Beijing calls the Uyghur region a ‘national energy and resource strategic security base’
Originally published on Global Voices
The Karamay Cloud Computing Industrial Park of the Uyghur Region. Screenshot from Xinjiang Radio and Television Station. Fair use.
This post is part of Global Voices’ October 2026 Spotlight series, “Big Tech and Authoritarianism.” In this Spotlight, we explore how Big Tech facilitates and hinders authoritarian governments and practices, and how these choices influence the Global South. You can support this coverage by donating here.
On September 14, ministers and senior officials gathered behind closed doors in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Uyghur region, on the eve of the 2026 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Digital Economy Forum. The meeting was presented as a technical and developmental exercise in which participants discussed digital infrastructure, industrial transformation, artificial intelligence, data governance, and the economic value of data. The wider forum was held under the theme “Promoting SCO Data Connectivity, Shaping the Future with AI.”
The choice of Urumqi as the meeting spot was not incidental. Chinese officials are positioning the Uyghur region as a land-based gateway through which China’s digital infrastructure, computing capacity, data systems and technical standards can extend into Central Asia and the wider Eurasian market. At the same time, holding the forum in Urumqi helps Beijing recast a region internationally associated with mass surveillance and severe human rights violations as a showcase of innovation, openness and prosperity.
That strategy also rests on energy. Long treated by Beijing as a source of oil, gas, coal and electricity for the rest of China, the Uyghur region is now being repackaged as a source of the vast computing power needed for artificial intelligence (AI). The new digital economy is being built on top of an older extractive economy.
For Uyghurs, the costs of this transformation are economic, political, social and physical. Their homeland supplies the land, coal, gas, electricity and increasingly computing power, while they have little control over the projects, profits or use of their data. What Beijing presents as technological development may deepen both extraction and control, including state-directed labor transfers, the loss of land-based livelihoods, industrial pollution and pervasive digital surveillance.
Digital technology in the Uyghur homeland has already been used to monitor movement, communications, religious practice and ordinary social behavior. That history — and the suffering it has caused — was absent from the forum’s public language. Instead, officials presented the region’s digital transformation as a promise of modernization.
From declarations to permanent machinery
According to China’s National Data Administration, the September 14 closed-door meeting brought together officials from SCO member states and other partner countries. Nine SCO members — Belarus, China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — reached agreement on a 2026 SCO Digital Economy Ministerial Statement.
The participants also produced a List of Priority Cooperation Items and Intentions in the SCO Digital Economy, 2026–2027 (上合组织数字经济领域重点合作事项和意向清单 (2026—2027)), which contains nearly 20 cooperation intentions across more than 10 sectors, including digital infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, transport and logistics, disaster prevention, education, healthcare and capacity building.
The institutional structure behind the event is more consequential than a single declaration; after the first SCO Digital Economy Forum in Tianjin in 2025, it includes a cooperative platform that monitors developments monthly, reviews projects quarterly, and conducts bilateral or multilateral exchanges every six months. In other words, the system proactively matches Chinese technology, standards and services with the policies and infrastructure needs of SCO states.
The call for submissions for the 2026 collection sought cooperation cases involving 5G, cloud computing, data centers, cross-border cables, artificial intelligence, digital identity, smart cities and digital government, cross-border data flows and data-security technologies. In a press briefing in August, the authorities revealed the 2025 collection of successful cases included a China–Uzbekistan “digital and intelligent port,” a China–Russia trusted data space for trade, a China–Pakistan automotive-finance data platform, and Chinese support for a data exchange in Astana, Kazakhstan. Chinese and Kazakh railway institutions are also connecting data and pre-screening freight documents for the trans-Caspian route.
Why Urumqi?
Chinese officials, during the August press briefing, described the Uyghur region as having 19 ports of entry, three regional international telecommunications gateways and 28 cross-border fiber-optic cables leading toward Central Asia. They also say they are seeking a national internet backbone direct-connection point and a full-service international communications gateway in the region.
The ambitions extend far beyond connectivity. Regional officials have announced plans to build large computing clusters in and around Urumqi, including clusters with tens of thousands — and eventually hundreds of thousands — of accelerator cards. Their stated goal is to turn the city into a computing hub serving Central Asian and wider Eurasian markets and to promote the export of computing power and AI tokens.
They also revealed a plan to build a regional alliance to promote digital standards, with regular technical training and alignment with certification systems so Chinese standards serve as a “priority reference” for Central Asian infrastructure. Such standards can determine who controls data, how systems communicate and what forms of state access are built into data centers, digital identity systems, smart cities and government databases.
Researchers have long identified the SCO as a venue through which China and Russia promote state-centered ideas of “internet sovereignty.” One academic study of China’s cyber-norm strategy describes it as a staging ground for norms that prioritize state control, information security and regime stability, often at the expense of transparency, accountability and human rights. Aligning digital rules and standards is therefore both economic coordination and an attempt to shape the region’s digital governance architecture.
The energy base beneath the AI hub
Artificial intelligence may appear weightless, but its infrastructure is intensely physical. Models are trained and operated in data centers filled with power-hungry processors, connected to electricity grids and cooling systems. The International Energy Agency puts the point plainly: “there is no AI without energy.” It estimates that a typical AI-focused data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, while the largest facilities under construction may consume 20 times as much. Global data-center electricity demand is projected to more than double between 2024 and 2030, driven largely by AI.
China’s digital strategy follows an older geography of extraction. For decades, west–east gas transmission, west–east electricity transmission and west-to-east coal transport have moved energy from inland resource frontiers toward eastern industrial centers. To pave the way for the data economy, China Mobile chairman Yang Jie has publicly called for expanding the storage, processing, training and rendering of eastern data in western China since 2023.
“East Data, West Computing” shifts some computing work to western regions, where land and electricity support demand elsewhere in China. In the Uyghur region, in addition to gas pipelines, coal and electricity exports, data centers and AI clusters are now added to the list of natural resource extraction.
Beijing calls the Uyghur region a “national energy and resource strategic security base.” Official figures put its primary energy production in 2025 at 510 million metric tons of standard coal and its installed new-energy capacity at more than 170 million kilowatts. Electricity is transmitted from the region to more than 20 provincial-level areas; roughly one-third of this outbound electricity is described as green power. Local officials also expect the region to become a base for “green computing” and plan to export computing power and AI tokens — the units processed by language models — toward Central Asia.
Politically, designating the Uyghur homeland as a national “strategic security base” places its resources within Beijing’s security agenda. Decisions about land, mining, electricity transmission and computing infrastructure are and will likely be made through a top-down system dominated by the state and large enterprises. Uyghurs — already denied meaningful political participation — have little independent space to contest land use, environmental harm or the distribution of revenue. Energy extraction and digital governance thus reinforce each other: one supplies material power, while the other expands the state’s capacity to monitor and administer the land and the population.
Mines, industrial parks, transmission corridors and wind and solar bases require land and, in an arid region, scarce water. Where agricultural or pastoral livelihoods are reorganized around state projects, more Uyghurs may face the loss of land-based independence, family separation, forced labor transfers, or work placements directed by officials.
While public data have not revealed how many Uyghurs have been displaced specifically by energy and computing construction, UN human-rights experts warned in January 2026 that state-mandated labor-transfer programs affecting Uyghurs contain indicators of coercion and can lead to displacement. A Sheffield Hallam University investigation traced state-imposed Uyghur labor through the solar supply chain, from quartz mining and coal-powered polysilicon production to solar-module manufacturing.
The “green” label attached to an AI data center does not by itself make its supply chain clean or its labor free. A study of heavy-industrial cities in the region documented serious particulate pollution, although it did not assess the effects of AI data centers or establish Uyghur-specific health outcomes.
A digital showcase built over a surveillance state
There is a profound contradiction in presenting Urumqi as the center of a benign and inclusive digital future.
The Uyghur region is where Chinese authorities built one of the world’s most intrusive systems of technologically enabled population control. According to Human Rights Watch’s investigation, the Integrated Joint Operations Platform aggregated information about individuals and flagged people for investigation based on everyday activities ranging from religious behavior and family relationships to phone use and social contact. Lawful conduct could be treated as an indicator of suspicion.
The UN Human Rights Office’s 2022 assessment also documented extensive surveillance and severe restrictions on privacy, movement and expression in the region. It concluded that the scale of arbitrary and discriminatory detention and related violations against Uyghurs may constitute international crimes, particularly crimes against humanity.
The SCO forum did not address the significant issues concerning privacy rights, independent oversight, algorithmic discrimination, remedies for misuse, civil society participation, or safeguards against state surveillance. “Data governance” was discussed principally as a matter of unlocking value, connecting markets, aligning standards and facilitating cross-border flows.
The complete project list has not been published, so the human-rights implications of individual projects cannot yet be fully assessed. The cooperation categories include smart cities, digital government, digital identity, AI datasets and public-service platforms — systems capable of expanding both public services and state power. The available evidence does not establish that the forum’s projects export the surveillance systems used against Uyghurs.
The question is not whether digital infrastructure can bring economic benefits. It can. The question is whose rules will govern it, who will be able to access the data, and what protections will exist when technology is used against the people it claims to serve. Transparency matters, but is lacking.
The forum as political theatre
Chinese officials have been unusually candid about the political purpose of staging the forum in the Uyghur region. In the August press conference, a senior regional official called it a “major political task” serving national strategy and said it would present an image of social stability, economic development, unity and public happiness.
The forum therefore served two parallel goals: materially, to connect China’s computing infrastructure, data systems and technical standards with neighboring states; narratively, to replace attention to repression with a managed story of technology and prosperity. Urumqi was both the venue and the message. Beijing presented the region where digital tools have been used to categorize, monitor and punish Uyghurs as evidence that its model of digital development should be trusted abroad.
The transformation of the Uyghur region into a Eurasian digital hub is also an outward extension of political power: over infrastructure and data, and over the international narrative about what has happened to Uyghurs.
Without transparency and human-rights assessment, governments and the public cannot meaningfully assess the participating companies, technologies, data-sharing arrangements, or human-rights risks. Without such scrutiny, digital cooperation may bridge a technological divide, as the forum’s organizers promise; however, it may also carry an older extractive hierarchy into the AI era, making an authoritarian model of digital governance more deeply embedded — and harder to challenge — across borders.
