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 The Digital War, 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.
Table of Contents
Foreword The Digital War to End War by Anthony Scaramucci xiii
Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments xvii
About the Author xxi
Preface xxiii
Part One From “Mobile Economy” to “Digital Economy” 1
Chapter 1 China’s Leap into 5G iABCD 3
Chapter 2 The World’s Largest Mobile Economy 43
Part Two China’s Digital Transformation and Innovation 71
Chapter 3 Big Data on the Digital Middle Class 73
Chapter 4 The AI-powered Internet Celebrities and Fans Economy 105
Chapter 5 The Heartland of Blockchain and Fintech 143
Chapter 6 O2O and the Shared Economy 178
Chapter 7 From C2C to 2CC: “Innovated in China” 210
Chapter 8 Land of Big Data and Its Legal Framework 241
Part Three Shared Digital Future 271
Chapter 9 The Tech Cold War 273
Chapter 10 The Silk Road in Cyberspace 301
Bibliography 333
China’s Digital Innovation Challenges US Tech Supremacy 355
Index 357
