Digital technologies are becoming central to state power, reshaping how states pursue development, organize governance, and exercise authority. Yet much of the existing debate relies on quantitative or computational analyses that focus on abstract capacities, outcomes, or regime types, treating the state and its technological apparatus as relatively coherent wholes. What remains largely unopened is the black box of how the state actually operates in relation to digital technology—through what organizational processes, actor configurations, discursive strategies, and institutional frictions its ambitions are pursued and its governance enacted on the ground.

This conference takes a distinctive approach by foregrounding qualitative research. The fourteen papers assembled here draw on extensive fieldwork conducted across China and beyond—a methodological commitment reflecting a shared conviction that understanding the state's relationship to digital technology requires getting inside the institutions, relationships, and everyday practices that constitute it. The conference is also deliberately interdisciplinary and geographically diverse. Our contributors span sociology, political science, public policy, anthropology, communication, and business, and are based at institutions across four continents—bringing together analytical lenses that capture dimensions of digital development no single disciplinary or national vantage point could illuminate alone?

The papers are organized around two interconnected but analytically distinct dimensions of state–technology relations. The first concerns the state as a developer of digital technologies. Moving beyond abstract accounts of industrial policy or innovation capacity, the conference examines how digital development is produced through concrete institutional arrangements—venture capital ecosystems, cross-border coordination, and forms of experimentation, among others—that are often visible only through qualitative inquiry. The second dimension examines the state as a user and governor of digital technology. Digital tools are frequently imagined as instruments that enhance control and coordination, yet close-up examination reveals how governing through digital systems can generate salient advantages along with new frictions, burdens, and vulnerabilities within the state itself.

By bringing these two dimensions into dialogue through empirically grounded, interdisciplinary, and internationally situated research, this conference seeks to advance a deeper understanding of digital statecraft and political economy in China and beyond—one attentive to the organizational complexities, contradictions, and contingencies that macro-level accounts tend to obscure.