Functional Liberalization as Strategy

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

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