Towards a critical understanding of digital twins: The politics of digitalizing rivers in China

Digital twin technologies play an increasingly important role in addressing predictive management and real-time decision-making for environmental challenges, with the potential to significantly transform river governance. By examining Digital Twin Yangtze, this paper critically analyzes how the Chinese state strategically positions digital twin technologies for governing rivers and for reinforcing authority over water, people, and territory. Inquiring into how rivers become “smart” through the integration of digital technologies in river management, we critically examine the politics of digital twins and the digitalization of rivers from a political ecology perspective. Within a theoretical Riverhood framework, we conceptualize river as ecosociety, as territory, as subject, and as movement, to unravel the ongoing technical, political, and cultural-symbolic transformation of river territories, imaginaries, and practices through governmentalization and techno-digital river subject-making. We argue that digital twin river basins embody a limited state-imagined “river reality” which, when transformed into digitized hydrosocial territories, can have potentially far-reaching implications for river governance. We find that digital twins rest on a reductionist logic that not only produces techno-digital subjects but also reinforces a technocratic imaginary and approach that simplifies rivers through numerification and datafication. Through our investigation, we seek to scrutinize the politics of river digitization and advocate for a nuanced, interdisciplinary, inclusive, and re-politicized perspective in water governance over the blind pursuit of computational sophistication.