This informative and well-researched book aims to answer two related questions: how do digital platforms and big data reshape the dynamics and policy implementation in China, and conversely, how do implementation processes adapt to and influence technological change? These are complex, nuanced questions, and the book’s argument, that the answers are informed by a “technology-policy recursive loop,” is similarly multi-faceted. This loop is comprised of three main elements: digital technology, which the book defines primarily as big data and digital platforms; industrial policy and regulatory policy. Geopolitical shifts exert an influence on industrial and regulatory policies, which in turn produce a “digital amplification of fragmentation” that both shapes and is shaped by evolutions in digital technology, completing the cycle. Fragmented authoritarianism plays an important role in the book’s conception of governance and policymaking, with the book arguing convincingly that China’s digital governance represents a hodgepodge of competing and often poorly coordinated policy impulses and influences.

The book employs an economics-inflected, data-heavy but fundamentally qualitative research design. Its chief strengths are a wealth of data drawn from official and proprietary sources, including useful statistics on China’s cloud computing markets and the “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) sector. Though these data do not appear to be novel, they are useful as presented. More distinctive perhaps are a series of important insights on key features of China’s technology policy, such as an interpretation of tech industrial policy as driven by regulation rather than subsidy or other forms of policy support, and the distinctive views of China’s leaders on data as a factor of production. Some of the book’s most important insights moreover address the fundamental tension China’s policymakers face between encouraging growth and competitiveness in the tech sector and steering it to focus on strategic challenges, including chokepoint technologies. Crucial but under-recognized issues in this vein that Qian points to are how to integrate public and private data sources, the fragmentated landscape for China’s artificial intelligence sector created by its stringent data localization policies, and the extent to which China’s digital regulators have devolved regulation to a bewildering array of quasi-governmental and quasi-academic institutions, creating a hard-to-unravel regulatory landscape.

The picture of China’s tech sector that emerges from this detailed account is far more halting, confused and humble than is often portrayed in the West. Therein lie the main shortcomings of Governing China’s Digital Transformation. Bafflingly, the book barely mentions surveillance or government control of information. This is a shame, because it could be the book’s biggest contribution. The book presents convincing evidence that China’s tech policy is best understood as an exercise in struggling to maintain a semblance of central control and direction over a vastly complex and fragmented set of actors – not exactly the Panopticon often portrayed by foreign observers. This would be a useful perspective to inject into the academic literature on Chinese technology policy, but one the book fails to offer because it fails to engage with discourse on surveillance and censorship.

In a similar vein, Qian misses an opportunity to engage broader literatures in China studies, including political science and political economy, by passing up the chance to root China’s technology policy in broader trends in Chinese political development. The book’s focus on policy fragmentation is well-supported by evidence, but from a broader perspective not very interesting, since this has been the dominant framework in Western political science since the early 1980s. The book would have broader relevance had it sought to chart the evolution of key features of Chinese politics, such as nationalism and authoritarianism, in technology policy. This is regrettable because it would seem to provide good material: one of the book’s shrewdest moments comes when it observes that competition and antitrust policy has been employed as a regulatory cudgel against political opponents, for example.

In principle, Qian’s book should appeal to a broad range of readers in several fields, including those seeking commercial advantage from better understanding how China’s technology policy is made. In practice, readers thus motivated will be rewarded, but only with diligence: though logically structured, non-technical and informative, the book makes for occasionally tedious reading. It may be suitable as a secondary text for courses on China and technology policy, and it will certainly be of interest to scholars of this field in political science and other social science fields. Policymakers and business leaders can also find much to learn in this book, though not without some effort. Governing China’s Digital Transformation puts several important issues on the table when it comes to China’s technology policy, and it also leaves important questions for future work to take forward.