Abstract

Undergirding China’s Belt and Road Initiative’s lofty promise of global connectivity are existing connections between the PRC’s implementation of planetary-scale observation systems for environmental sustainability and the recognizably nefarious policies of localized, colonial surveillance of Turkic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). My article examines how the recently alleged genocide in XUAR becomes the afflicted topos where both the rhetoric and practices of monitoring differently complex systems come together. Such complex connections require a recursive analysis, one which further distinguishes between recursion as an actual technique used in remote sensing and algorithmic processes and recursion as a heuristic in discourses about these computational processes and their effects on controlled populations and territories. This article, following recent interest in the intersections of geopolitics, computational design, digital capitalism and colonialism, argues that the Chinese government’s multipronged investments in environmental sciences-related sensing and imaging technologies do not simply help track its own citizens and foreign populations but also how these groups are increasingly monitored by them. I examine how the Digital Belt and Road’s Science Plan frames the environment, including sovereign territories, peoples, and natural resources as data assets. The rest of my discussion turns away from state-sponsored Earth sciences to examine Anglophone media and human rights groups’ use of satellite imageries and databases to evidence the state’s construction of internment facilities and other surveillance mechanisms in XUAR. Alleged algorithms of oppression enclose the XUAR as a black box of the police state, but digital infographic interfaces like the Xinjiang Data Project, which attempts to expose the PRC’s relegation of Uyghurs to biometric and surveillance data, only furthers a recursive datafication of XUAR.