The governance of digital technologies has become one of the most important questions in contemporary politics. In Governing Digital China, Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo challenge simplistic understandings of authoritarian digital governance by developing a more nuanced account of how governance operates in practice. Drawing on extensive empirical research, including surveys and qualitative evidence, the authors argue that China’s digital governance cannot be understood simply as state domination. Instead, it emerges through the interaction among the state, platform companies, and citizens, a process they conceptualize as “popular corporatism.” The book’s central contribution is to show how authoritarian adaptation operates through negotiated relationships among state agencies, platform firms and users.

The starting point of the book is the “digital dilemma”: digital technologies simultaneously expand economic innovation and political uncertainty. For governments, platforms create opportunities for economic growth, administrative capacity and social coordination, but they also facilitate new forms of information circulation, collective action and public expression. Existing debates have often been divided between narratives emphasizing China’s digital innovation and those portraying digital governance primarily through state control. The former view platforms as spaces of participation and empowerment, whereas the latter emphasize how states appropriate digital infrastructures to strengthen surveillance and political control. Stockmann and Luo argue that both perspectives capture only part of the picture. In the Chinese context, digital governance is neither simply market-driven innovation nor straightforward state repression; rather, it is produced through institutional arrangements connecting state authority, corporate expertise and citizen participation.

The concept of popular corporatism provides the book’s main theoretical innovation. Drawing inspiration from scholarship on corporatism and state–business relations, the authors depart from traditional understandings of corporatism as a system in which the state incorporates and controls social interests through formal organizations. Instead, popular corporatism describes a dynamic relationship in which the state, corporations and citizens mutually shape digital governance outcomes. The state remains the dominant actor because it controls regulatory frameworks and political authority. Yet platform companies are not merely passive instruments. Their technical expertise, infrastructural capacity and access to user-generated data provide resources that allow them to negotiate with, and occasionally resist, state demands. Citizens influence governance indirectly through their platform practices, creating a “bottom line” that constrains corporate strategies and shapes broader governance outcomes.

This argument makes an important contribution to theories of platform governance. Existing research often conceptualizes platforms either as commercial intermediaries governed primarily by market incentives or as political instruments controlled by states. Stockmann and Luo instead position platforms as political-economic actors embedded within governance systems. Their analysis suggests that platform power does not simply derive from technological infrastructure or market dominance; it emerges from platforms’ capacity to mediate relationships between governments and citizens. In authoritarian contexts, this creates a distinctive tension: states rely on platforms to pursue governance objectives, while platforms rely on user participation and trust to sustain their commercial models.

The empirical chapters demonstrate this argument through two cases: social media governance and commercial social credit systems. Chapters three to five examine how companies participate in governing platforms such as Weibo and how citizens’ engagement affects political outcomes. Rather than treating censorship as only a hierarchical process of state command, the authors reveal a more complex governance arrangement shaped by commercial incentives, institutional bargaining, and user expectations. Their analysis of political trust suggests that citizens’ perceptions of openness and diversity in digital spaces are associated with greater trust in the state.

The second empirical section examines commercial social credit systems and extends the theoretical argument from communication platforms to data-driven governance. Chapters six to eight analyse the role of companies such as Alibaba and Tencent in developing commercial credit-rating systems and their relationship with state governance. The authors challenge deterministic accounts that portray social credit as a unified surveillance infrastructure. Instead, they demonstrate how commercial actors have contributed to systems initially shaped by market logics and consumer incentives. Citizens’ participation, however, depends on how they understand the relationship between data sharing, convenience and potential political consequences. Digital governance therefore appears as a negotiated process rather than a simple extension of state power.

The book’s greatest strength lies in moving beyond binary interpretations of Chinese digital politics. It avoids both portraying China as an exceptional surveillance state and assuming that digital participation necessarily leads to political liberalization. Nevertheless, popular corporatism raises important theoretical questions. While the authors convincingly demonstrate that companies and citizens possess agency within digital governance, the asymmetry of power among the three actors remains profound. Negotiation does not necessarily imply a redistribution of political authority or meaningful constraints on state power, as platform resistance may reflect commercial interests, user preferences or institutional incentives, rather than broader political autonomy. Future research could further examine when negotiated governance generates substantive limits on authoritarian authority and when it instead serves as an adaptive mechanism of authoritarian governance. Moreover, as digital regulation in China has become increasingly centralized under Xi Jinping, an important question for future research is whether the mechanisms identified by the book remain applicable in a context marked by stronger state intervention, geopolitical tensions and the growing strategic importance of digital sovereignty.

Overall, Governing Digital China is an important intervention into debates on digital governance and authoritarian politics. Its central insight is that contemporary digital governance is shaped not only by state control but also by negotiated relationships among governments, platforms and users. This argument provides a significant corrective to overly state-centric interpretations of China’s digital transformation. Meanwhile, the book raises broader theoretical questions about how scholars should conceptualize agency, power and adaptation in authoritarian digital societies. The concept of popular corporatism offers a productive framework for understanding China’s evolving digital order while inviting further research into when negotiated governance reflects meaningful forms of agency and when it functions as an adaptive strategy of authoritarian rule.