Description: China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China challenges this perception, arguing that China's approach is radically different in practice. This book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, the authors track governance of social media and commercial social credit ratings during both the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras. Their findings reveal how Chinese tech companies such as Tencent, Sina, Baidu, and Alibaba, have become consultants and insiders to the state, thus forming a state-company partnership. Meanwhile, citizens voluntarily produce data, incentivizing platform firms to cater to their needs and motivating resistance by platforms. Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo unveil the intricate mechanisms linking the state, platform firms, and citizens in the digital governance of authoritarian states.
Brief description: Daniela Stockmann is Director of the Centre for Digital Governance and Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (PhD 2007), the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and the University of Rochester. Before joining the Hertie School, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. Her book, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China (Cambridge University Press, 2013), received the 2015 Goldsmith Book Prize by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. Beyond her academic work, she has served as advisor on social media governance to policy-makers in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.
Review Quotes: 'Understanding China's current data policies will be critical to anticipating global trends in the information environment in the years ahead. Stockmann and Luo, two experienced analysts of digital China, give us both the theoretical frame for understanding how the country's model for data management has emerged, and the tools needed to explain the impact of the model on governments, markets, and citizens around the world.' Phil Howard, Oxford Internet Institute and Chair of the International Panel on the Information Environment