The questions raised in this project are: Why does the discourse of Tianxia resurface in the 21st century along with the “Peaceful Rise” of China, and how does it prefigure the map of the BRI? What are the material logistics and infrastructure of Tianxia 2.0, how do they impact geopolitical power relations, and what are the driving forces behind this perspective?
This project examines how China, in the 21st century, has revived the concept of Tianxia and explores how the Tianxia vision, characterized by political rhetoric such as “One World, One Family” and “Harmonious Coexistence,” aligns with the development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Like an expansive network, the BRI encompasses comprehensive coverage across land, sea, cyberspace, and outer space. The discourse of “Tianxia,” which includes all realms under the heavens, serves as the guiding principle for the logistics of the BRI’s infrastructure, designed to connect and control the flow of resources and commodities. By analyzing the Maritime Silk Road’s strategic port acquisitions at key choke points, examining the deployment of Chinese overseas Special Economic Zones that secure maritime supply chains, and investigating the proliferation of scam compounds and transformative nodal points of underground networks in Southeast Asia, we can understand how geo-historical and geopolitical factors play a crucial role in the capital-driven territorial expansion that has deep historical roots. Additionally, this analysis reveals how digital technologies have advanced the methods of capital multiplication and human control.
The structure of this presentation is arranged in four sections: First, I will explicate the discourse on Tianxia and its implications. Second, I will explain how China’s Tianxia has materialized through its Maritime Silk Road and Digital Silk Road, as well as their global impacts. Third, I will highlight the BRI’s unintended side effects, the dark corners of scam compounds, and their underground rhizomes, emphasizing their geo-historical factors and semi-tributary trading practices. Fourth, I propose the V – M+ mode of digital capital operation in the 21st century, focusing on the techniques of capital operation through compound capitalism, or the Samoan Model, that produce legal exceptional zones. “V” stands for the void with no cost and violence with no law, and there is no limit to the multiplication of capital. This model integrates transnational corporations, overseas Special Economic Zones that facilitate various favorable legal exceptions, and digital automation that accelerates capital flow and human labor extraction transactions.

Collections are repositories for millennia of knowledge and represent generations of knowledge-management systems. They provide data for innovative thinking and play a vital role in safeguarding historical, artistic, scientific, socio-cultural and spiritual knowledge and values for past, present and future generations. They have been produced in the service of what this symposium’s call for papers called “a modern technology”, a “frame and apparatus, challenging, gathering, and ordering humanity to proceed as if destined, extracting natural and human resources”, and with what has been widely recognised as colonial “world making and world breaking” practices (Johnson and Nemser 2022, 7).

This presentation explores the benefits that new networks and collection connection practices may yield for the future sustainability of a world that may come to rely on knowledge existing exclusively within them. It will describe an emergent multi-institutional and multi-sector project that recognises that the decline in collections knowledge can only be halted if institutions create and invest in new processes of relationship-building and knowledge governance and sharing, as well as technical systems for information capture. The project takes an infrastructure-thinking approach to demonstrating the potential ways that Australia’s dispersed collections provide a universe of knowledge that help us solve problems from biodiversity loss through to media literacy and social cohesion.

Based on my work with Brett Neilson, I will discuss the current conjuncture of war from the angle provided by the notion of war regime. This will allow reframing the vexed question of the relation between capital and war against the background of an emerging multipolar world. In particular I will take logistics and infrastructures as a key lens to analyze the current conjuncture of war, with references to Ukraine, Gaza, and the “Indo-Pacific.”

What is industry-based geopolitics? Does it involve running industrial processes and developments through standard scripts of international rivalry and competition? Or does it reorient geopolitics through transnational production and value-generating networks? Is industry-based geopolitics a readily identifiable branch of geopolitics that works in tandem and tension with other kinds of geopolitics, say those based in military power or economic sanctions? Or does industry-based geopolitics signal a more general shift in how power relations intersect space and territoriality? Does the turn to industrial policy as a form of statecraft register a movement away from neoliberal precepts in economic governance? Or does this change evidence a diffusion and privatization of political power within and beyond the state? What assumptions about alliance, enmity, or multipolarity are embedded in practices such as friendshoring? More widely, what sense does it make to speak of industry-based geopolitics when economies are becoming more service-oriented, financialized, and platform-based? And how do these changes inflect relations among geopolitics and geoeconomics? The talk will grapple with these questions as a prelude to asking how empirical engagement with specific industries can inform the theorization of capital and power in the contemporary world.

This paper offers an overview of the creative labour solidarity that took place in Thailand during the pandemic by young film graduates and political-conscious workers. A dialogic reflection with research on creative labour studies largely based in the global North is discussed. In addition to tracing the development of this local ‘turn to labour,’ the paper offers a closer look at the lives of below-the-line film crews based on ‘solidarity dialogues’ during and post-pandemic. The paper explores precarity gaps based on the type of production, age, family, and social relation, as well as micro-practices adopted by workers to navigate different shades of precarity. Adopting ‘South-South citations’ and feminist approach to production studies, aspects of local class systems, the paradoxical nature of workers’ solidarity, and the persistent structural inequality between large-scale international productions and local film sets are also examined with reflections on other countries in the global South.

Decolonial computing is a rapidly emerging field to resist the continuation of colonialism in culture and political economy, and to redesign our digital life. Much of this critical development, however, considers Southern populations as little more than recipients of North-to-South technology transfer. Transsion Holdings is a Chinese company that has dominated Africa’s smartphone market, now expanding into Southeast Asia. The study focuses on two of Transsion’s brands: (1) its TECNO smartphones known for their AI cameras optimized for darker skin tones, and (2) its CarlCare post-sales service that provides affordable high-quality repair for customers via 4,200 shops located throughout the Global South. Transsion, TECNO and CarlCare are arguably the world’s leading brands for decolonial computing that follow a market-driven model, rather than relying on western NGOs or state support. The challenges of elitism, consumerism, and neoliberalism however persist. The organizational trajectories of Transsion is analyzed to reveal the historical path of an alternative “Chinese model” for global tech policy. This leads to the insights that it is insufficient for decolonial computing to be only a political movement or efforts of technology transfer and reappropriation. Decolonial computing must also be an economic movement that provides livelihoods and meets market needs. Rather than an elite network, it must also be a cultural movement to build sustainable political economy structures consisting of grassroots people, communities, their everyday technology needs and practices.

The inquiry of ways in which imperial geopolitics is “re-shaped” by today’s industrialisation and how it differs, if at all, from classic geopolitics is significant. It also links to “digital governance” as a mode of global governance.

The traditional economy of ‘commons’ is continuously being replaced by extractive economy, to fulfill the insatiable desire, increasing aspirations and narcissistic individualism of people with deep pockets in the 21st century. On the other hand, the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ coupled with the algorithmic architecture of the neoliberal ecosystem and digital capitalism has been altering the nature of industries almost beyond recognition. The growing outsourcing of the business processes has been curtailing the existing system of social security that used to obtain a few basic rights of the labour. All these together have been modifying the world of labour through widespread growth of informalization, contractualization, casualization, and platformization of labour. This massive transition has led to the re-constitution of the working class and its new differentiation, giving rise to more precarity of labour that needs our special attention. In this scenario, do we need to imagine fresh forms of politics, which will be different from the traditional and official forms of politics, which was bequeathed to the postcolonial societies by the erstwhile colonial powers, and which has almost entirely been appropriated by the professionals? Do we, therefore, need to explore alternative transformative epistemologies to de-professionalize politics today in order to ensure meaningful representation of labour?

Due to Taiwan’s precarious position of non-recognition in the international community, the Xi Jinping regime in China has loudly proclaimed the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” causing widespread unease in Taiwanese society. The significance of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry in the international industrial chain has led to the industry cluster, Hsinchu Science Park, being hailed as ” Taiwan’s Shield,” with hopes of providing national security for Taiwan. Furthermore, as critiqued by the field of geography, space has become a commodity and a production material for capital accumulation. Behind the Taiwan Semiconductor Knowledge Development Program lies billions of dollars in rent-seeking space and actively promoting rent-seekers. Consequently, the Taiwan Semiconductor Knowledge Development Program brings enormous pressure on the oppositional force of social movement activists and local Hakka community in Hsinchu.
This study aims to explore how local protest communities convey social, cultural, and ethnic meanings beyond economic value through cultural movements under the dominant mainstream discourse. Since Taiwan’s industrialization, mainstream society has continuously reinforced the concept of developmentalism. Therefore, the analysis of cultural movements against the Taiwan Semiconductor Knowledge Development Program is an important entry point. It allows us to detect how oppositional forces develop strategies, maintain resilience, the extent of social dialogue space, and whether the dialectical struggle can lead to societal reflection, enabling Taiwan to explore development paths beyond manufacturing.

Nepal is a landlocked country. When it comes to digital governance, Nepal is still backward. However, this is changing with the transformation of Nepal’s relations with China. Since 2019, Nepal’s relations with China have entered a new phase after joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In exchange for protecting China’s national security interests in Nepal, the Chinese government promised more investments and cooperation in various avenues of Nepal’s development. One important aspect of these cooperations entails strengthening assistance in digital infrastructure. In this context, in addition to the Internet facilities, China plays a significant role in shaping and expanding Nepal’s surveillance and security system. In 2019, The Reporter reported about increased CCTV cameras in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, for surveillance purposes. Reports further reveal that these CCTV cameras were imported from China because they beam with Chinese language text that many Nepalese, including police officers, do not read and understand. Many of these CCTV cameras are located in Boudhanath, which has the largest number of Tibetan refugees. Subsequently, the Nepalese government announced that it aimed to double the number of cameras by about 22,000 in 18,000 different locations within the city. The government argues that such surveillance systems are part of its larger objective of enhancing digital infrastructure to improve the security and stability of the city. However, many human rights watchers accuse the Nepal Police of installing CCTV cameras to monitor Tibetan refugees. Additionally, the Nepalese government is also accused of sharing Tibetan refugee data with the Chinese government. In the growing currency of strengthening surveillance and digital infrastructure by the Nepal government, China’s increasing role in shaping Nepal’s digital governance is apparent. Thus, this paper examines the trilateral relationships between digital infrastructure and surveillance of Nepal, Chinese influence, and Tibetan refugees. The paper will first cover the dialogue of digital infrastructure between Nepal and the Chinese government. The second section emphasizes China’s interests and how it shapes the digital infrastructure and surveillance regime in Nepal. The final section will elaborate on how cooperation between China and Nepal concerning surveillance and digital infrastructure impacts the public spaces of Tibetan refugees in Nepal.