Transcript | Governing Digital China, with Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo
Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
This week on Sinica, I speak with Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, co-authors of Governing Digital China, a new book that examines how an authoritarian state governs a digital ecosystem it doesn’t fully own, can never fully control, and yet fundamentally depends on. Danie — a professor of digital governance at the Hertie School in Berlin and a returning Sinica guest, having joined us way back in 2014 to discuss her earlier book on media commercialization and authoritarian rule — and Ting, associate professor in government and artificial intelligence at the University of Birmingham, together offer a richly empirical account of the triangular relationship between the Chinese state, major platform companies, and ordinary internet users. Rather than treating firms as mere instruments of party control or citizens as passive subjects of surveillance, they develop a framework they call “popular corporatism,” which captures how bargaining, incentives, and user preferences shape what is and isn’t permissible in China’s digital spaces — including the endlessly misunderstood social credit system.
4:32 — The digital dilemma: how digital platforms simultaneously empower economic development and create political risk for the party-state — a tension that isn’t unique to authoritarian regimes
7:45 — Why the command-and-control model falls short: platforms require technical expertise and user engagement the state lacks, and firms like Tencent and Sina have real leverage as a result
11:41 — Popular corporatism explained: why users — including the “silent majority” of lurkers — must be foregrounded in any account of China’s digital governance, and how firms become state “consultants” and “insiders”
21:09 — The survey: GPS-based nationally representative sampling, how to desensitize politically sensitive questions, and why this kind of research can no longer be conducted in China
27:22 — Lurkers vs. discussants: the 90-9-1 rule and the counterintuitive finding that users who perceive more openness on platforms like WeChat and Weibo report higher political trust in the central government
35:40 — Functional liberalization: why partial openness should be understood as governance strategy, not mere concession — and what the fandom-community doxing wars illustrate about that
39:23 — The social credit system: what it actually is, what it is not, and why the Black Mirror version is a myth
42:38 — Two subsystems, one misunderstood system: the financial/commercial credit infrastructure, the local-government behavioral programs, and how Sesame Credit and court blacklists actually fit together
46:20 — The privacy paradox and political trust: why convenience routinely overrides stated privacy preferences — and why where Alipay is most embedded, residents trust the state most
52:42 — Stability, exportability, and the Orwell-versus-Huxley question: what preconditions popular corporatism requires, which other developmental states it might apply to, and why China’s digital governance is better understood as a coercion-cooption balancing act
Paying It Forward
Ting Luo recommends Ning Leng, assistant professor at Georgetown University and author of Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China.
Daniela Stockmann recommends Felix Garten, postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School, whose work examines how Chinese tech companies behave when operating in regulatory environments outside China — including the EU, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Recommendations
Daniela: The Legend of the Female General 《锦月如歌》, a Chinese historical drama available on YouTube with English subtitles, especially for anyone interested in internal martial arts and martial heroines in Chinese popular culture.
Ting Luo：Bordeaux, France — specifically, just going there and drinking excellent wine.
Kaiser: Two Substack newsletters for following China’s relationship with the Middle East, especially as the American-Israeli war against Iran continues to unfold: Jonathan Fulton’s China-MENA Newsletter and Jesse Marks’s Coffee in the Desert
Transcript
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my home in Beijing.
Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. It’s also the university from which my daughter graduates in May, so I’m very, very happy. The Sinica podcast is and will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. I’m still looking for new institutional support, and the lines are open. You can reach me at sinicapod@gmail.com or just at my first-dot-last-name at gmail.com.
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Over the past decade, China’s digital transformation has produced two sharply divergent narratives. One celebrates technological dynamism — sprawling platform ecosystems, ubiquitous mobile payments, smart cities, AI ambition, dancing robots, or robots doing kung fu. The other, of course, warns of tightening authoritarian control, algorithmic censorship, surveillance, the ever misunderstood social credit system. Both narratives contain truth, but taken on their own, I think either alone obscures a deeper question: How does an authoritarian state govern a digital ecosystem that it does not fully own, can never fully control, and yet fundamentally depends on for growth, for data, even for legitimacy, you could argue?
That is the question at the heart of Governing Digital China, a new book that examines the triangular relationship between the Chinese state, major platform companies, and ordinary internet users. So, rather than treating firms as mere instruments of party control or treating citizens as just passive subjects of surveillance, the book argues for a much more complex equilibrium, one that’s shaped by bargaining, incentives, institutional constraints, and what the authors call popular corporatism. The book has two main parts, one on the big social media platforms and the other on this social credit system, which, as I’ve just suggested, many of my listeners also know is just something that is endlessly debated about, which many nonsensical ideas remain in the world.
Well, we’re going to hopefully set the record straight today. So, listeners may remember that one of today’s guests, Daniela Stockmann — Danie — joined Sinica back in December 2014 – my God, that’s a long time ago – to discuss her earlier book, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China. In that work, she examined how the Chinese state maintained political control, even as it embraced market-driven media platforms, a paradox that has only deepened, I think, in the platform era. So, Danie is now a professor of digital governance at the Hertie School in Berlin, and really one of the leading scholars working on the intersection of Chinese politics and the digital transformation. She is joined by her co-author, Ting Luo, Luo Ting, who is associate professor in government and artificial intelligence at the University of Birmingham.
Ting’s research focuses on political behavior, public opinion, and digital governance in authoritarian contexts, and she brings rigorous survey and quantitative analysis to this project, grounding the book’s claims in unusually rich empirical evidence about how Chinese citizens actually experience social media governance and the social credit system.
So, Danie Stockmann and Ting Luo, welcome to Sinica. It’s great to have you both here. And Danie, welcome back.
Daniela Stockmann: Thank you so much. It’s great to be back on the show.
Ting Luo: Thank you.
Kaiser: Danie, first question to you. You guys opened the book with what you call the digital dilemma. On the one hand, digital platforms definitely drive enormous economic value, innovation, mobile payments, which are just so advanced in China, financial inclusion, really, microfinance and things like that, data for urban governance, and, of course, even tools that the state can use to monitor public sentiment and opinion, or health. On the other hand, those same technologies can lower coordination costs, they can accelerate information or disinformation flows, they can amplify dissent or organize collective action, which is threatening to the state.
Can you walk us through that tension maybe more concretely? What are the key benefits that the party state gets from digitalization? And what are the political risks that make it a genuine dilemma rather than just kind of a problem that needs to be managed?
Danie: Yeah, so this term ‘digital dilemma’ is actually not a term that Ting or I coined. It was coined by Phil Howard at the Oxford Internet Institute and his co-authors. And so, as you correctly described, there’s this tension inherent in digital technology that on the one hand, it really allows for collective action, meaning organizing yourselves, learning more about other people’s opinions, but then also potentially taking political action on them. So, we see, of course, not only in China, but if you remember the Arab Spring, for example, Facebook, Twitter at the time featured extremely prominently in the uprisings in the Middle East.
And so that’s kind of, I think, the perception of threat amongst the Chinese leadership, as in many other countries, is, of course, this potential destabilizing element of digital technology, which, by the way, is also not even specific to authoritarian states. You mentioned I’m now based in Berlin, so I’m talking to German, but also European policymakers, and they also feel really, at this moment in time, also feel really deeply threatened by the potential of misinformation, online hate
