Beijing calls the Uigur region a "national strategic energy and resource security base"
Originally published in Global Voices in Spanish
Industrial Computing Park in the Karamay Cloud, Uigur region. Screenshot from the Sinkiang Radio and Television. legitimate use.
This article is part of the Global Voices Spotlight series of October 2026 "Technological Giants and Authoritarianism. "This series explores how giant technology companies facilitate and hinder governments and authoritarian practices, and how these decisions influence developing countries. You can support this coverage with a donation.
On 14 September, ministers and senior officials meeting in private in Urumqi, capital of the region uigur of China, on the eve of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (OCS) Digital Economy Forum 2026. The meeting was presented as a technical and development exercise in which participants discussed digital infrastructure, industrial transformation, artificial intelligence, data governance and its economic value. The forum was held with the theme "Promoting the data connectivity of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, forging the future with IA."
Urumqi's choice as a meeting place was not casual. The Chinese authorities are positioning the Uigur region as a ground entry door through which digital infrastructure, computing capacity, data systems and technical standards in China can be extended to Central Asia and to the Eurasian market in general. At the same time, the forum in Urumqi helps Beijing reformulate the image of a region that is internationally associated with mass monitoring and serious human rights violations, and presents it as a window of innovation, openness and prosperity.
This strategy is also based on energy. The Uigur region, which for a long time Beijing considered a source of oil, gas, coal and electricity for the rest of China, is now rethinking itself as a source of the vast computer power needed for artificial intelligence. The new digital economy is being built on an older extractive economy.
For the Uighurs, the costs of this transformation are economic, political, social and physical. Their native land provides land, coal, gas, electricity and increasingly computer power, while they have little control over projects, the gain or use of their data. What Beijing presents as technological development can aggravate exploitation and control, including the transfer of state-led jobs, the loss of land-based livelihoods, industrial pollution and invasive digital surveillance.
Digital technology in the Uigur homeland has already been used to follow the movement, communications, religious practices and daily social behaviour. That story, and the suffering it has caused, was not in the public discourse of the forum. On the other hand, those responsible presented the digital transformation of the region as a promise of modernization.
From declarations to permanent machinery
According to the China National Data Administrationthe private meeting, held on 14 September, brought together officials from the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other partner countries. Nine members (Belarus, China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) reached agreement on the Ministerial Declaration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on Digital Economy of 2026.
The participants also drawn up a "List of priority issues of cooperation and intentions in the digital economy of the OCS, 2026-2027 ″ (-), which contains about 20 cooperation intentions in more than 10 sectors, including digital infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, transport and logistics, disaster prevention, education, health and capacity development.
The institutional structure behind the forum is more relevant than a single statement; following the first OCS Digital Economy Forum held in Tianjin in 2025, a cooperation platform which monitors progress on a monthly basis, reviews projects on a quarterly basis and conducts bilateral or multilateral exchanges every six months. In other words, the system proactively adapts Chinese technology, parameters and services to the policies and infrastructure needs of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization States.
The call for proposals for the collection of 2026 sought cooperation cases related to 5G, cloud computing, data centres, cross-border cables, artificial intelligence, digital identity, smart cities and digital administration, cross-border data flows and data security technologies. In August at a press conference, the authorities revealed that the 2025 success case collection included a "digital and intelligent port" between China and Uzbekistan, a reliable data space for trade between China and Russia, a data platform on automotive finance between China and Pakistan, and Chinese support for data exchange in Astana, Kazakhstan. The Chinese and Kazakh railway institutions are also connecting data and conducting a prior assessment of the cargo documents for the transcaspian route.
Why Urumqi?
During the August press conference, the Chinese authorities described the Uigur region as a territory with 19 ports of entry, three regional gateway for international telecommunications and 28 cross-border fibre optic cables heading towards Central Asia. They also say they are looking for a direct connection point to the national Internet network and an international communications gateway with all services in the region.
The ambitions go far beyond connectivity. Regional authorities have announced plans to build large computer groups in and around Urumqi, including groups with tens of thousands (and over time with hundreds of thousands) of accelerators. Its stated objective is to turn the city into a computer center that serves the markets of Central Asia and Eurasia in general, and to promote the export of IA's computer and tokens capacity.
They also revealed a plan to create a regional partnership to promote digital parameters, with regular technical training in accordance with certification systems, so that Chinese parameters serve as a "priority" for Central Asian infrastructure. These parameters can determine who controls data, how systems are communicated and what forms of State access are incorporated into data centres, digital identity systems, smart cities and government databases.
For a long time, researchers have pointed to SCO as a forum through which China and Russia promote static ideas around "Internet sovereignty." One academic study on China's cyberstandards strategy It describes it as a platform for promoting standards that prioritize state control, information security and regime stability, often at the expense of transparency, accountability and human rights. Aligning digital standards and parameters is therefore an economic coordination and an attempt to shape the region's digital governance architecture.
The power base under the center of IA
Artificial intelligence may seem intangible, but its infrastructure is deeply physical. The models are trained and run in data centres filled with energy-consuming processors, which are connected to electrical networks and cooling systems. The International Energy Agency Make it clear.: "There is no IA without energy." It is estimated that a typical AI data centre consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, while the larger facilities being built could consume up to twenty times more. The global demand for electricity from data centres is expected to double, and more, between 2024 and 2030, largely driven by the IA.
China's digital strategy follows an older extraction geography. For decades, the transport of gas from west to east, the transport of electricity from west to east and the transport of coal from west to east have moved energy from the borders of resources from the interior to the industrial centres of the east. To pave the way for the data economy, since 2023China's President Mobile, Yang Jie, publicly asked to expand the storage, processing, training and representation capacities of eastern data in western China.
"Eastern data, Western computer"moved part of the computer work to the western regions, where land and electricity meet the demand of the rest of China. In the Uigur region, in addition to pipelines, coal and electricity exports, data centres and artificial intelligence groups are now added to the list of natural resource extraction.
Beijing qualifies the Uigur region as a "strategic national security base for energy and resources. "Official figures put their primary energy production in 2025 at 510 million metric tons of standard coal and their installed capacity for new energy at more than 170 million kilowatts. Electricity is transmitted from the region to more than 20 provincial-level areas; approximately one third of this exported electricity is described as green energy. Local authorities also Wait. that the region becomes a basis for "green computing" and plan to export IA's computation and tokens capacity (the units processed by language models) to Central Asia.
From a political point of view, the designation of the Uigur homeland as a national "strategic security base" places its resources on the Beijing security agenda. Decisions on soil, mining, electricity transport and IT infrastructure are, and will probably continue to be, made through a state-dominated and large-scale reporting system. Uighurs, who are already denied significant political participation, have little independent space to question land use, environmental damage or income distribution. Energy extraction and digital governance are thus mutually reinforcing: one provides material power, while the other expands the capacity of the State to monitor and manage the territory and the population.
Mines, industrial parks, transmission corridors and wind and solar power bases require land and, in an arid region, they need water, a scarce resource. When agricultural or livestock livelihoods are reorganized around state projects, more uiguras may face loss of land-based independence, family separation, forced labour-related transfers or work assignments by the authorities.
Although public data have not revealed how many uiguras have been specifically displaced by the construction of energy and computer facilities, United Nations human rights experts warned in January 2026 that labour transfer programmes imposed by the State that affect Uighurs show signs of coercion and may lead to displacement. A research from Sheffield Hallam University tracked the uigur labour force imposed by the State along the solar supply chain, from the extraction of quartz and the production of coal-powered polysilicon to the manufacture of solar modules.
The "green" label that applies to an IA data centre is not enough for its supply chain to be clean or its labour, free. One study on heavy industry cities in the region documented a serious particle contamination, although it did not assess the effects of the IA data centres or determine specific health results for the uigures.
A digital window built on a surveillance state
There is a deep contradiction in presenting Urumqi as the center of a benign and inclusive digital future.
The Uigur region is the place where Chinese authorities built one of the most intrusive technology-based population control systems in the world. According to the investigation of Human Rights Watch, the Integrated Platform of Joint Operations added information about people and marked individuals to investigate them on the basis of daily activities, ranging from religious behaviour and family relations to telephone use and social contact. A lawful conduct could be considered an indication of suspicion.
The 2022 evaluation of the United Nations Office for Human Rights also documented extensive monitoring and serious restrictions on privacy, movement and expression in the region. He concluded that the extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention and violations against Uighurs could constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization forum did not address the major problems of privacy rights, independent monitoring, algoritmic discrimination, remedial measures against abuse, civil society participation and safeguards against State surveillance. "Data governance" was mainly discussed as an issue related to value generation, market connection, standards alignment and facilitation of cross-border flows.
The full list of projects has not yet been published and it is not yet possible to fully assess the human rights implications of each. The categories of cooperation include smart cities, digital administration, digital identity, IA data sets and public service platforms (systems capable of expanding public services and state power). The available evidence does not show that the forum projects export the surveillance systems used against the uigures.
The question is not whether digital infrastructure can bring economic benefits. You can contribute them. The question is what rules will regulate it, who will be able to access the data and what protection measures will exist when the technology is used against the people it intends to serve. Transparency is important, but little.
The forum as political theatre
The Chinese authorities have been unusually frank about the political objective of holding the forum in the Uigur region. At the August wheel, a senior regional official called it "important political task" at the service of the national strategy and said it would project an image of social stability, economic development, unity and happiness of the population.
The forum therefore had two parallel objectives: at the material level, to connect China's computer infrastructure, data systems and technical standards with neighbouring States; at the narrative level, to replace the attention given to repression with a controlled account of technology and prosperity. Urumqi was the stage as the message. Beijing presented the region where digital tools have been used to classify, monitor and punish Uighurs as evidence that their digital development model deserves foreign confidence.
The transformation of the Uigur region into a Euro-Asian digital centre is also a projection of political power abroad: on infrastructure and data, and on the international narrative about what happened to Uiguras.
Without transparency or an assessment of human rights, Governments and citizens cannot significantly assess participating companies, technologies, data exchange agreements or human rights risks. Without such scrutiny, digital cooperation can reduce the technological gap, as promised by the forum organizers; but it can also move an ancient extractive hierarchy into the IA era, further rooted (making it more difficult to question) an authoritarian model of digital governance beyond borders.
