China is building data exchanges, exporting governance via Digital Silk Road, and treating data as a national asset

TL;DR China treats data as a factor of production, not a privacy right or corporate asset, and is building economic infrastructure around it: regulated data exchanges, 30+ new standards expected in 2026, and a Digital Silk Road that exports governance frameworks alongside telecommunications hardware to developing countries. The EU spent a decade making the GDPR a global benchmark for data protection, but China’s model offers something Brussels cannot: the roads, cables, data centres, and exchanges needed to make a data economy work. The country that builds the infrastructure may set the standard. The European Union treats data as a privacy…