To promote interdisciplinary dialogue and deepen theoretical and empirical research on digital infrastructure and local high-quality development, the “2026 International Conference on Digital Infrastructure and Local High-Quality Development” will be held on July 18–19, 2026, in Huaxi District, Guiyang, Guizhou Province, China.

The conference is jointly organized by the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University and the School of Media at Guizhou University, and hosted by the School of Media at Guizhou University. It focuses on the practices of digital and data infrastructure in contemporary China and their profound impacts on regional development and social life.

Scholars from around the world are warmly invited to submit conference papers and panel proposals.

Keynote Speakers (Listed Alphabetically):

·Bingchun Meng 

　Director, LSE PhD Academy and ESRC Doctoral Training Centre

　Professor, Department of Media and Communications

　London School of Economics and Political Science

·Jack Linchuan Qiu

　Chair and Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology

　Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

　Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

·Miao Lu 

　Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies

　Lingnan University

·Timothy Oakes 

　Professor, Department of Geography

　University of Colorado Boulder

·Tung-Hui Hu 

　Associate Professor of English, University of Michigan. Author of A Prehistory of the Cloud: The Shape of the Network (2015) and Digital Lethargy (2022).

·Yong Hu 

　Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University

Guest Discussants:

·Yu Luo 

　Associate Professor, Sociology & Anthropology

　Suzanne Wilson Barnett Chair in Contemporary China Studies

　University of Puget Sound

·Yu Hong 

　Professor, College of Media and International Culture

　Zhejiang University

·Hong Zhang 

　Associate Professor, College of Media and International Culture

　Zhejiang University

·Hongzhe Wang 

　Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University

·Jinhe Liu 

　Researcher, School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University

·Kevin Ziyu Liu 

　Associate Professor, School of Communication, Guizhou University

Conference Purpose

Digital and data infrastructures have long been recognized as the foundational substrate underpinning modern economic and social life. The global digital “cloud” system relies upon vast physical networks—submarine fiber-optic cables, Internet exchange points, and data centers—that carry the overwhelming majority of communication traffic, yet seldom enter public visibility. Existing scholarship has shown that these systems are characterized simultaneously by profound materiality and a distinctive elusiveness, organizing human communication, memory, and economic life at a planetary scale (Starosielski 2015a, 2015b; Larkin 2013).

In contemporary China, digital infrastructure has become deeply intertwined with the national agenda of “high-quality development.” Within policy frameworks such as “Digital China” and “digital ecological civilization,” it bears multiple state narratives, including industrial upgrading, smart governance, rural revitalization, and regional rebalancing. Initiatives such as the “Digital Countryside” extend “Internet+” services into rural areas in an effort to bridge the urban–rural digital divide; in October 2023, China’s National Data Administration was formally established.As Rippa and Oakes (2023) argue, infrastructure in this context is not merely a passive tool of policy; it actively reshapes territorial configurations, forms of citizenship, and scalar relations.

Yet conceptual frameworks and empirical research capable of adequately capturing the Chinese experience remain scarce. The largely invisible digital infrastructures—especially those heavily concentrated in China’s interior regions—raise critical questions: how do they mediate between the state’s digitalization vision and the everyday experiences of local communities? Indeed, as Rippa and Oakes (2023) note, “China’s own ‘infrastructural turn’ remains understudied” (549). This conference responds directly to that call by placing China’s large-scale infrastructural practices at the center of theoretical inquiry, rather than treating them as belated footnotes to Euro-American experience.

We focus particularly on the visibility and invisibility of digital infrastructure, and on the “structures of feeling” that emerge in regions positioned at the technological frontier. Understanding China’s digital modernization requires moving beyond examining how data centers are built and governed; it also demands attention to how they are perceived, lived, and imagined—as spaces imbued with hope, anxiety, pride, or dispossession. By foregrounding inland regions, the conference seeks to challenge the persistent cognitive equation of “the rural with backwardness” and “modernization with the coast,” asking instead: how are digital infrastructures reshaping the social textures and affective geographies of national development?

Conference Theme

In the Cloud: On the In/visibility of Infrastructure

Infrastructure derives much of its power precisely from its simultaneous visibility and invisibility. Star (1999) identified “visible upon breakdown” as one of the core characteristics of infrastructure, while Larkin (2013) observes pipes, cables, and roads typically recede into the background, intervening most forcefully in social life when they malfunction or become sites of contestation. Parks and Starosielski (2015) likewise argue that contemporary communication systems depend upon dense technological and logistical facilities that, though largely unseen, serve as crucial nodes of cultural and political power. Research on data centers and the “cloud” extends these insights into the digital realm, anchoring the seemingly immaterial cloud in concrete material sites, energy regimes, and labor relations (Hu 2015; Reading and Notley 2015), thereby challenging dominant narratives of data dematerialization (Vonderau 2019; Velkova and Plantin 2023).

Drawing these threads together, we contend that China’s digital infrastructure should be understood as a sociotechnical formation whose invisibility itself carries political effects. Who holds authority over the governance of data center clusters? How do secrecy and technological abstraction shape public discourse about modernization? Highly visible systems such as health codes and facial recognition coexist with opaque back-end infrastructures, together weaving the everyday experience of digitalization.

Inland Modernization: Place and People

For the first four decades of reform and opening, China’s modernization narrative was largely a coastal performance: special economic zones, export corridors, and megacities along the seaboard formed its most emblematic stage. Today, however, the spotlight has shifted toward vast inland regions—through big data industrial zones, computing power hubs, and smart-city pilots—posing a sharp conceptual challenge: how should these projects be understood within narratives of Chinese modernity? Rather than habitually viewing inland development as a delayed replica or spatial extension of coastal models, we must interrogate its distinct dynamics.

As initiatives such as “Eastern Data, Western Computing” advance an inland turn, western provinces have been designated as national computing power hubs, hosting energy- and land-intensive infrastructures that sustain nationwide data flows. Guizhou, for example, has rapidly emerged as a major national big data center hub, leading the country in digital-economy growth while simultaneously generating a range of localized tensions.Yet, aside from a small body of scholarship (Oakes 2022; Meng 2025; Pan 2022; Liu 2024, 2025), this profound transformation remains largely understudied.

These developments prompt further questions: how are inland regions repackaged as “technological frontiers” in policy discourse and popular imagination? To what extent do they function as “back-end supply zones” for coastal regions, and to what extent do they become sites of innovation and digital sovereignty in their own right? How do the grand promises of “modernization” and “high-quality development” intersect with local histories of marginalization, resource extraction, and uneven development—and what kinds of lived emotional experiences emerge among those who live and work in newly infrastructuralized landscapes?

Digitalization, Governance, and Structures of Feeling

Following Raymond Williams, we understand “structures of feeling” as shared, emergent affective dispositions through which people experience historical change before it crystallizes into institutions or explicit ideologies. Digital and data infrastructures are generating such structures of feeling in communities that host data centers, supply labor, or experience smart governance: enthusiasm or ambivalence toward promised futures, pride or resentment regarding regional transformation, excitement or fatigue amid continual upgrading.

We thus invite research addressing questions such as: how do residents, workers, officials, and entrepreneurs in inland regions narrate their place within China’s digital future? What everyday practices and sensory encounters shape affective ties between place and the digital? When digital projects fail to fulfill their promises, what forms of public controversy, silent resistance, or creative appropriation emerge? Our central concern is to examine how digital infrastructure becomes woven into the fabric of everyday life, how it carries expectations of the future, and how it shapes shared—or highly fragmented—structures of feeling surrounding China’s digital modernization.

Themes and Questions

We welcome submissions grounded in and extending the above discussion, addressing (but not limited to) the following themes:

· In/visibility and Representation: How do state, corporate, and media narratives render digital infrastructures visible—or keep them hidden? And what are the political stakes? What role do secrecy, security, and technical abstraction play in shaping public understanding?

· Infrastructure and Regional Modernization: How do digital infrastructures redistribute power between coastal and inland regions, urban and rural areas? How do promises of computing power and connectivity translate—or fail to translate—into local development?

· Place-Making and Technological Frontiers: How are locales branded as sites of technology—and with what consequences for land, labor, environment? How do these processes shape social imaginaries of digital futures?

· Labor and Everyday Life: What forms of labor sustain digital infrastructures, and how are they distributed? How do infrastructures reshape migration patterns, daily routines, and aspirations in regions undergoing digital-led modernization?

· Governance and Data Regimes: How do data infrastructures reconfigure local governance practices and state-society relations? What forms of publics or contestation emerge around infrastructure siting, environmental impacts, or surveillance?

· Historicized and Decentered Research on Data Centers: How are data and digital infrastructures embedded within the long-term historical processes of regional development? In what ways do they intertwine with political, economic, cultural, and ecological forces? And how do earlier waves of revolution and construction in inland regions—such as the Third Front movement, hydropower development, and ecological development—continue to exert influence on contemporary processes of digital transformation?

Submission Guidelines

We accept:  

·Paper abstracts (500 words)

·Panel proposals (5 papers max, 2500 words total, inclusive of individual paper abstracts and panel description)

In your submission, please also include:  

·Author name(s) and affiliation;

·Contact email.  

We especially welcome:  

·Scholars working with Chinese-language materials;

·Early-career researchers, including doctoral students;

·Fieldwork or archival research on specific inland sites or projects;

·Work from media/communication studies, STS, geography, anthropology, historical sociology, environmental humanities;

·Comparative perspectives linking inland China to other global peripheries.

Conference Languages: English and Chinese. Papers may be presented in either language.

Publication Plans: Selected papers will be considered for a peer-reviewed edited volume or journal special issue.

Approximately 30 papers (or six panels) will be selected for presentation. Remote or online presentations are not available. The submission is now open. Submission deadline is April 30, 2026, Beijing time. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by email shortly.

Please submit your paper abstract or panel proposal to: infraguizhou2026@163.com.

Convener: Hongzhe Wang, School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University; Kevin Ziyu Liu, School of Communication, Guizhou University.

Conference Details

·Organizers: School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University; School of Communication, Guizhou University

·Host: School of Communication, Guizhou University

·Date: July 18–19, 2026

·Venue: Four Points by Sheraton, Shilihetan Resort Area, Huaxi District, Guiyang, Guizhou Province, China.

·Preconference Screening:

·Film screening: Zike He, Random Access (2023);

·Guest Speakers: Zike He, Artist; Iris Xingru Long, writer and independent curator

·Fieldwork Sites: Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province (including locations associated with the “Village Super League” or “Village BA,” as well as grassroots integrated media centers). Detailed information will be released after the announcement of accepted papers.

·Fees and Accommodation: No registration fee will be charged. The conference will cover one night of accommodation during the conference period for one author of each accepted paper. All additional accommodation expenses and round-trip travel costs are to be borne by participants.