This edited volume addresses a central question in current debates on digital governance: should the developments of automated decision-making (ADM) in China be viewed as outgrowths of its distinct party-state structure, or as pioneering cases of ADM applications whose study can inform the general debate about ADM’s impacts? The editors argue against both, proposing instead that “China should neither be treated as an exception nor as a new universal model, but as a context that challenges existing frameworks” (p. 29). The ten chapters that follow examine a diverse set of digital governance initiatives in China, involving both state and non-state actors.
The question mark in the book’s title already signals that its contributors undertake genuinely open-ended deep dives into their respective research objects. Rather than presenting just how technologically advanced governance in the People’s Republic has become, the chapters address the limitations of ADM, mixed public perceptions of digital technologies, and the spaces where advanced technology is suspected but not, in fact, present. Chapter two, by Xin Dai, offers a legal perspective that highlights ADM failures and underscores the value of studying them through localized approaches. The following chapters examine the paradoxical role of blockchain systems in China’s digital governance ambitions (Warwick Powell), the country’s “smart courts”, which promise efficiency and deliver a strengthening of Party control in the judiciary (Fan Yang), and public responses to the use of facial recognition technology at the gates of residential compounds in Shanghai (Xin Gu, Gavin Smith, Neil Selwyn, Mark Andrejevic and Chris O’Neill). In chapter six, Haemin Jee provides an empirically grounded, myth-debunking account of China’s social credit system from a political science perspective, while Anne-Christine Trémon in chapter seven analyses points systems in Shenzhen for allocating public goods and their legitimization through “scientificness.” Chapters eight and nine explore, respectively, how the state uses practices of social sorting to suppress queer activism (Ausma Berno) and how it regulates the pricing algorithms used by online platform companies (Haiqing Yu and Xuanzi Xu). The final chapter, by Peter Yu, discusses the “algorithmic divide” and distinguishes it from the digital divide in the Chinese context.
The volume makes a timely intervention in a literature that has often oscillated between dystopian and utopian interpretations of digital governance in China. Many earlier contributions focused on highly advanced yet exceptional cases of technological applications, overstating their scope while ignoring that fact that most people in China have little or no direct contact with them. Some attribute to these technologies a transformative power that remains empirically unsubstantiated. The trope of the fully automated techno-Orient exerts the same odd attraction as the older narratives portraying China as part of an exotic and backward Orient. As a result, the debate frequently conflates political propaganda with actual developments, and in the China case, produces an imaginary of a tech-enabled authoritarian state. The reality, however, is one marked by contrasts, fragmentation and tensions. The interests of technology companies, local governments, sectoral regulators and Party organs often compete and conflict. The book provides a bouquet of timely and well-founded insights into both functioning and failing instances of ADM in China.
Contributions stem from a range of disciplines including political science, law, sociology, philosophy and anthropology, among others. Ongoing debates in the social sciences and legal studies about automated governance’s impacts increasingly emphasize the need for interdisciplinary approaches, and this volume demonstrates the particular value of China studies in providing such methodological and disciplinary breadth. As an exploratory collection of case studies on ADM in both governance and commercial processes in China, the book does not (aim to) deliver a coherent and systemic discussion of key concepts. ADM has become somewhat of a catch-all term under which a wide range of digital governance ambitions are discussed. In this book these include points systems, facial recognition systems, price discrimination algorithms of platform companies, and smart court applications for streamlining judicial decision making. These matters have little in common, which limits the volume’s capacity for sustained theoretical synthesis. Nonetheless, the book provides an important step toward greater conceptual clarity by underscoring that ADM applications have no inherent, objective characteristics that themselves shape society. Rather, the value-laden, culture-shaped design decisions behind them do. ADM applications are contingent on the social, cultural, political and economic environments in which they are developed and deployed, and any study of their impact must remain sensitive to these contextual factors.
Despite this general sensitivity to context, the quality of the individual contributions varies, and some chapters contain questionable claims. Notably, the editors’ assertion that people “turn into data subjects” (p. 18) is hardly tenable. Even when they are algorithmically profiled, people remain people. Similarly, the claim that China’s social credit system blacklists individuals for having low social credit scores (p. 17) is misleading; in practice, being blacklisted may affect the scores, but not the other way around. One chapter describes facial recognition technology as an “integral component” (p. 96) of the social credit system, contrary to near consensus in the literature that facial recognition barely features in social credit system projects.
Overall, the volume succeeds in its stated aim of using China not simply as a point of contrast with Western experiences, but as a productive site for examining the relationship between technology and governance more generally. The contributions are timely and of interest to scholars of PRC politics, but also digital governance, and science and technology studies. They lay important groundwork for further research. For teaching purposes, the case studies offer effective entry points to discussing a range of abstract fears, risks and potentials of ADM technologies in China and beyond in a grounded manner, sensitizing students to context contingencies of ADM as well as its diversity – even and especially in the People’s Republic of China.
