"There Should Be More Than One Voice in A Healthy Society": Infrastructural Violence and Totalitarian Computing in China

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese citizens were caught up within a public health crisis and an expansive censorship and propaganda infrastructure built by the Chinese government over the past few decades. In March 2020, we interviewed 24 Chinese citizens to understand how they experienced censorship and propaganda during the first few months of the pandemic. Drawing from the lens of infrastructural violence, we document state violence inflicted on the Chinese people at the infrastructural scale, penetrating ordinary citizens' minds and daily lives. We examine three dimensions of infrastructural violence: epistemic violence of truth distortion, emotional violence of state retaliation, and interpersonal violence of relationship deterioration. Based on our empirical findings, we reflect on how infrastructural violence is constituted through totalitarian computing technologies. We stress the need to study the geopolitics of technology and propose a research agenda for studying totalitarian computing.