Digital Silk Road

The Chinese market is undergoing rapid digital transformation. In The Digital Silk Road, Winston Ma offers investors, entrepreneurs, and all students of international business an essential guide to China's new economy. Based primarily on technological innovation and domestic consumption-and less on government-led capital expenditure and the import-export business-China's new economy is driven by the world's largest group of Internet users, smart devices, mobile applications, and social networks. China's 'digital middle class,' around 300 million people, is roughly equivalent to the size of the entire U.S. population. Many of these users have bypassed the use of personal computers and leapfrogged directly to a 'mobile first' economy. They readily adopt new mobile apps, shop and bank online, and participate in new forms of entertainment that blur distinctions between cultural production and consumption. The 'creative destruction' of older economic sectors is a hallmark of digitization everywhere, but the transformation is occurring in China much more quickly and on a larger scale. The Digital Silk Road provides an invaluable introduction to China's new growth story.