The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace, reviewed

We look at the latest book by Winston Ma, published by Wiley here. It provides a topical analysis of digital relations between China and the US, all the more timely after the recent terse encounter between both countries in Alaska.

The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace, reviewed

We found Winston Ma’s previous book about China and it’s mobile economy useful and informative. This time around he updates us about how things have evolved and moved on even more in the five years since he wrote that book. The final AI versus human battles in the world of the ancient game of Go are also covered. Though by this stage the AI made it a clean sweep against the best that humanity could offer, and won easily 3 – 0. This match was hosted in a small town in China, and was a clear demonstration of how far AI had come. Similarly for blockchain technologies, Chinese companies dominate the list for the most now patents and blockchain related technologies.

Ma’s book is a comprehensive overview of what is happening in terms of the development of Chinese tech. His use of the word ‘splinter net’ is well chosen, and could very much be an accurate description of what we may come to see more and more of in the future. If you want to be better informed about the juggernaut that is the footprint of China upon the world, then this is a timely and extremely useful book to read. We found it useful and would recommend it to others.

More about the book

What new directions in China’s digital economy mean for us all

China is the largest homogenous digital market on Earth: unified by language, culture, and mobile payments. Not only a consumer market of unrivaled size, it’s also a vast and hyperactive innovation ecosystem for new technologies. And as China’s digital economy moves from a consumer-focused phase to an enterprise-oriented one, Chinese companies are rushing to capitalize on ways the newer wave of tech—the Internet of Things, AI, blockchain, cloud computing, and data analytics (iABCD)—can unlock value for their businesses from non-traditional angles.

In China’s Data Economy, Winston Ma—investment professional, capital markets attorney, adjunct professor of digital economy, and bestselling author—details the profound global implications of this new direction, including how Chinese apps for services such as food delivery expand so quickly they surpass their U.S. models within a couple of years, and how the sheer scale and pace of Chinese innovation might lead to an AI arms race in which China and the U.S. vie aggressively for leadership.

• How China’s younger netizens participate in their evolving digital economy as consumers, creators, and entrepreneurs
• Why Online/Office (OMO, Online-merge-with-Offline) integration is viewed as the natural next step on from the O2O (Online-to-Offline) model used in the rest of the world
• The ways in which traditional Chinese industries such as retail, banking, and insurance are innovating to stay in the game
• What emerging markets can learn from China as they leapfrog past the personal computer age altogether, diving straight into the mobile-first economy

Anyone interested in what’s next for Chinese digital powerhouses—investors, governments, entrepreneurs, international business players—will find this an essential guide to what lies ahead as China’s flexes new digital muscles to create new forms of value and challenge established tech giants across the world.

More about the author

WINSTON MA is an investor, attorney, author and adjunct professor in the global digital economy. Most recently for 10 years, he was Managing Director and Head of North America Office for China Investment Corporation (CIC), China’s sovereign wealth fund. Prior to that, he served as the deputy head of equity capital markets at Barclays Capital, a vice president at J.P. Morgan investment banking, and a corporate lawyer at Davis Polk. He is the author of the best-selling books including Investing in China (2006), China’s Mobile Economy (2016) and The Hunt for Unicorns (2020). Winston was selected as a 2013 Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum and in 2014 he received the NYU Distinguished Alumni Award.

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