Abstract

WANG, Wayne Wei. China's digital transformation: Data-empowered state capitalism and social governmentality. AJIC [online]. 2023, vol.31, pp.1-13. ISSN 2077-7213.  http://dx.doi.org/10.23962/ajic.i31.16296.

The article scrutinises the trajectory of China's establishment of a digital state, rooted in a "whole-of-nation" system-or aptly termed (party-)state capitalism. The author illustrates the path of formulating and enforcing strategies to digitalise public services-including, importantly, the digital identity infrastructure-via institutional concentration that exemplifies both the positive and the exclusionary nature of social big data in streamlining administrative procedures. Two catalysts are spotlighted in China's digital transformation: quasi-neoliberal market processes, and technology's social change spillover effects. The author points to the fact that, since its inception, the contemporary Chinese state has created a cybernetic justification for "social governmentality", as a means to redress potential informational imbalances in the process of ruling the state polity. For the Chinese administrative hierarchy, data provides the means to execute a top-down correctivist paradigm for steering societal conduct, a paradigm integrated into (but also to some extent in tension with) data-empowered state capitalism.

Keywords : China; state capitalism; data silos; digital government; identity infrastructure; social big data.

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