State-orchestrated hinterlands? Reworking the digital growth machine from China’s East Data West Computing initiative

Abstract

The variegated hinterlands framework offers a generative vocabulary for tracing the material geographies that sustain digital capitalism beyond urban cores. This commentary reads that framework through China's East Data West Computing initiative, a national program routing eastern computational demand toward western and interior data center clusters through central state planning. The case reveals a distinct mechanism of hinterland production: state orchestration. State-orchestrated hinterlands are produced when the national state authors the location, sequencing, infrastructural form, and legitimacy claims of digital hinterland space. This shifts attention toward state-authored spatial fixes, redistributive-extractive legitimacy, and the political incorporation of economically marginal regions. The concept sharpens the variegated hinterlands framework by asking not only what kinds of hinterlands digital capitalism produces, but also who or what authors their spatiality.