China’s Digital Civilization
Algorithms & Society series
Perhaps no country has gone further than China in setting up overt systematic tracking, surveillance and constant computational evaluation of its citizens. Everyday life is saturated with a pervasive digitization that affects social mobility, economic opportunities and personal freedoms. Global organizations operating in China have to take account of the ramifications of these systems for data protection within the CCP’s explicit project of forming a digital civilization.
Chapter 1 — “From Citizens to Users: The Algorithmic Turn in China’s Surveillance Apparatus” by Fan Liang and Leiyuan Tian– explores the new technological practices that have transformed how states acquire and analyze personal data, by examining the recent shifts in China’s citizen surveillance. The “algorithmic turn” uses interactive digital technology to move beyond the panopticon tradition that has dominated surveillance discourse. Now, citizens themselves are active users of surveillance platforms, generating personal data and monitoring their own and peers’ activities, as platform mechanisms like gamification are increasingly incorporated in China’s surveillance techniques. The new ‘participatory’ surveillance maintains the power imbalance between observer and watched, defining the new monitoring methods being developed by the state and the tech industry it increasingly, and more explicitly, controls. In this instance, bottom-up involvement by citizens is not freely participatory but limited to movement within strict power-hierarchy structures.
Chapter 2 — “The TikTok-ification of Chinese Society” by Yi Guo– observes that as the digital industry expands in Chinese socio-political settings, Chinese media culture and lifestyle are becoming more like TikTok.TikTok, which just surpassed Google as the most popular online platform, is considered by many as changing how social media operates in society. As a sign of China’s unfinished but continuous project of ‘digital civilization,’ the trends analyzed by the author help us envisage what the ramifications of this process may imply for China and the rest of the world. New concerns are emerging as many are prepared to accept the TikTok-ification of society as readily as they accept TikTok itself because of their familiarity with its interaction paradigms. This is a particularly worrying aspect of the problem that needs to be further researched. The TikTok-ification of Chinese culture is a form of “soft control” like that used by the government to preserve its popularity and position in people’s daily lives, establishing a more restrictive culture by making everyone more “transparent” to the authorities.
Chapter 3 — “Towards an Algorithmically Planned Economy: Data Policy and the Digital Restructuring of China” by Brett Aho– analyzes the acceleration in China’s digital growth that occurred after data was legally acknowledged as a production component in 2019. With a slew of new rules, the government is asserting its power over the IT sector and positioning itself to regulate the nation’s data flows. The government’s goals include boosting data supply and its circulation as it hastens a move from high-speed to high-quality economic growth. Data supervision is increasingly crucial to the creation of China’s Social Credit System, a novel regulatory framework that algorithmically coordinates aspects of general economic activity. China has taken unprecedented moves to govern how emerging technologies are integrated into society, and its non-democratic, authoritarian power systems have allowed it to shape its data revolution ahead at a faster pace than in most countries.
Acknowledgment
The chapter summaries here have in places drawn from the authors’ chapter abstracts, the full versions of which can be found in Routledge’s online reference for the volume.
