Welcome to Silicon Roads

Silicon Roads aims to document and analyse the trends that are shaping China's digital economy. Looking beyond the hype around emerging technologies and startup fundraising, we want to explore the bigger picture around where Chinese technology development is heading and the kind of economy it is building.

Our content

Silicon Road's analysis deep-dives look into specific aspects of the digital economy to draw connections between the complex systems that shape the Chinese technology industry.

Our long-form reports explore further into specific industries or technologies to measure, quantify and assess the reality behind hype and media interest.

We also release a weekly round-up of news stories, analysis and reporting from publications around the web. By linking this content broader long-term thinking and trends, we want to help provide context behind the headlines. While much of the content we recommend is in English, we also aim to help introduce ideas from untranslated Chinese by summarising takeaways from new regulations, reports and articles.  

We take an experimental approach to content and are exploring the best ways to communicate our analysis. Currently, this includes exploring possibilities around an audio offering and increasing the quality and variety of our reports.

Our goal is to make the majority of our content available for free. People who want to support us in our mission to document the digital economy can purchase a membership that grants them access to full-reports and exclusive additional content.

About Benedict Altier

Hi I'm Benedict and I live in London, United Kingdom. I am passionate about China, and in particular its business and technology ecosystems.

I do not claim to be any kind of expert, but instead spend an inordinate amount of time reading everything and anything I can get my hands on from the world of Chinese tech. While living in Beijing, I immersed myself into the startup scene travelling around China to meet entrepreneurs, innovators and developers to learn more about how China does technology. I also worked at two technology startups which gave me first-hand experience of Chinese startup culture. This led me to write my dissertation on Chinese blockchain governance and the relationship between the public and private sector in technology regulation and development.

On Silicon Roads I use my experiences to curate China experts and industry leaders' best ideas and provide supplementary commentary and analysis. I always welcome any feedback or contributions, so if you can help to make Silicon Roads better, please get in touch!