's leadership at home for decades to come. Other nations such as Zimbabwe have or are looking to acquire Chinese information and communication technologies (ICT) and integrate them into their national infrastructures, opening up potential opportunities for abuse.
China's efforts to advance and proliferate its ICT hardware and systems, both in China and overseas, represent not only a desire to continually expand its economy, but also to push to establish, expand, internationalize, and institutionalize a model for digital governance that this reports describes as "digital authoritarianism."
