Governing Digital China

China’s digital governance has evoked notions of “Big Brother,” as envisioned by George Orwell’s 1984. Governing Digital China challenges this totalitarian top-down paradigm and argues that China’s digital governance is radically different in practice. The book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting bottom-up influences of China’s largest platform firms and citizens. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, the book tracks governance of social media and commercial social credit ratings during the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping era. We find that Tencent, Sina, Baidu, and Alibaba have become consultants and insiders to the state, thus forming a state-company partnership. At the same time, citizens voluntarily produce data that serve as key resource, thus creating incentives for platform firms to cater towards their bottom-line. Governing Digital China illustrates the mechanisms that link the state, platform firms, and citizens in digital governance of authoritarian states.