China Centre Book Talk: Governing Digital China by Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo

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.

Daniela (Danie) Stockmann is Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany. Her current research focuses on platform regulation in the United States, China and Europe. She received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2007) and an MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (2001). Before joining the Hertie School faculty, 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 awarded by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Beyond her academic work, she has served as advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands and to German President Steinmeier during his 2018 visit to China and on platform regulation in 2021.