Panel 3: Digital Tools and the Transformation of State Institutions

May 8, Afternoon Session

Chair:

Jack Linzhou Xing, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University

Discussant:

Xueguang Zhou, Department of Sociology, Stanford University

Xiaobo Lü, Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley

3.1  Disciplining the Discipliners:How Digital Tools Intensified Intra-Bureaucratic Control in China

Yan Long, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley

Wei Luo, School of Governance, Peking University

Abstract

Digital governance is often understood as tools of surveillance and control directed at citizens. This article shifts the analytical focus inward, asking how digital tools reorganize authority, labor, and accountability within the state itself. Drawing on 130 interviews with government officers on China’s Zero-COVID campaign, we argue that digital technologies can undermine bureaucratic organizational capacity over time, even as they enhance the state’s ability to act upon society.

Through panoptic visibility generated as a spillover from citizen-facing platforms, turbocharged metricized accountability regimes, and multiplied reporting infrastructures, officials were systematically transformed into human infrastructural interfaces responsible for making fragmented technologies function in practice. Hierarchical authority operated less through centralized supervision than through the asymmetric assignment of responsibility for system performance, compelling front-line government workers to absorb uncertainty, reconcile contradictions, and bear blame.

This process generated four organizational consequences: the destruction of bureaucratic buffers that traditionally mediate between rules and practice; the displacement of substantive problem-solving with performative alignment to dashboards; the erosion of professional identity as officials were transformed into generic enforcement labor accountable to multiple principals; and chronic exhaustion that eroded organizational morale.

Together, these dynamics produced a paradoxical form of state power: a system that appeared omniscient and highly disciplined, yet was structurally brittle. Information flowed upward as compliance data, while ground-level knowledge failed to travel back, undermining learning and adaptability. By theorizing organizational dysfunction as a constitutive feature of digital governance, this article contributes to sociological debates on digital power and the organizational foundations—and limits—of contemporary state capacity.

3.2  To Comply or Not to Comply? Frontline Bureaucrats under Platform Authoritarianism

Jingyang Huang, School of Public Policy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Kellee S. Tsai, Department of Political Science, Northeastern University

Abstract

Non-electoral regimes rely heavily on bureaucracies to collect and process societal information to maintain authoritarian rule. As autocrats invest in digital administration technologies, an aspirational form of digitally centralized governance has emerged. Platform authoritarianism is dedicated to centralizing data resources, integrating decentralized data from bureaucracies, and using algorithms to enhance oversight of subordinate bureaucrats, enabling rapid responses to citizens’ demands and preemptive repression of dissent.

Through field research on big data surveillance platforms across different administrative entities in China from 2020 to 2024, this paper empirically demonstrates that an ostensibly idealized centralized data governance model cannot, in practice, solve information problems or organizational resource contradictions. Lower-level officials, especially street-level bureaucrats, exhibit different coping behaviours in response to the administrative burden generated by the surveillance system.

This paper develops a typology of the algorithmic compliance behavior of street-level bureaucrats and argues that two factors—the clarity of the political mandates introduced into the monitoring system and the employee’s expectation of the severity of consequences for disobedience—influence these frontline government agents’ compliance choices.

3.3  Culture as Finance: From News Media to Data Infrastructures

Angela Xiao Wu, School of Communication, New York University

Abstract

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, Chinese official discourse increasingly cast culture in financial terms—as an intangible asset with scalable growth potential. State-operated cultural organizations were pushed through incorporation, financialization, and targeted state-capital infusion (a hallmark of industrial policy treatment), in a reform cycle far more compressed than the decades-long restructuring of industrial SOEs. These developments raise questions for regulators and scholars alike: How does state control over the ideologically sensitive culture sector change when refracted through ownership structures and financial instruments? Once reorganized as a profit—rather than a cost—center, what viable mechanisms exist for generating revenue? And what practices or values are sidelined or transformed in the process?

This study investigates these questions by examining the most sensitive segment of the cultural domain—newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations, collectively referred to as the news media (or simply, media). In doing so, it reveals how this sector has, largely unintentionally, transitioned into the provision of data infrastructure for purposes of social governance.

The archival materials analyzed span from 2000—when “culture industry” first entered policy discourse and sporadic, informal financialization began—through 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the broader economy. Sources include policies and regulations and their surrounding rhetoric, financial statements and disclosures, industry yearbooks in advertising, accounting, and state-asset management, as well as public interviews, memoirs, and media coverage.

By tracing the delineation, creation, and transformation of media SOEs, the study challenges prevailing and abstractly generalizing accounts of cultural capitalization and neoliberalization. It situates Chinese media—typically approached through a narrow focus on semantic censorship—within the broader history of SOE reform, while contributing to that scholarship by foregrounding the evolving political economy of intangible goods. Ultimately, it highlights the path dependency of Chinese digital statecraft, locating key infrastructural foundations in the propaganda system.