In February 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments jointly issued a document announcing the official launch of the "East Data, West Computing" project, which was subsequently approved by the Fifth Session of the 13th National People's Congress in March. This represents another national infrastructure strategy following the "South-to-North Water Diversion," "West-to-East Gas Transmission," and "West-to-East Power Transmission" projects. The "East Data, West Computing" project aims to build an integrated new computing power network system encompassing data centers, cloud computing, and big data, thereby guiding the computing power demand in the east to the west in an orderly manner, optimizing the layout of data center construction, promoting coordination and synergy between the east and the west, and enabling computing resources in the west to more fully support data processing in the east, ultimately empowering digital development.

Currently, according to the deployment of "East Data, West Computing," the dense computing power demand in the east will be ordered to five computing hubs in the west, namely, Chengdu-Chongqing, Guizhou, Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia, thereby achieving cross-regional flow of data elements and optimal allocation of resources. For the western regions, this presents a crucial opportunity to achieve leapfrog development in the digital age, while simultaneously posing higher requirements for the construction of digital security safeguards in the western borders and serving as a pivotal window to reshape the security governance in the western borders through "technical empowerment" in the digital realm. Especially in the current intricate regional and international landscape, non-traditional security threats in cyberspace faced by the western borders have become increasingly prominent. Therefore, the importance of "East Data, West Computing" will far exceed the comprehensive effectiveness expected of the "new infrastructure" itself in terms of information security and network protection for western "computing hubs" and anti-infiltration and anti-jamming for "smart borders."

In this regard, this book focuses on the strategic background, characteristics, construction, and risk assessment of "East Data, West Computing," with the western borders as the research subject and security as the governance requirement and construction target of "East Data, West Computing." It integrates the strategic visions of "open borders" and "western development" and ultimately aims to construct a security governance system for the western borders empowered by "East Data, West Computing."