Steering at China’s Periphery: Tech-Poor Provinces and International Digitalization Ambitions

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, including its digital dimension, the Digital Silk Road (DSR), is often studied either top-down as ‘grand strategy’ or bottom-up from the perspective of sub-national agency. Applying political steering theory, this article examines tech-poor sub-national governments that operate within, rather than deviate from, central parameters. Through an interpretive policy analysis of Guangxi and Ningxia, this article argues that these regions developed international digitalization initiatives that, using the DSR for legitimization, absorb and evolve in line with successive Five-Year Plan priorities. It proposes the term ‘anchoring steering instrument’ to describe how these regions, as both steering subjects and objects, capture the DSR as a soft steering instrument to build an ‘anchoring’ platform, which expands and accumulates as it aligns with central steering.