New Silk Roads - Gary Zhexi Zhang - Small and Close or Big and Far Away

Small and Close or Big and Far Away

Gary Zhexi Zhang

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Huawei Cloud Data Center in Guian New Area, 2023. Photo by author.

New Silk Roads
September 2024










Notes
1

“Huawei opens data center in Guian New Area,” Guiyang.gov (English), December 22, 2021, .

2

“Huawei builds data storage center in Guizhou,” Xinhuanet, August 2, 2017, .

3

As said by Lu Yongzheng during the “Guizhou: Carrying forward the spirit of Zunyi Meeting and embarking on a Long March of the new era” event on May 20, 2021, .

4

This phrase and variations on it are Xi Jinping-era trademarks. See: Xinhua, “What to know about China’s high-quality development,” State Council Information Office, People’s Republic of China, March 18, 2024, .

5

“Consul General of Switzerland in Chengdu Visited Guizhou Normal University,” November 19, 2020, .

6

Huanqiu.com, “Guizhou’s super computational power enables the audience to watch the Wandering Earth II ten years in advance,” PR Newswire, March 18, 2023, .

7

Government Guidance funds can be between national banks, local government investment vehicles, and private capital. See: Yifan Wei, Yuen Yuen Ang, and Nan Jia, “The Promise and Pitfalls of Government Guidance Funds in China,” The China Quarterly 256 (2023): 939–59; China.org.cn, “Guizhou: a decade of China’s big data valley,” PRNewswire, October 14, 2022, .

8

Xinhua, “China turns ancient caves into big data treasury,” China Daily, June 3, 2023, .

9

Tim Oakes, ‘“The National New Area as an Infrastructure Space: Urbanization and the New Regime of Circulation in China,”‘ The China Quarterly 255 (September 2023): 162.

10

Tim Oakes, “From Creation City to Infrastructural Urbanism” in Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia, eds. Max Hirsh and Till Mostowlansky (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2023), 159.

11

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

12

Tim Oakes and Zuo Zhenting, “‘Remoteness and Connectivity,” 426, ‘in The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia, eds. Jelle J. P. Wouters and Michael T. Heneise (London: Routledge, 2022).

13

Barry Naughton, ‘“The Third Front: Defence Industrialization in the Chinese Interior,” The China Quarterly 115 (1988): 352. See also Covell F. Meyskens, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 37.

14

Meyskens, Mao’s Third Front, appendix A.2.

15

“Eastern Data Western Calculation,” National Development and Reform Commission, March 7, 2022, .

16

Darcy Pan, ‘“Storing Data on the Margins: Making State and Infrastructure in Southwest China,” Information, Communication & Society 25, no. 16 (December 2022): 2419.

17

Amanda Lee and Mia Nulimaimaiti, “China’s debt-ridden Guizhou faces reckoning after years of splashing out on pricey projects,” South China Morning Post, March 9, 2024, .

18

Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis), “5/5 Just as Guizhou in the past has been the poster child for investment excesses, it is likely in the future to become a model for the way in which much of the Chinese economy will have to adjust from these excesses.” Twitter, March 9, 2024, .