Making the China Data Valley – The National Integrated Big Data Centre System and Local Governance

Abstract

As a core part of the New Infrastructure Project, China officially launched the National Integrated Big Data Centre System (NIBDCS) in 2022. As part of the “West Computes Data for East” initiative, the NBDCS is a national digital governing infrastructure that includes eight National Data Hubs hosted by ten National Data Centre Clusters. This article examines the Guizhou Hub – one of the earliest established National Data Hubs and where China’s first National Big Data Pilot Zone is located. The research takes an infrastructural perspective and reveals how contingent alignments, including the central state’s initiatives, local government’s role, and corporations like Apple and Alibaba, have come to negotiate, collaborate, and compromise in sustainable arrangements, and eventually bring about Guizhou Hub. The research shows that the grand strategies envisioned and supported by the central state are not enough; localising technological infrastructures requires key local leaders with business and political networks, and mechanisms of state–commercial complexes where intimate partnerships among governmental entities, state-owned enterprises, and private corporations are established, and mutual interests are achieved. This process is conditioned by a “frame of locality” and requires scholarly attention to a local perspective of infrastructural developments.