The Digital Silk Road (DSR) is usually described as the digital component of the Belt and Road Initiative that is reshaping the digital world order. Most existing research is concerned with the possible long-term consequences of the DSR rather than on what the DSR encompasses, how it developed and how it has changed since it was announced in 2015. We address this gap by reconstructing the origins of the DSR within China, with a focus on both rhetoric and concrete plans as they developed between central and provincial actors. We collected and analysed a corpus of 31 national and 130 provincial DSR-related plans. In contrast to prevailing views of the DSR as a unified, outward-facing strategy, we show that after an initial surge of related documents, the central government ceased to discuss the DSR in a meaningful way. Provincial governments then appropriated its rhetoric to legitimize their own digitization agendas, including upgrading infrastructure in poorer provinces and remaining plugged into export markets for those with an IT industry. Rather than reshaping the digital world order, the DSR has been appropriated by some provincial governments to attempt, mostly unsuccessfully, to shore up their own digital ambitions.

In 2015, President Xi Jinping proclaimed the principle of the Sinicization of religions. Since then, it has become the Communist Party's guiding thought in religious governance. However, so far little is known about how it is perceived by everyday religious practitioners, especially Christians. Based on textual analysis of speeches and writings by leaders of the Catholic Church in China, and 50 in-depth interviews with Catholic practitioners from the mainland and Hong Kong, this paper examines how Catholics (en)counter the public transcript created by the state. Church leaders at the national level publicly embrace Sinicization and appropriate the Church's teaching on inculturation, another transcript, as its justification. However, the everyday practitioners interviewed for this study refused to embrace this discourse. Instead, they adopted one of three discursive strategies: rejection, evasion and empathy. All fell short of endorsing the state's discourse. The findings suggest that the Church's transcript enables Catholic practitioners to critically (en)counter the state's transcript.