Big Earths of China: Remotely Sensing Xinjiang along the Belt and Road Shaoling Ma Across the border from Kazakhstan where Chinese President Xi Jinping, in September 2013, first proposed his vision of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) lies the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Home to Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic minorities—as well as the rich resources of natural gas, wind, rare-earth minerals, and cotton—this largest province-level division in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) lies adjacent to eight major countries involved in the BRI and crucially links the PRC to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean through the Karakoram Highway. 1 Begin- ning in late 2016 under the leadership of the then recently appointed regional committee secretary, Chen Quanguo, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been intensifying its repression of Uyghurs. 2 This effort has been accom- panied by the construction of a massive network of electronic surveillance and database systems. 3 It is not only populations, however, that are moni- tored in this unprecedented infrastructural vision. The “Kashgar Declaration: International Cooperation on Earth Observation in Central Asia,” marking Research for this paper was made possible by the Yale-NUS College’s Tan Chin Tuan Chi- nese Research Grant. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. See Anna Hayes, “Interwoven ‘Destinies’: The Significance of Xinjiang to the China Dream, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the Xi Jinping Legacy,” Journal of Contemporary China 29 (Jan. 2020): 38. 2. In December 2021, the CCP replaced Chen with Ma Xingrui, an aerospace engineer and former secretary of Shenzhen, Guangdong, to head the XUAR regional committee. Ma was the chairman of the Sino Satellite Communications Company, and oversaw the Chang’e 3 mission, the PRC’s first lunar surface exploration. 3. See Sean R. Roberts, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Mus- lim Minority (Princeton, N.J., 2020), p. 1. Critical Inquiry, volume 49, number 1, Autumn 2022. © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/721173