Reading Beijing in Beijing’s own words
China writes its digital future in Chinese — cybersecurity laws, data-governance regulations, artificial-intelligence plans. DigiChina exists to make those documents legible to English-speaking policymakers, journalists, and analysts. It is a collaborative research project, currently housed at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, whose core method is translation plus expert context: Chinese-language primary sources rendered into English and analyzed by a network of specialists.
The project dates to about 2017, when it began at the think tank New America under founding coordinating editor Graham Webster. In June 2019 it moved to Stanford, where it now sits within the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance at the Cyber Policy Center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. New America remains a partner, alongside the Leiden Asia Centre. The New America and Stanford incarnations are one continuing project, not two institutions.
What it produces
DigiChina’s published output, all open access at digichina.stanford.edu, includes:
- Translations and analysis of China’s cybersecurity and data-governance regime — the project’s early focus.
- A translation of the State Council’s New Generation AI Development Plan.
- A February 2023 translation of the “Plan for the Overall Layout of Building a Digital China.”
- Deep-dive reports, for example on cross-border data flows.
- The DigiChina Digest newsletter, published since September 2018 in partnership with the Leiden Asia Centre.
Its method is a cross-organization contributor network — scholars and analysts including Rogier Creemers, Samm Sacks, Paul Triolo, Shazeda Ahmed, and others — translating and analyzing laws, regulations, published commentaries, and corporate strategies. Support has included the Harvard–MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative.
How to read it
DigiChina’s corpus is curated, not exhaustive. What gets translated reflects the editorial judgment of its contributor network; it is a selection of significant documents with expert commentary, not a complete archive of Chinese digital-policy texts. It is also commentary and translation — qualitative and curated — not a structured dataset. Read it as a window onto the documents its editors judged most important, and check what was left out before treating any single translation as the whole picture.
The project’s exact founding date is not established — no formal launch announcement has been located — and is given here as approximately 2017 on the strength of the founder’s own timeline. No Chinese name for the project has been located.
Using DigiChina in research
DigiChina is the site’s primary English-language source for Chinese digital-policy texts: the Cybersecurity Law, the AI plan, the Digital China plan, data-governance regulations. Cite the translation alongside the original Chinese title where possible, and attribute the analysis to the project rather than treating translated commentary as primary text. For the site’s digital-governance pages, DigiChina is the anchor for AI, data-governance, and cybersecurity-law evidence.