Discourse as infrastructure: How “New Infrastructure” policies re-infrastructure China

Abstract

The term “New Infrastructure” has been highlighted in China’s recent policies. It refers to a set of new, and expanding, policies and the discourse surrounding them which support the development of facilities, equipment, and systems derived from the latest technologies, including 5G Internet of Things, AI, cloud computing, and data centers. This article reviews China’s New Infrastructure policies, analyzing their specific discursive ontologies and how they relate to major state projects to “re-infrastructure” China’s economy. It introduces the concept of “discursive infrastructure” and argues that the policies that redefine and recategorize infrastructure themselves serve as a form of infrastructure. Key to the concept is the recognition that discursive infrastructure relies on mutually constitutive material and semiotic dimensions and dialectically reproduces both symbols of progress and positive infrastructural imaginaries. Drawing on an analysis of policy documents and other discursive materials, the article tracks New Infrastructure’s fetish-like existence and unravels the multiple political modalities, as well their varying efficacies, that are manifested through the discursive publics they generate. It likewise reveals some emerging conflicts that appear across New Infrastructure’s different contexts, showing critical gaps between imaginaries and actualities, all of which have a profound effect on a re-infrastructured China.

Infrastructural capitalism in China: Alibaba, its corporate culture and three infrastructural mechanisms

“…Michael Mann argues that the modern state 'penetrates everyday life more than any historical state, and that the state's infrastructural power has increased enormously' (Mann, 1984, p. 189). Underlying these 'progressive' infrastructural projects, there are discursive dynamics synching nationalistic sentiments and neoliberal market values togethera blend of political power and economic force in the making of global infrastructural capitalism, as also exemplified in other capitalist and post-socialist societies (Biao and Lindquist, 2014;Larkin, 2013;Rao, 2023). Multi-scalar and multi-faceted operation of capitals notwithstanding, as a mode of production, infrastructural capitalism serves a totality encompassing both the concrete infrastructures of roads, cities, plants and buildings, electrical grids, high-speed railways, logistics transportation, computer servers and cabled telecommunications networks (Cubitt, 2014) with itself linked to extractive capital in China and overseas, and their intersections with digital infrastructures of E-commerce, banking and financial systems, social and digital platform economy, and internal communication that increasingly take advantage of the physical as well as human infrastructures, discursively control the economic, social and affective lives of individuals, families and communities.…”