Digital Sensing, Infrastructure of Sovereignty, and the Unmaking of the Chinese Surveillance State

This article theorizes the micropolitics of sovereignty in contemporary China by examining the everyday functioning of its digital sensing infrastructures. It foregrounds the endogenous ‘unsmoothness’ haunting the party-state’s exercise of sovereign power, as these infrastructures are saturated with excesses – waste, friction, overload, and disruption – that destabilize the very operations they are meant to secure. Using online archives from Chinese government and research institutions, this article interrogates the infrastructural ecologies of the Chinese national surveillance network ‘Sky-Net’ and its policing and urban modeling projects based on UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones). By attending to infrastructural excesses, the article revisits theories of sensing, sovereignty, automaticity, and recursivity, elaborating a technopolitical rearticulation of the notion of sovereignty as its actual exercise is being reconfigured by computational technologies. From this vantage, the article reveals the constitutive vulnerabilities of the Chinese surveillance state, which opens potential spaces for activism and resistances.