An expert on China’s global infrastructure expansion provides an urgent look at the battle to connect and control tomorrow’s networks. From the ocean floor to outer space, China’s Digital Silk Road aims to wire the world and rewrite the global order. Taking readers on a journey inside China’s surveillance state, rural America, and Africa’s megacities, Jonathan Hillman reveals what China’s expanding digital footprint looks like on the ground and explores the economic and strategic consequences of a future in which all routers lead to Beijing. If China becomes the world’s chief network operator, it could reap a commercial and strategic windfall, including many advantages currently enjoyed by the United States. It could reshape global flows of data, finance, and communications to reflect its interests. It could possess an unrivaled understanding of market movements, the deliberations of foreign competitors, and the lives of countless individuals enmeshed in its networks. However, China’s digital dominance is not yet assured. Beijing remains vulnerable in several key dimensions, the United States and its allies have an opportunity to offer better alternatives, and the rest of the world has a voice. But winning the battle for tomorrow’s networks will require the United States to innovate and take greater risks in emerging markets. Networks create large winners, and this is a contest America cannot afford to lose.

DIVDIVFrom China to Facebookistan, the Internet has transformed global commerce. A cyber-law expert argues that we must free Internet trade while simultaneously protecting consumers./div/div

2013 saw the launch of the largest, most influential investment initiative in recent memory: China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This globe-spanning strategy has reshaped local economies and regionals networks, and it has become a contested subject for scholars and practitioners alike. How should we make sense of the complex interactions that the BRI has enabled? Understanding these processes requires truly global perspectives alongside careful attention to the role that local actors play in giving shape to individual BRI projects. The contributions in this volume provide both 'big picture' assessments of China's role in regional and global interactions and detailed case studies that home in on the role agency plays in BRI dynamics. Written by leading area studies scholars with diverse disciplinary expertise, this book reveals how Chinese efforts to recalibrate the world are taken up, challenged, revamped, and reworked in diverse contexts around the world.

The digital transformation is in full swing and fundamentally changes how we live, work, and communicate with each other. From retail to finance, many industries see an inflow of new technologies, disruption through innovative platform business models, and employees struggling to cope with the significant shifts occurring. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is predicted to also transform Logistics and Supply Chain Management, with delivery systems becoming automated, smart networks created everywhere, and data being collected and analyzed universally. The Digital Transformation of Logistics: Demystifying Impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution provides a holistic overview of this vital subject clouded by buzz, hype, and misinformation. The book is divided into three themed-sections: Technologies such as self-driving cars or virtual reality are not only electrifying science fiction lovers anymore, but are also increasingly presented as cure-all remedies to supply chain challenges. In The Digital Transformation of Logistics: Demystifying Impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the authors peel back the layers of excitement that have grown around new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Blockchain or Cloud computing, and show use cases that give a glimpse about the fascinating future we can expect. Platforms that allow businesses to centrally acquire and manage their logistics services disrupt an industry that has been relationship-based for centuries. The authors discuss smart contracts, which are one of the most exciting applications of Blockchain, Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings for freight procurement, where numerous data sources can be integrated and decision-making processes automated, and marine terminal operating systems as an integral node for shipments. In The Digital Transformation of Logistics: Demystifying Impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, insights are shared into the cold chain industry where companies respond to increasing quality demands, and how European governments are innovatively responding to challenges of cross-border eCommerce. People are a vital element of the digital transformation and must be on board to drive change. The Digital Transformation of Logistics: Demystifying Impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution explains how executives can create sustainable impact and how competencies can be managed in the digital age - especially for sales executives who require urgent upskilling to remain relevant. Best practices are shared for organizational culture change, drawing on studies among senior leaders from the US, Singapore, Thailand, and Australia, and for managing strategic alliances with logistics service providers to offset risks and create cross-functional, cross-company transparency. The Digital Transformation of Logistics: Demystifying Impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution provides realistic insights, a ready-to-use knowledge base, and a working vocabulary about current activities and emerging trends of the Logistics industry. Intended readers are supply chain professionals working for manufacturing, trading, and freight forwarding companies as well as students and all interested parties.

A prominent authority on China’s Belt and Road Initiative reveals the global risks lurking within Beijing’s project of the century China’s Belt and Road Initiative is the world’s most ambitious and misunderstood geoeconomic vision. To carry out President Xi Jinping’s flagship foreign-policy effort, China promises to spend over one trillion dollars for new ports, railways, fiber-optic cables, power plants, and other connections. The plan touches more than one hundred and thirty countries and has expanded into the Arctic, cyberspace, and even outer space. Beijing says that it is promoting global development, but Washington warns that it is charting a path to global dominance. Taking readers on a journey to China’s projects in Asia, Europe, and Africa, Jonathan E. Hillman reveals how this grand vision is unfolding. As China pushes beyond its borders and deep into dangerous territory, it is repeating the mistakes of the great powers that came before it, Hillman argues. If China succeeds, it will remake the world and place itself at the center of everything. But Xi may be overreaching: all roads do not yet lead to Beijing.

This book is among the first to systematically analyze and discuss the Chinese government's“One Belt, One Road” initiative to promote infrastructure investment and economic development, bringing together a diverse range of scholars from China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. The book assembles a package of next generation ideas for the patterns of regional trade, investment, infrastructure development, or next steps for the promotion of enhanced policy coordination across the Eurasian continent and strategic implications for EU, Russia and other major powers, introducing innovative ideas about what these countries across belt and road can do together in the eyes of the young generation. This book will be of interest to scholars, economists, and interested observers of the international impact of Chinese development.

This innovative book examines the maritime component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), focusing on three key trade routes and addressing the question of how China protects its overseas assets. Gerald Chan explores China’s rising maritime power, using geo-developmentalism as a theoretical framework to analyse the country’s development of port facilities and infrastructure along important trade routes. Through developing these sea routes, he argues that a new global order is in the making.

The ancient trade routes that made up the Silk Road were some of the great conduits of cultural and material exchange in world history. In this intriguing book, Xinru Liu reveals both why and how this long-distance trade in luxury goods emerged in the late third century BCE, following its story through to the Mongol conquest. Liu starts with China's desperate need for what the Chinese called "the heavenly horses" of Central Asia, and describes how the traders who brought these horses also brought other exotic products, some all the way from the Mediterranean. Likewise, the Roman Empire, as a result of its imperial ambition as well as the desire of its citizens for Chinese silk, responded with easterly explorations for trade. The book shows how the middle men, the Kushan Empire, spread Buddhism to China. Missionaries and pilgrims facilitated cave temples along the mountainous routes and monasteries in various oases and urban centers, forming the backbone of the Silk Road. The author also explains how Islamic and Mongol conquerors in turn controlled the various routes until the rise of sea travel diminished their importance.

The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction is a new look at an ancient subject: the silk road that linked China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean across the expanses of Central Asia. James A. Millward highlights unusual but important biological, technological and cultural exchanges over the silk roads that stimulated development across Eurasia and underpin civilization in our modern, globalized world.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye. It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet. Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.