Conceptualizing Digital Governance in the Age of Semiconductors: A Critical Review of Keywords and Concepts

2025-12-03 - 2025-12-31

Prof. Tzu-kai Liu

Online

 

The Chip Era and Digital Governance Forum 10

📌Date and Time: December 3, 2025, from 14:00 to 16:00, Taipei Time (GMT+8)

📌Format: Online

📌Online meeting Link: https://meet.google.com/nkv-uhmz-wgk

📌Forum Language: English

📌Synopsis
This forum critically examines keywords and concepts related to digital governance, surveillance systems, and citizenship politics. These terms serve as entry points for exploring how political discourses—both theoretical and methodological—engage with rapid developments in digital communication technologies during the chip era. The forum investigates how digital surveillance technologies reshape power relations across Asian contexts, transcending traditional boundaries of state, market, and territory. Liu analyzes how China’s “surveillance capitalism” diverges from Western models through a distinctive state-corporate nexus, where technology giants build infrastructures for population management rather than commercial personalization. This surveillant assemblage transforms migrant data into governing capital, fundamentally redefining relationships among surveillance, labor, and citizenship. Tsering critically reviews the concept of “societies of control” and examines how the Chinese government maintains long-arm jurisdiction over the Tibetan diaspora through WeChat. Continuous monitoring, censorship, and intimidation via digital platforms fragment refugees into individuals, eroding the protection once provided by physical distance. Verma further expands the discussion of “digital governance” by examining its operation in the context of Rohingya refugees in India. Although often framed as promoting efficiency, transparency, and service delivery, digital governance increasingly functions through assemblages of biometrics, surveillance networks, and data analytics that reconfigure state–citizen relations. For refugees positioned at the margins of legal recognition, these infrastructures become deeply coercive: biometric databases, border surveillance systems, and digital identification regimes render Rohingyas hyper-visible yet rightless, categorizing them as security risks rather than humanitarian subjects.

Keywords:

Surveillance Capitalism

Societies of Control, WeChat, and the Tibetan Diaspora

Digital Governance and Rohingyas

 

 

📌Speakers:

☁️Prof. Tzu-kai Liu

Assistant Professor, Department of Ethnology, National Chengchi University

＃Surveillance Capitalism

The relationship between digital surveillance and capitalism continues to evolve as new communication technologies emerge and societies grapple with regulatory responses. Surveillance capitalism—the use of digital technologies to monitor behavioral data and extract economic value—transforms personal data into commodities, often disregarding privacy and individual rights. While Shoshana Zuboff's (2019) model focuses on platform companies like Meta that commodify personal data for targeted prediction, China's system operates through a distinct state-corporate nexus. Major technology firms—including Huawei, Hikvision, and SenseTime—provide the 5G networks, biometric systems, and analytic platforms that underpin grid-style local governance. This infrastructure creates a surveillant assemblage oriented toward social stability, border security, and labor governance rather than commercial personalization. Within this grid system, migrant data is continuously extracted, stored, and circulated as governing capital, serving administrative goals of population management rather than profit generation. These intertwined systems demonstrate how digital technologies reshape governance practices and forge new forms of state-corporate collaboration, fundamentally redefining relationships among surveillance, labor, and citizenship.

☁️Dr. Dolma Tsering

Postdoctoral Fellow, International Center for Culture Studies, National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University

＃Societies of Control, WeChat, and the Tibetan Diaspora

In his 1992 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze theorizes societies of control to examine contemporary forms of power transcending time and space. He argues that modern power has shifted from a disciplinary society, described by Foucault, where enclosed institutions such as schools, factories, and hospitals shape human behaviors by producing obedient and productive bodies. In contemporary societies, enclosures are dissolving and being replaced by mechanisms of power that operate continuously through markets, digital technologies, and perpetual monitoring. Therefore, power is no longer anchored through the wall but enacted through codes, access systems, and data flows. Within this new paradigm, subjects are no longer treated as unified individuals, but become “dividuals,” fragmented into data points that can be tracked, analyzed, and modulated across open networks. This dynamic is manifested in the experiences of the Chinese government’s long-arm jurisdiction over the Tibetan diaspora, particularly through digital apps such as WeChat. Tibetan refugees, who once believed that distance offered protection, no longer remained so and were constantly controlled. Through censorship, data extraction, intimidation, and continuous monitoring, the Chinese government continues to assert its influence over Tibetan refugees, transcending traditional time and space boundaries.

☁️Dr. Monika Verma

MSCA-CZ Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Myanmar Studies Center, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic

＃Digital Governance and Rohingyas

Digital governance refers to the deployment of information and communication technologies in state administration, policy implementation, and population management. While often framed in terms of efficiency, transparency, and service delivery, digital governance increasingly operates through infrastructural assemblages—biometric systems, surveillance networks, and data analytics platforms—that fundamentally reshape power relations between states and citizens. In the chip era, these technologies enable continuous monitoring, data extraction, and algorithmic decision-making that transcend traditional bureaucratic processes, creating new modes of governmental control and social ordering. For refugee

populations, digital governance takes on particularly coercive dimensions. Refugees exist in precarious legal positions where they are simultaneously hyper-visible to state surveillance systems yet denied recognition and rights. Digital technologies intensify this paradox: biometric registration, border surveillance apparatus, and digital identity infrastructures render refugees trackable and controllable while reinforcing their status as non-citizens. Rather than facilitating protection or integration, digital

governance in refugee contexts often serves securitization imperatives, transforming displaced populations into data subjects marked as security threats. The case of Rohingyas in India exemplifies how digital governance and securitization intersect to produce new forms of exclusion and control. Through biometric databases, surveillance technologies, and digital identification systems, the Indian state manages Rohingya refugees not as subjects requiring humanitarian protection but as populations to be monitored, contained, and potentially expelled. This digital-securitization nexus demonstrates how technological infrastructure becomes embedded in political projects of citizenship restriction, border enforcement, and population management, fundamentally redefining the relationships among governance,security, and human rights in contemporary Asia.

 

📌Organizer

國立陽明交通大學文化研究國際中心 International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS), National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University

• Subproject II: The Chip Era and Digital Governance (Principal Investigator: Joyce C.H. Liu)

• ICSSR-NSTC Project (2025-2027): China’s Digital Silk Road and Chip-Based Geopolitics: A Critical Analytical Study from the Indo-Taiwan Perspective

📌Funding Source

教育部高等教育深耕計畫

Higher Education Sprout Project, Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan

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