1 The Setting

This short article seeks to shed light on digital and big data practices in China with insights from a political economy perspective and cultural studies that help contextualize the current debates on big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and automated technology in the framework of “infrastructural capitalism.” I treat this moment in contemporary society as part of infrastructural capitalism, characterized by the transition from competitive capitalism to a stage of monopoly capital and emerging imperialist rivalry, which has attempted to play out against crisis dynamics since the Great Recession of 2008–2009. Infrastructural capitalism is the material base of all other forms of capitalist materiality, namely, extractive capitalism, industrial capitalism, and digital or platform capitalism. Metaphorically, infrastructural capitalism also provides symbolic power capable of exhibiting spectacular landscapes and prophesying a nationalistic future for humanity.

Because it concentrates and condenses all forms of capitalism into its core elements, infrastructural capitalism encompasses all potential forms of contradictions and crises as it evolves to reproduce and expand the conditions of production and social reproduction across the globe. The deepening of China’s infrastructural capitalism is reflected in conflictual and increasingly monopolizing global capitalism, which embodies contradictions, severe international competition, and rivalries. The current AI and tech race between the United States and China is a concrete moment of infrastructural capitalism, a life-and-death struggle for current and future capital accumulation. It also heralds the end of the 20th-century Cold War, a feature of the geopolitical rivalry between capitalism and socialism. Whereas oil once constituted the core condition of global capitalism and the imperialist role played by the United States (Harvey, 2003), we are currently entering a new, 21st-century Cold War defined by a race for AI and data. The winner of that race is expected to take it all, become the new hegemon, and preside over the world order. Unlike the previous one, this Cold War is no longer structured by two ideological camps but by two countries, the United States and China, which share the same capitalistic and populist beliefs and merely fight for technological dominance. The new Cold War is fought by the United States and China, which mirror each other by building their own capitalistic blocs to compete following the logic of infrastructural capitalism (Qian & Pun, 2025). This race presently influences the construction of digital and data infrastructures such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek in a bid to dominate the high-tech economy. Arguably, it is the most current form of global capitalism, which unifies the two ideological rivals, putting China and the United States into the same boat of political economy.

2 The Triple Logic of Infrastructural Capitalism

Derived from the field of political economy (Pun, 2024), infrastructural capitalism serves as the material base for all other forms of capitalist materiality, namely, extractive capitalism in most developing countries (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2017, 2019), industrial capitalism (Braverman, 1998) and digital capitalism in developed countries (Fuchs & Mosco, 2015), and platform capitalism in both the Global North and the Global South (Srnicek, 2016). As part of the logic of capitalism, China’s infrastructural capitalism cannot develop internally but must compete and take on an international dimension. The Internet+ and Made in China 2025 initiatives were launched by the Chinese government to support private and state capital and boost productive capacity in the race against the United States. As China became the second-largest economy in the world, the United States began to see it as a threat and to employ various measures to contain China’s tech development.

China’s capitalism has entered a new age of competition and monopoly, supported not only by new, high-end technology but also – and more importantly – by state power. The latter has played a major role in constructing infrastructural bases such as building projects, new economic zones, highways and high-speed railways, digital platforms, the data economy, and AI technologies, both internally and externally, to reproduce an expanded capitalism. As a latecomer to global capitalism, post-socialist China embodies multiple forms of capital and practices more variegated forms of capitalism compared to Western countries (Peck & Zhang, 2013; Zhang & Peck, 2016). The competition of multiple capitals simultaneously has produced another “Third World” in China’s rural hinterlands and in neighboring regions. These multiple forms of capital (i.e., manufacturing, financial, logistical, digitalized, data, and AI-related capital) co-exist and operate in various sectors in different regions of China and beyond.

For instance, industrial capital, which is highly dependent on and interconnected with the development of infrastructural capitalism, has boosted domestic and overseas consumption of manufactured goods, especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession, aided by finance capital. In doing so, it has facilitated the rapid emergence of logistics capital to speed up the circulation and consumption of these goods. The growing consumption of China’s manufactured commodities depends on a complex and expanding digitalized and logistical infrastructure enabling circulation. This also underpins the fast expansion of digitalized commercial sectors to meet the needs of e-commerce companies such as Alibaba, Cainiao, and TikTok, with a global network crucial to their operations. Information technology capital has fueled global circulation, taking global competition to new heights. We need to understand how, multi-scalar and multi-faceted operations of capital notwithstanding, infrastructural capitalism, as a mode of production, serves a totality encompassing the concrete infrastructures of roads, cities, high-speed rail, and logistics transportation, as well as digitalized and AI platforms.

The term “infrastructural capitalism” emphasizes the deepening of infrastructural power as an analytical lens for understanding the tactical power of the state, not just in exercising control over society but also in reproducing capitalist social relations and capital accumulation in both the material and the symbolic realms (Pun, 2024). I attempt to grasp the features of the new Chinese digital and data economy as part of the deepening process of global capitalism by analyzing what I conceptualize as infrastructural capitalism. The growth of capital capital relies on a dual logic of capital and territorial power that dictates the rapid race for AI, big data, and automated technology in the changing space of global capitalism (Harvey, 2010). Closely mirroring each other, infrastructural capitalism in both countries in the age of monopoly and rivalry is now epitomized by the race to construct data infrastructures – a symbol of the rise of the new Cold War and international rivalry.

As an evolving political economic system, China’s infrastructural capitalism is approached here not as an alternative to global capitalism but as a reaction to neo-liberal capitalism, which has reached its limits and requires a paradigmatic shift in political technologies of power to sustain the accumulation regime in the age of global competition and monopoly (Author, 2024). The deepening of state-initiated infrastructural development is foundational to the accumulation of monopoly capital and the preparation for imperial rivalry (Lee et al., 2018). In a case study of Alibaba, Tse and Pun (2024) point out that the techniques adopted to direct and sustain the expansion of global capitalism in a context-specific, daily organizational setting intertwined with the state-led, multi-dimensional infrastructural expansions are yet to be studied. While sharing global capitalism’s feature of capital accumulation, China’s socio-economic system is arguably mainly characterized by its imposition of state power, particular historical processes, and hybrid infrastructural expansions within and beyond the nation. In contrast to existing scholarship on “state capitalism” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which overemphasizes China’s unique model, I argue that China’s infrastructural capitalism is a contemporary moment of global capitalism, which nevertheless shares the same contradictions in deepening the exploitation of labor, and the destruction of the environment and social relations.

In cultural studies, infrastructure has been taken as a “keyword” for foregrounding the production and the reproduction of contemporary global capitalism, its tensions, and its contradictions (Hallinan & Gilmore, 2021; Pun & Chen, 2023). It highlights cultural politics and addresses a triple logic – capital, power, and culture – that interweave to inform infrastructural capitalism as non-linear historical moments. To tease out the global dynamics of infrastructural capitalism and its contradictory other, the infrastructural power of labor, the cultural logic of capital moves beyond the dichotomy between the logic of capital and the territorial logic of power (Havey, 2010) and discloses cultural politics and its potential emancipatory subject of infrastructure, both physically and digitally.

While being increasingly incorporated into global capitalism, China’s infrastructural capitalism excels by providing the symbolic power of exhibiting spectacular landscapes and prophesying a nationalistic or imperialistic future for humanity (Debord, 1967). The visual of high-speed bullet trains all over the country and beyond demonstrates China’s cultural power and the hegemony of infrastructural capitalism. Similar memes have spread in China and internationally for a decade, impacting social and environmental developments in many developing countries. The production and reproduction of infrastructural capitalism has thus primarily relied on the escalation of nationalism and populism as ideological state apparatuses in China and the United States, driving racism competition, and rivalry internationally. I argue that the main concern remains to understand how China’s infrastructural capitalism and the infrastructural power of labor contribute to the new configuration of worker subjects.

I also follow David Harvey’s (1990) conceptualization of time-space compression and the multiple contradictions embodied in the spatial logic of capital accumulation. A spectacle of infrastructures, glittering in the age of monopoly capitalism, informs a counternarrative to Marx’s (1858) “annihilation of space by time” (p. 539), when he predicted the coming dominance of capital over society. A new form of “annihilation of time by space” has also emerged through the unrestrained construction and ambitious expansion of a network of physical and digital infrastructures. As the cultural keyword indexing the molecular processes of political economy, infrastructural capitalism encompasses extraction, production, circulation, and exchange (Köstem, 2021). As well as social reproduction, it unearths the potential of socio-economic and political crisis inherent in the network of infrastructures, leading to the “potential vulnerability of the system breakdown” or “the crisis of crisis management” (He et al., 2020). As Hallinan and Gilmore (2021) put it, “from contaminated water pipes to social media manipulation to sinking cities, infrastructures increasingly appear at the heart of cultural, political, and environmental crises” (p. 618). This process of infrastructural capitalism vividly embodies the materiality of expanded capitalism and the unavoidable contradictions between the state, capital, and culture.

3 Theorizing the Infrastructural Power of Labor

China has the world’s most extensive manufacturing facilities and capacities, one of the largest consumer markets, some of the largest e-commerce companies facilitating consumption, and a logistics sector that has seen extraordinary expansion and concentration. This development forms the new basis for China’s current regime of accumulation and has far-reaching implications for workers’ conditions and labor struggles. Conceptualizing infrastructural capitalism in China requires taking into account how these multiple forms of capital co-develop or conflict, as well as capturing the dominant and changing features of infrastructural capitalism in the contemporary moment to tease out its complexity, condensation, and overarching forces, which constitute and are constituted by the vast array of worker subjects.

I give infrastructural power back to the working-class subjects whose agential power was nurtured by various spatial fixes in the geographies of infrastructural capitalism (Strauss, 2018, 2020). I conceptualize the infrastructural power of labor as a condition and a condensation of social relations reflected in a specific stage of competition and monopoly in global infrastructural capitalism. As a distinctive form of global capitalism, this concept denotes a reconfiguration of the political technology of power. This reconfiguration gives rise to the triple logic of capital, power, and culture embedded in specific class relations and their ultimate struggle. Taking a relational class analysis seriously, while I agree that working-class forces could, in a sense, affect or subvert spatial fixes such as economic zones, specific sectors, industries, or workplaces at certain times, labor agency and struggles are deeply engrained in the structure and context of infrastructural capitalism as a dialectical process between capital and labor continuously shaped by class struggles (Harvey, 2018).

Based on insights from Italian workerism (Tronti, 2019), I learned that just as the state and capital build their power infrastructures, so does the working class. I argue that labor infrastructural power is not only generated by the constraints and limits of capital but is actively created out of a highly conflictual process and workers’ transformative subjectivity. I acknowledge that under infrastructural capitalism, the co-existence of multiple forms of capital and capitalist production – and social reproduction – has worked to organize and reorganize the working class. However, worker subjects compelled by their own acute experiences of exploitation and suppression also shape and challenge the pathway of infrastructural capitalism, building potential for eventual transgression and emancipation.

Therefore, the exercise of labor infrastructural power is one of contestation, of class struggle between the state, capital, and labor. Taking capital and labor as dialectic processes that mutually constitute each other, I highlight the politicalizing process of infrastructure in creating social contradictions that are largely invisible or subsumed (Das, 2012). The process of intensifying infrastructural events such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek has reinforced global assemblages of unpredictable but inescapable class contradictions that drive China and the United States into imperial rivalry externally and class conflicts internally.

To conclude, I call on the digital labor community to examine the far-reaching effects of China’s infrastructural turn on Chinese and Southeast Asian laborers, whose lives are increasingly engulfed in global rivalry. I advocate a theorization of the infrastructural power of labor. This requires a critical reflection on social change, pondering infrastructure, labor, and the solidarity that emerged from the enormous contradictions in the development of AI and the automation industry, which socially and culturally form worker subjects – including manufacturing, logistics, platform, and data laborers – in China and Asia. Importantly, factory workers should not be neglected in current debates because they are still major actors producing electric vehicles, robotics, drones, among other. These manufacturing workers as well as platform and digitalized workers in transportation, coding industries, data mining, and data service industries formulate and share the infrastructural power of labor. It is necessary to explore how infrastructural building and the processes of AI, the data economy, and automated technology, as key hegemonic projects, impact the interests of the worker subjects, whose young members are increasingly suffering from precariousness globally. By analyzing the contradictions embedded in the infrastructural turn to AI, the big data economy, and automated technology, we can examine the concrete and specific configurations of the infrastructural power of labor in workplaces, communities, and vocational colleges. We may thus study the micro-processes of solidarity building through the triple logic of infrastructural power and study workers’ solidarity in workplaces, communities, and vocational colleges, even though most of these initiatives are currently being suppressed. Reviewing past attempts and present failures is preparing for the future.

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Date accepted: April 2025