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China builds digital infrastructure in Southeast Asia but fails to set governance rules: Report

Digital Desk | New Delhi, Sep 15 (IANS) China has become a dominant supplier of digital hardware across Southeast Asia, but the recipient regional governments are largely writing their own rules for cybersecurity and artificial intelligence rather than adopting Beijings governance model, a new report has said. The report from Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) said that Chinese hardware is widespread but Chinese rules are not, adding that this situation will only remain so if there are alternative options to rely on. Across Southeast Asia, Chinese firms have laid fiber-optic cable, built smart-city platforms, supplied 5G networks, and even donated laptops to defense ministries but countries enforce technical standards and AI governance models largely from Europe. Indonesias cybersecurity agencies enforce technical standards developed in Geneva. The Philippines modeled its data privacy law on European regulation. Malaysias approach to artificial intelligence borrows from U.N. principles and regional frameworks, the report noted. The publication argued that the United States could lose the digital contest in Southeast Asia surely if it assumes Beijing has already won. Chinas Digital Silk Road (DSR), the technological arm of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has spread Chinese-built networks, surveillance systems, and cloud infrastructure across the developing world, the report noted. The DSR aims to export both Chinas technology and its preferred norms, to set the rules of digital governance proven by Beijings own Chinese-language framing of the initiative. However, Southeast Asian governments are taking Beijings hardware while writing their own rulebooks, drawing from European regulation, UN norms, regional frameworks, and their own political traditions. The report argued that Chinese norms are essentially absent in the cybersecurity domain. Indonesia anchors its cybersecurity guidance in ISO 27001, the international standard for information security management, where banks follow central bank regulations and fintech firms answer to the financial services authority. Once a countrys banks, telecoms, and certification regimes run on ISO and Western frameworks, the switching costs are prohibitive, and every new regulation layers on top of the old ones, the report noted.