In this latest Strategic Update, Valentin Weber explores Chinese scientific research and industry application of smart cities, with ‘city brains’. The geostrategic implications for these complex Chinese smart city construction projects outside of China – particularly surrounding surveillance and artificial intelligence – and a potential future ‘world digital brain’ must be considered by policymakers, even if we are far away from an eventual bifurcation of the global internet.

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China's smart cities and the future of geopolitics

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 Chinas smart cities and the future of geopolitics

About the author

Dr. Valentin Weber is Associate at LSE IDEAS. He is a Research Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations and holds a PhD in cyber security from the University of Oxford.