China’s internet laws are catching on across the world as Washington, US tech giants face ideological battle in budding Southeast Asia

Vietnam and Thailand are among the neighbouring nations warming to a governance model that combines sweeping content curbs with uncompromising data controls – because it helps preserve the regime in power

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People read online news in a cafe in downtown Hanoi. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:18am, 15 Apr 2019Updated: 9:37pm, 15 Apr 2019

Much of the world is adopting China’s vision for a tightly controlled internet over the unfettered American approach, a stunning ideological coup for Beijing that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago.

Vietnam and Thailand are among the Southeast Asian nations warming to a governance model that combines sweeping content curbs with uncompromising data controls – because it helps preserve the regime in power. A growing number of the region’s increasingly autocratic governments watched enviously the emergence of Chinese corporate titans from Tencent to Alibaba – in spite of draconian online curbs. And now they want the same.

The more freewheeling Silicon Valley model once seemed unquestionably the best approach, with stars from Google to Facebook to vouch for its superiority. Now, a remoulding of the internet into a tightly controlled and scrubbed sphere in China’s image is taking place from Russia to India.

But it is Southeast Asia that is the economic and geopolitical linchpin to Chinese ambitions and where US-Chinese tensions will come to a head: a region home to more than half a billion people whose internet economy is expected to triple to US$240 billion by 2025.

“For authoritarian countries in general, the idea of the state being able to wall off to some extent its internet is deeply appealing,” said Howard French, author of the book Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power.