AI Export and Digital Silk Road: A Comparative Analysis of China’s Influences on Digital Economies and Geopolitics across Southeast Asia

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.