Digital State Capitalism: A Game-Theoretic Perspective on Global Data Governance in Flux

The explosion of data has become a principal driver of wealth creation, unsettling the regulatory equilibria underlying global data governance. This seminar theorises China’s governing logic as digital state capitalism (DSC), a mode of statecraft in which the party-state instrumentalises the digital economy to reconcile accumulation with national security and social control. It treats DSC as a strategic actor within a shifting global game, exported via the Digital Silk Road as a payoff-maximising move within Belt and Road digital ecosystems.

Examining how China’s expanding digital infrastructure footprint shapes Africa’s social, economic, and political landscapes, Prof. Bu argues that African jurisdictions are not passive rule-takers but strategic players negotiating equilibria of their own — an original contribution to the theory of “African Agency” under Agenda 2063. The talk asks whether this trajectory supports or constrains the continent’s prospects for a more democratic and sustainable digital economic transformation.

Treating digital technology as non-neutral and ideologically encoded, the study draws on securitisation theory and game-theoretic modelling to expose how DSC’s “invisible” ideological architecture conditions state choice and outcome. Preliminary findings suggest several African states are calibrating privacy, sovereignty, and security norms to DSC-compatible templates, evidencing path dependency and asymmetric bargaining power as structural features of the game. Amid the continued absence of global consensus on cross-border data rules, the seminar contends that existing governance frameworks are inadequate to this strategic terrain, and proposes a game-theoretic foundation for a new architecture of global data governance — one capable of reconciling an open internet with the competing imperatives of privacy, security, and sovereignty.