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- [00:01]
A
Support for this podcast comes from Progressive, America's number one motorcycle insurer. Did you know? Riders who switch and save with Progressive save nearly $180 per year. That's a whole new pair of riding gloves and more. Quote Today Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $178 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between October 2022 and September 2023. Potential savings will vary. Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from my home in Beijing. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. It's also the university from which my daughter graduates in May, so I'm very, very happy. The Seneca Podcast is and will remain free. But if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. I'm still looking for new institutional support and the lines are open. You can reach me@senecapodmail.com or just at my first last namemail.com and listeners, please support my work by becoming a ping subscriber@senecapodcast.com seriously, help me out. I know there are a lot of excellent substacks out there. I subscribe to very many of them and they do start to add up. But I think this one delivers serious value for your hard earned dollars. So please do subscribe. Help me continue to bring you these conversations. Over the past decade, China's digital transformation has produced two sharply divergent narratives. One celebrates technological dynamism, sprawling platform ecosystems, ubiquitous mobile payments, smart cities and AI ambition, dancing robots or robots doing kung fu. The other, of course, warns of tightening authoritarian control, algorithmic censorship, surveillance, the ever misunderstood social credit system. Both narratives contain truth, but taken on their own, I think either alone obscures a deeper question. How does an authoritarian state govern a digital ecosystem that it does not fully own, can never fully control, and yet fundamentally depends on for growth, for data, even for legitimacy? You could argue that is the question at the heart of Governing Digital China. A new book that examines the triangular relationship between the Chinese state, major platform companies and ordinary Internet users So rather than treating firms as mere instruments of party control or treating citizens as just passive subjects of surveillance, the book argues for a much more complex equilibrium, one that's shaped by bargaining incentives, institutional constraints, and what the authors call popular corporatism. The book has two main parts, one on the big social media platforms and the other on this social credit system, which, as I've just suggested, many of my listeners also know is just something that is endlessly debated about which many nonsensical ideas remain in the world. We are going to hopefully set the record straight today. So listeners may remember that one of today's guests, Daniela Stockman. Danny joined sinica back in December 2014. My God, that's a long time ago. To discuss her earlier book, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China. In that work, she examined how the Chinese state maintained political control even as it embraced market driven media platforms. A paradox that has only deepened, I think, in the platform era. So Danny is now a professor of digital governance at the Herti School in Berlin and really one of the leading scholars working on the intersection of Chinese politics and the digital transformation. She is joined by her co author, Ting Luo. Luo Ting, who is Associate professor in Government and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham. Ting's research focuses on political behavior, public opinion and digital governance in authoritarian contexts. And she brings rigorous survey and quantitative analysis to this project. Granted grounding the book's claims in unusually rich empirical evidence about how Chinese citizens actually experience social media governance and the social credit system. Danny Stockman and Ting Luo, welcome to Seneca. It's great to have you both here. Danny, welcome back.
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B
Thank you so much. It's great to be back on the show.
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C
Thank you.
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A
Danny, first question to you. You guys opened the book with what you call the digital dilemma. On the one hand, digital platforms definitely drive enormous economic value innovation, you know, mobile payments, which are just so advanced in China, financial inclusion, really, you know, micro finance and things like that. Data for urban governance, and of course, even tools that the state can use to monitor public sentiment and opinion or health. On the other hand, those same technologies can lower coordination costs, they can accelerate information or disinformation flows, they. They can amplify dissent or organize collective action which is threatening to the state. Can you walk us through that tension, maybe more concretely? What are the key benefits that the party state gets from digitalization and what are the political risks that make it a genuine dilemma rather than just kind of a problem that needs to be managed?
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B
Yeah, so this term digital dilemma is actually not A term that Ting or I coined. It was coined by Phil Howard at the Oxford Internet Institute and his co authors. And so as you correctly described, there's this tension inherent in digital technology that on the one hand it really allows for collective action, meaning organizing yourselves, learning more about other people's opinions, but then also potentially taking political action on them. So we see of course not only in China, but if you remember Arab Spring for example, Facebook, Twitter at the time featured extremely prominently in the uprisings in the Middle East. And so that's kind of, I think the perception of threat amongst the Chinese leadership, as in many other countries is of course this potential destabilizing element of digital technology, which by the way is also not even specific to authoritarian states. I mean now you mentioned I'm now based in Berlin, so I'm talking to German but also European policymakers. And they also feel really, at this moment in time also feel really deeply threatened by the potential of misinformation, online hate speech, potential distrust that social especially are associated with social media these days. But then at the same time there's also this great dependency and you can really sense that in conversations with policymakers across, I think I would say really across different types of political systems. So I've heard this in China, but I've also heard this here in Europe. You're dependent on developing further digital economy, especially now with the growth of AI, of course. And so you cannot just simply shut down, I mean maybe you can temporarily shut down the Internet as some states in the world are constantly showing us, but not long term because you also need these infrastructures in order to develop the economy. And so there is this, this inherent tension is what's called the digital dilemma.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. Very well described here. Ting to you, a lot of outside observers would still describe China's digital governance in pretty straightforward terms. The party sets the rules, platform companies just have to comply. Users have to operate within any boundaries that are imposed. That kind of command and control, top down framing is how most people, I would say outside of China probably conceive of how digital China actually works. Based on your research, where does that model, where does that heuristic, where does that fall short? What are we missing if we treat firms as, as just mere instruments of the state rather than as actors with their own constraints, but also with their own incentives and their own bargaining power?
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C
Yeah, that's a good question. So generally I think these command control sort of perspective of China's digital government, you can see that there meets a lot of nuance and actually does not really describe what's going on in China, especially in digital tech knowledge, for example social media, Internet or AI. Because those areas that require the expertise, require technological know how and require also to manage, you know, to a chat user. And that's precisely where the state does not have all the expertise or resources to do it.
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A
Right.
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C
And also state also doesn't have the mindset to run, you know, social media platform or to actually manage the system. So they will have to require the company or rely on the company to help them to build such, you know, a digital economy or digital ecosystem. And then in that ecosystem you will also see for the platform company like, you know, Tankson Sing available for example, they, they have a business to run, they have a business model that's built on a checking user, right? And they will have to attend those user, they will be able to engage them or stick them to the platform. So in this way you can see this is actually a much more complex, you know, relationship between three actors. Here you have the state, you have the company, you also have the citizen. And here in our model, the state, the sort of popular cognizant, we see that the state is still sitting in the driving seat, that setting the direction. But State does not necessarily know how to do it. So they require the company to build such a system. And then for the company they will require on user because the user is basically is part of their business model. They have to generate money, they have to generate revenue from that model. And in the same time the company also have to meet the demand of the state. So you can see the state as a sort of very dedicated actor connecting the state with the citizen and the state. The sort of platform company also have to tailor to what we call the bottom line of the user. And here we are not talking about each individual user, we're talking about the average user. Because if a user not happy with the platform, they're going to move away, they're going to move to other platform. So they will have to sort of very dedicated, manage the balance between, you know, the stage with demands and the users.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. And it's something very familiar for me because, you know, for many years I was director of international communications for Baidu and I always got asked about this very question about how are we able in any way to negotiate? I mean, how are we able to keep the interests of the user? I reminded people, nobody who works for any of these big digital platforms. And of course Baidu wasn't a major social media player, but nobody labored under the illusion that users prefer just a completely censored experience. Of course they don't. Right. So there's always some room for negotiation. Danny, you and Ting propose a different way of understanding this relationship. And Ting just used this word, popular corporatism. It's not just state and firms, but a triangle, like I said, that also includes netizens, ordinary users. Can you explain exactly what you mean by that term? Maybe work on what Ting already said. What distinguishes popular corporatism from the more maybe familiar idea of digital authoritarianism? And why was it so important for you guys to foreground the role of users in this model?
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B
On the second question, that's a really great question. Maybe I start with that.
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A
Yeah, great.
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B
So I think Ting and my motivation of writing this book was very much based on trying to give the user perspective because there's a lot of research now on Chinese censorship, focusing a lot on all the different ways, what we call the top down mechanisms through which the Chinese state actually tries to influence what is permitted to talk about on social media in China. And so in this perspective, of course users, you know, user data or user content is being used. But by just looking at the social media data, you, of course you, you lose the perspective of all the people we call the lurkers, people who don't express their opinions online. We call them the discussants. But you could also just, just talk, think about them as the producers of data. So some people are kind of producing information online. It can be, you know, content, you know, comments, writing, posting, forwarding information on social media, but it can also be, in case of the social credit system, for example, creating financial data. So some people produce these data, but actually the very last, the vast majority of online users are people who, they're not passive, but they kind of engage with this content, they read it and they think about it, but they don't necessarily express their views online or they don't, they're not extremely actively circulating their financial data. And so we were really interested in kind of filling in this, this black box of how users, including those lurkers in China, how they actually see the system. And so we've conducted a tremendous amount of interviews with about 100 Internet users in different provinces, different levels of education, you know, differences in gender, age and so forth. And then later we developed this survey which is, I think we can talk about that a little bit later. It's the last nationally representative public opinion survey we've put in political questions on China that China scholars, to my knowledge, were able to do. So we were really motivated by trying to fill in this black box. And so that's why in our story, users play an important role. But then to go back to the initial question that you posed, you know, what is popular corporatism? I think I need to go back to this question of sort of state and the state and technologies first. So, so when we talk about popular corporatism, there's one element which is the corporatism part. And so of course many other researchers have to describe these control mechanisms through which the Chinese state is imposing limits on, for example, regarding censorship on Chinese tech companies. But what we add to the story are the bottom up mechanisms are mechanisms through which the Chinese state becomes dependent on these tech companies and therefore they become what we call consultants and insiders. And so basically consultancy happens when tech firms are trying to make a profit by using their data in order to provide services to the state. And they do that, for example by giving advice and serving as consultants towards local governments in China when they have, you know, they have, for example, propaganda campaigns that they want to run on Sina Weibo. There's a, for example in the book we talk about Fujian as one example where the Fujian local government wants to emphasize its achievements in the city and also emphasize what this CCP has done. And then they don't know, they lack the knowledge of doing it themselves as Ting mentioned earlier. And so they rely on CINA in this particular case. But you know, also Tencent is very important here, mostly Cina and Tencent in order to give them advice about how to do this in practice. And it is through this consultancy that the tech companies or the employers working for the tech companies then also become influential because they start to copy co design the content of how to do these propaganda campaigns. And they may also express their opinions in terms of, you know, this is not going to work, but this is, you know, you better do it another way. That's consultancy. Becoming an insider goes even further. So becoming an insider means that the state itself starts to rely on your infrastructure in order to provide government services. And so this insider relationship means that that's a different degree, that's an even stronger degree of dependency. And it creates a leverage on the side of the tech company to resist certain kinds of policies. So in the book we have a number of examples that we give and Ting can talk about the social credit system where there's actual cases of resistance. Maybe before we move back to the users, maybe Ting wants to jump in here and give us an example of resistance in case of the social Credit.
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A
Yeah, let's stay with the platforms though and move to social credit later. But let's stay with if there are any examples about how users working either through platforms or directly were able to exert leverage in this kind of popular corporatist structure.
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C
Ting you mean to resistant from user from platform? I think just like.
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A
Yeah, from users or from platforms? I think both. Both are interesting to me here.
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B
I'm thinking about the social credit system and the lack of collaboration on the side of Alibaba in particular. But also Tencent to share data maybe Ting you want to.
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C
I think we can start with the platform first. So we do have an example in the social credit system cases in there you would see that the state actually now I'll start with a bigger picture. So for the social credit system from the state's perspective, you know, they want to be a sort of overarching social credit system that stay on that have a central database that can host all the data.
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A
Hey, you know what? I don't want to get too much into the social credit system without laying a lot of groundwork for what it isn't. Is there any example that you can go for that is strictly just in terms from the first half of the book of platform companies?
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B
Yeah. So for example, for example we. We can show that companies that have this insider relationship, for example Cina has one. Cina is even though Cina only has about 20% of of users compared to WeChat of course, which is. Which is way more popular. Right. We discovered through our survey that basically 99% of Chinese Internet users are on Wein or WeChat. I mean that's a huge monopoly. But besides, you know, but besides that, you know, some smaller platforms can actually develop these insider relationships as well, mostly because they have users that are more prone towards organizing themselves and have this collective action potential.
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A
So Sina Way Boy is one of them for sure. And what are some of the other ones?
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B
Very important one. So that I. So in the book we mostly found evidence for Sina Weibo being one and then, and then Wei it's so basically Tencent and Cine Weor are the. The key companies that have this inside relationship with respect to a public opinion guide with D guidance. But so to give you an concrete example. So from the user perspective this is how we do this. So we look at survey data and then we ask users about their perceptions of various platforms in terms of what they observe in terms of deletion of information themselves. And then we can show in the book that from the User perspective, they discover that platforms like Sina, Weibo and also Wei Xin tend to be less censored. This is of course their personal experience, but I think it's a very valuable experience compared to other platforms.
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A
Interesting. So just lack of censorship seems to correlate with insider status, you're saying?
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B
I wouldn't say it's completely lack of censorship.
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A
No, no, of course. A reduction of.
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B
It's a reduction of censorship, yes.
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A
While we're on the subject of the survey, I'd love to hear more about it, about your methodology, how you designed and how you executed this survey. Because that's very interesting to me. So Ting, I know you were deeply involved in doing this. Can you talk a little bit about how you designed it, how you implemented it and what some of the really interesting findings were?
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C
Yeah. So I think I will start with how we design it. I think like Stanley mentioned earlier that I think the design process, it was took us so many years to really come up with these final surveys. And I think here I can also share something interesting as well along the design process. So we have interview about 92 Internet user and also 30 something experts to come up with the question in the survey because we want to be able to ask those questions that user or people feel comfortable to answer. But we also want to be able to answer a question that we are interested. So for example, here I can give you just one example how we design those questions. When we ask people, we are interested in how people see what do they think is politics. And you know, in Chinese politics can be very sensitive. And if you ask that directly, Nissa, we're going to get you very far.
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A
Sure.
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C
So then from our interview we figured out that the best way to talk about actually when people talk about politics, they are talking about, you know, I think in Chinese we call so it's basically social hot topics or international news. And we figure out that the term, when they use it in the interview, they sort of think this is equivalent to politics. So I think this is one way to give a sense of how we design the survey. So we through the interview we're able to find, you know, find the right term of frame that we can use in our survey so we can desensitize the question and can, you know.
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A
I see, I see. That's very clever. Yeah, yeah.
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C
And can also increase our responsibility.
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A
Ah.
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C
And I think this is designed as how we design the survey.
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B
Right.
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C
I think when it comes to implement our survey, we, it's a national representative survey and we work with A research institute in China. We are not able to of course, release their name, but what we've done together to implement the survey and what we do is a GPS sampling. So GPS sampling is actually not something we develop. It is developed by, I think Professor Pierre Landry and Shanming. They're from Michigan initially. Right. And so in this GPS sampling, basically what we do is compared to traditional survey method. You basically take out the list. You know, in China we have this household registration, the list, Google registration. Right. And you take out the list and list local resident and you sample them and you go to their residence and to interview them to do the survey. But the problem with that is in China we have internal, a high percentage of internal migration. Those people who have their hukou register in their rural area, but they don't actually live there. So if you use those registration, you're going to miss about 30% of those population.
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A
Yeah.
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C
So then we do instead GPS sampling. You can see that as taking the map of China and we partition the map into small square, a little square, and then you actually do the GPS sampling to locate those building and find those you only go to, let's say, I'm using a very simple example to demonstrate how this works. So you basically use GPS sampling to do random sampling on those location and then you go to the actual building. Once you build those building, you go to the actual building and to interview those people. And these people are those actually living there and they might not be registered. So I think in this way we are able to reach those people who are, we call rural migrants. They don't register in the city area, but they live there.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And in our survey, about 20 something, I remember 25 or 28% actually who can be classified as rural migrant.
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A
I see. Yeah. So this is a much more accurate way to do it. And still, I mean, I think when most people think about the difficulty of conducting social science survey in China, it sounds like you had a reputable partner that you were able to do this through. But still, this is talking about one of the most sensitive topics that you could possibly broach. So how did you. It still sounds like quite an accomplishment to be able to do this even with a relatively small sample size. That's a huge thing. And it also sounds very expensive. I mean, to actually have people on the ground going to these individual grid spots on the GPS survey map and actually conducting in person surveys. This must have been a very, very time consuming, very, very expensive undertaking.
- [26:11]
B
It absolutely was. And also we had to, on top of that we had to delay the survey three or four times because we got information that it wasn't the right time. And until the day it was run, we weren't sure whether the survey was actually going to field. And since then, these kind of surveys have stopped. So in Chinese politics, we have been able to conduct lots of these surveys up until 2018, which is when this survey was conducted. But since then, even also researchers in China who don't work together with foreigners, they can do GPS sampling surveys, but not on political topics. So we have, in the survey, we, of course, we talk about political discussion online. We also talk about political trust in our view, not, you know, highly sensitive topics. I mean, in the past these were not completely fine to ask, but no longer, you know, this, this, this is no longer the case.
- [27:19]
A
Yeah, yeah. Ting, your survey makes a distinction between, as Danny said earlier, between lurkers and discussants. So people who just are mostly just sort of consumers of information online versus those who actually actively post and comment. So what is so important about this distinction? What does it tell us about how especially political information circulates in China's digital spaces and about how the state and platforms think about risk with respect to these two different groups?
- [27:51]
C
That's a, that's an interesting question. Now I think the first, firstly, I think we, I think it's not just in China generally there is a, I think it's 1991 rule. So basically almost in any social media online platform, 90% of them don't post anything. They are the silent majority. And then 9% maybe post something occasionally and only 1% that are the edit, so they use etic, sort of a content producer or any online platform. That's one of the general rule that you also see, I mean, everywhere, not just in China. So I think here we want to make a distinction because we want to know what's the silent majority? Who are those? Asylum majority, what are they like, you know, what do they think about, for example, censorship on these social media platform? Because they are the majority. If you look at the number, right, if number matters, they are the majority. And I think we do find that, I can't remember exactly the number, but we do also find in China, yes, the majority are just the silent majority.
- [28:50]
A
Yeah, just broadly speaking, when you look at the lurkers versus the discussants, who perceives that there's more space for discussion? Is it the lurkers who think there's more space or is it the discussants who think that there's more space for discussion?
- [29:05]
B
There's no as far as I remember, it doesn't correlate with your user activity and it's also so, so, so basically the more active users, they don't differ that much from the lurkers in terms of their perceptions and also in terms of their preferences. As far as, as I remember, maybe, maybe ting you, you, you have the numbers on top of, of your head.
- [29:32]
A
Yeah. The reason I ask is because that number isn't in, in the book that, that it wasn't. That was one that immediately leapt to mind that I would think that it would be a significant difference. If I had to have guessed, my hypothesis would have been that passive users perceive more space, whereas the people who actually experience the heavy hand of censorship, they would experience less space. But that's interesting that you find very little measurable difference. But Danny, one of the really striking findings is that users who do perceive more space for discussion on platforms like WeChat or on Sino Weibo, they actually report higher levels of political trust, of trust in the central government, at least that. I mean, it makes sense to me. It runs though against, I think probably the intuition that tighter controls automatically produce more stability. How should we understand that relationship? I mean, you said, like you said, political trust is something that you used to be able to pretty openly survey for in China. So that's something we do actually have quite a bit. I think it's, it's an interesting finding that people who perceive higher levels of openness also perceive higher levels of trust. Is, is that correct?
- [30:47]
B
Absolutely. Because. Because essentially, so what we discovered, and this is the. So earlier I talked about this corporatism side of the story. But the popular element of the story is the relationship between the firm and the users and the dependency of the firm on user activity in order to create data. And the data itself is extremely valuable for the firm, not only in order to develop services that they can then also sell to, for example, governments, but also in order to develop new products. So you know this better than we do because you have all the insider information from your time at Baidu. And so therefore we also looked into what are the preferences of users in terms of space, online space for political expression, and also in terms of their privacy. And very interestingly, we discovered that the majority, of course there's a variation inside China, as you know, anywhere else, but the majority of the Chinese public, which we think we captured very well in the survey, prefers more space for political expression and also has preferences for privacy protection, which kind of also doesn't confirm very much with some of the stories. You oftentimes hear about China where lots of people say, oh, you know, these Chinese users, they just don't care so much about privacy.
- [32:23]
A
But anyway, all the time.
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B
Yeah, so. So interestingly, it is then because there is this, this bias, I would say, amongst the Chinese public, which the firms know from experience, because they, they don't. I think it's more that they learn by means of testing their products. They kind of adjust to, indirectly to these preferences. And so that means that sometimes when, when the state's interests are at odds with user preferences, the firm may have an incentive, they have a motivation. Whether they act on it is another question. But they definitely have a motivation to resist if they have these insider relationships. And it is through then this sort of negotiation that that China addresses the digital dilemma precisely because these insider relationship firms, they then through, there's kind of a communication process that happens between the companies and the state and therefore the state kind of readjusts somewhat towards user preferences. And that this is important for the reason that you just mentioned, because if Chinese Internet users, and now we're talking about also about the lurkers, the less active Internet users online, if they perceive the management of the Chinese Internet to be somewhat more open and more protective of their privacy, there is kind of an understanding that the Chinese government should be a moral government. This is, it goes a little bit also with Shi Tian Dians earlier work, who was a professor at Tsinghua University who was very interested in political culture. And so he also made this argument, and we also find some evidence of this in, in. In our examination of political trust in China, that in contrast to, for example, in Europe, political trust is very much based on procedure. So those citizens in Europe oftentimes consider just governance to be associated with correct, like just processes. And in China, it's very. A lot of other scholars have written about output orientation. So it's very much about, you know, delivering goods.
- [34:45]
A
Performance.
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C
Public performance.
- [34:47]
B
Exactly. Which is of course we also find confirmation of that in our data. But on top of that, there's also the expectation on the central government to be, to be, to have a kind of a moral behavior and to govern in favor of Lao Bai Xing of sort of ordinary folks. And therefore it is when users are experiencing this governance in practice to be more in line with at least the average user's preferences for more space for political expression, for more privacy protection, then they then it leads to. Or it's correlated with higher levels of political trust in the central government.
- [35:34]
A
Right. That's interesting. And I hope it's a lesson that the central government totally takes to heart because I think it would be very good for everyone and good for perception not just within its own populace, but perception abroad, which is something the Chinese government cares more and more about, it seems. But ting. So if we build on that finding if perceived space for discussion and protection of user privacy is associated with higher political trust, that to me suggests that some degree of openness shouldn't just be tolerated, but actually encouraged as quite functional for the system. In other words, partial liberalization in digital spaces maybe should be not just understood as a concession, but as just part of a governance strategy. Right?
- [36:21]
C
Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's one of the implications from our fighting as well. I think we, we see that. So partial liberation or partial openness on the Internet is actually help to boost region support and trust. And I think there are, there are many example in real life. If you look at recently what happened. I mean, for example, I just come to my mind, so what happened in the, you know, the fandom community, you know, people who worship certain celebrity, you know, in those areas, you see a lot of doxing campaign, you know, people who, who are, you know, using these censorship or regulation to support their celebrity and, and, and, and do this, what we call
- [37:03]
B
means, doxing means when.
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A
Yeah, I know what doxing means. I think, I think they all know this revealing the information where somebody lives.
- [37:11]
C
It was just off my brain just now.
- [37:14]
A
Okay, let's take it again. We'll erase that part. So do you have a good example of this?
- [37:20]
C
Yeah. So basically, for example, in fandom community they use how they recognize their power against rival fans or other celebrity. And this happened a lot in online community. And that's where you see that actually if stay informed censorship for those reasons, it can actually backlash. And that's to tell you why partial creation is very important. And those you have, you need a partial sort of liberation or those partial space or openness allow people to discuss, to compete on, you know, equal footing. Otherwise you will not have your trust from the citizen. I think that's a sort of. I think we didn't discuss those in our book, but this was something that recently I observed. And I think what we find there can actually support what's going on in China as well. Not just in what we discuss in the book.
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A
Listening, take notes.
- [38:12]
B
I mean, what I find so fascinating also because we didn't anticipate all of these relationships when we started the project, we were really guided by the empirical findings also to develop popular corporatism. But What I found really fascinating because I also like you Kaiser and like you Ting. I know for as well, I've oftentimes not only outside of China, but also inside China. Of course, you know, back in the days when, when I was able to talk openly with government officials, I've heard many times that kind of an anxiety or a fear of too much openness and therefore arguments justifying more control. But what I really found so fascinating about this, these empirical findings we have in the book is that actually yes, if, if China was going to move more in this direction and would actually become this, what, what is perceived outside as this total command and control big brother type of digital governance structure. Yes. Possibly China or the Chinese government could you know, increase control over its system citizens, but it wouldn't be as popular.
- [39:27]
A
Right, right, right.
- [39:28]
B
And I do think that the central government and all also, as far as I remember, all government officials I talk to, they do want, you know, they do care about China and they do want to be popular as all politicians do. And so I, so I find that connection sort of with the openness extremely fascinating.
- [39:53]
A
I completely agree with you. Yeah. Let's move on to the social credit system. I think we've really gone through your main, I think most significant finding about the platforms. The social credit system of course is, you know, it generates a lot of misunderstandings outside of China you still see that meme a lot, you know, oh, you know, minus 30 on your social credit score and stuff like this. So it's often described as this like single unit unified system that assigns every citizen a score and it governs their life accordingly. So based on you guys research, what is the social credit system actually? What are its main components and maybe just as importantly, what is it not? Ting, do you want to start with that one?
- [40:36]
C
Okay, so what is and what is not? I think it's obviously not what outside of China what people portrays like in the, you know, it's a system that can control everyone, can monitor everyone.
- [40:49]
A
The black mirror version, right?
- [40:51]
C
Exactly. It's definitely not the black mirror version. And so what is it? So in China, the state of course want to build sort of all encompassing credit system that can monitor, that can discipline people's behavior. And you have also need to look into what happened before social credit system. We don't have the credit system or the sort of sort of cross credit rating system like in the west. So we won't have anyway especially after the clock of the, you know, these. In the past you have the Dangan system, but now we don't have that. At least Dangan system is no longer important anymore. Right. The down an system is where you manage people. You have the audit record, you know what's going on. But now you don't have that anymore as well because people's movement and migration.
- [41:36]
A
Yeah. Maybe just one quick note just to explain what the Dangan system is. Just for those of you who don't know. I mean it's this old system whereby you know, linked to your actual residence status and to where you are in school or where you were employed. You have a personal file that is kept and it goes from place to place with you. And it's sort of a permanent record of all your movements and all stuff. The Dungan system has long since more or less collapsed.
- [42:01]
C
Yes, that's right. So then I think then you have to see the social credit for that background. If you see that, you will understand that it's a way to. For the state to manage the people's movement, manage their behavior. Especially you know, there's so many financial scam, you know, in the past and also these bad behavior, then people can, you know, people who break rule and regulation can just, you know, bear no consequences. So I think a better way to understand social credit system is a system that try to re establish order social orders. I think that that how I would see it. But then of course throughout all the years it has changed. So now if you look at social credit system, we in our book we see it as two systems, right? Two different subsystems. We have the financial part that's similar to the west, the financial credit system. But you also have the political and social aspect where it's mostly run by local government, where they are mostly focused on regulated people's behavior, especially now financial behavior. So I think if you look at social credit broadly, that's the two different part of it, right.
- [43:07]
A
And there's also a lot of conflation with a couple of other things. One is these commercially run credit systems like Sesame Credit that's run through the Alibaba system. And then the other area of conflation is these court orders. Maybe you can clarify and tweeze that apart and explain what role commercial systems like Sesame Credit play and what role things like court orders play, blacklists, you know, court blacklists and things like that from the judicial.
- [43:39]
C
So I think the judicial system is mostly belong to the political part of the system where the court system are looking into regulate people's behavior, especially how they they are by they following or complying to the court ruling. But then the commercial part is mostly related to financial transaction. But in our book I think we find evidence they are a way to connect them nowadays. So for the court ruling, especially those relate to financial transaction, social credit system and especially all these companies like Tencent Alipay, they are also working with the court system to inform those financial ruling related financial transaction. So does that make sense? You can see them.
- [44:25]
A
Yeah, Give some examples maybe of the sorts of court rulings that might result in a connection to your other financial records. For example, I mean we're talking about, for example, if you are sued in a court of law and you are found to be liable and you have to pay say 50,000 yuan to a company or to another party to a plaintiff, until you have paid that off, you might have for example, your ability to travel restricted.
- [44:52]
C
Yeah, that's right. And that's going to be informed. Part of it is going to be informed by, for example, WeChat Pay and Alipay. So their system nowadays, people using WeChat Pay and Alipay more than using their bank for transactions. So I think that's part that you can see the connection between them. But mostly at the moment, all these sort of commercial, all these platform company that are involving social credit system. In our case, that's tanks and mostly Tankson and, and Alipay. Right. And they are at the moment only involved as far as we farm, only involved in this aspect of the, the political system of the social credit system. Right. So they only involve in court ruling that's has any financial aspect of it, but they are not involving as far as V5. We have no evidence suggesting that they are providing data for the state to manage people's political behavior or to monitor their political behavior. And I think that's also related to our part of our argument as well as we find this company, they worry about their user, so they are cautious about sharing those data with the state. So they're not helping the state to do, for example, political monitor.
- [46:06]
A
It's exactly the same dilemma that you described when we were talking about platform companies then. Danny, turning to you, one of the things that stood out in your findings is that financial incentives, access to loans or deposits, consumer perks, discounts and things like that, they seem to matter far more for participation in these commercial credit systems than the perks seem to outweigh their concerns over privacy in participating in systems like Sesame Credit. What does that tell us about how the social credit system functions in practice? And does it maybe complicate the way that we often talk about surveillance and consent in the context of China.
- [46:49]
B
So we found some evidence for what's called the privacy paradox, which has also been examined outside of China. The privacy paradox means essentially that users oftentimes express that they have preferences for privacy. In our case, we actually, we ask them about their privacy behavior. So we don't ask them about their attitudes only. We also ask them about what they are actually doing. Have they changed their privacy settings on their phones, have they blocked other people, other users and so forth. That's our measurement of privacy. Privacy. But, but even if we use this behavioral measure of privacy, what you find is that oftentimes people are sort of convenienced or bought out. So that means your necessity to use a platform, for example, for financial transactions that you're taking, you know, when you go shopping and it's very convenient to just slide your phone, that oftentimes outweighs in practice your preference for privacy. So you accept that part of your privacy will not be protected by the firm.
- [48:03]
A
That's not just China though, right? That's everywhere.
- [48:05]
B
Exactly, exactly. This is called the privacy paradox. And we just find that Chinese users are no different than users outside of China regarding the privacy paradox. But what we find is that definitely we looked at based on our survey data, we were able to connect people's geolocation where they live because Ting earlier explained how we did the survey. So we have used GPS sampling so we know where they live, we connect where they live with county level data from Alibaba that is publicly available. And so we know kind of what the, we can connect the environment of where people live and how much they are embedded into the Alibaba ecosystem with people's survey responses. And what we find is that in places where Alibaba is more integrated, people actually tend to perceive the social credit system as more sort of financial in nature. And as a result of this, this is again connected with political trust because there is an underlying fear that if you provide your data it may be politically abused. But if you live in an environment where you see that in practice lots of Alipay is just using, used for financial reasons. As a result of this, you think it's not, you know, there's no danger that your data is going to be used for political reasons. And as a result of it, yeah, you know, you, you actually think the, you trust that the central government in particular should be managing the social credit system. And as a result of it, they are more trusting towards the central government being very much managing the social credit system. So they're more supportive of sort of government involvement in digital governance.
- [50:13]
A
So this mirrors very much the finding that you had with platforms. Again, right. Where there seems to be higher levels of social trust, higher levels perception of state competence, of skillful management of these governance systems when they experience personally or they perceive an experience of less intrusiveness, that seems to be.
- [50:34]
B
Exactly. So it mirrors our examination of political expression and public opinion guidance, which is the earlier part of the book.
- [50:43]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not, I guess I'm not. I'm not super surprised. Ching. You know, so just getting digging into that finding a little bit. I mean, you find that support for state involvement in the social credit system, it varies on, you know, how people experience it. So where it's encountered primarily as kind of economic infrastructure, you know, that's tied to finance, to payments, to, you know, convenience, support for state participation tends to be higher. Again, just very much like the question I asked about, about the what the state does with that finding. What the state does for that information. What does that tell us about how they construct legitimacy in this kind of state company partnership? What should local and central governments take away from this finding?
- [51:31]
C
I think what we can see from what we find here, I think what the state can do with this is to, I think in a way to sort of like what we have argued in the book. Right. So to really see this company as a consultant or insider because they are better than the company in how to manage this infrastructure and also to build an image that is, you know, financially benefit for the citizen. They can build a system that's convenient for them. So I think in a way that will, what we, what we say for local government is more from their perspective, how to collaborate with this company, how to cooperate or to partner with them, to be sort of collectively benefit from these partnership. I think if I see from the state, the state's perspective and also to be light on this company to, to do the marketing or the sort of public communication.
- [52:22]
A
Right. Right. Now that makes a lot of sense. Danny, when you step back from this, when you look at social media governance and social credit system, both the platforms and social credit, the picture that you guys paint is of these calibrated interdependent relationships between state firm end users. Do you see this as a stable equilibrium? Is this model pretty robust across economic downturns, political priorities, or is it dependent, contingent on continued growth, on the vitality of these platforms, their ability to continue to dazzle users and bring them ever improving lives and greater satisfaction? How stable does this look to you?
- [53:11]
B
So it has been, of course, and you know, looking at the development, Internet development in China, it has been very stable in the past, but that doesn't mean that it has to remain stable in the future. There's one important precondition for this model to work. And this precondition is that there is enough funding on the side of the government to become clients essentially to these firms and therefore pay for these services. If the government ends up in a, for example, in an economic crisis or because economic growth goes down to be to have to redistribute these resources into other areas and no longer has these resources available to pay the firms for profit, then the system crumbles. And so that's also why we, in the final chapter of our book, we look into this question of can popular corporatism be also applied to other places outside of China? Sort of how specific is this model of digital governance to China? And we don't think it's specific specific to China at all, but it is specific to states that have this sort of state developmental approach towards economic development. So in East Asia, lots of the Asian tigers like China is one of them. They have a more state driven developmental approach. And places, if you look into Singapore or Vietnam, for example, they also, in terms of how they approach the digital economy, they also use more resources and state subsidies in order to actively promote the digital economy. And so we think it can be exported. But the big precondition is that you have enough economic resources available as a state.
- [55:17]
A
That makes a ton of sense to me. Ting, by the end of the book, you guys invoke this kind of familiar Orwell versus Huxley contrast, coercion on the one hand versus kind of inducement, surveillance versus distraction. And you suggest that neither quite captures what's happening in China's digital governance. And I would probably agree with you if you had to distill it. What does your model add that those familiar metaphors really just kind of miss? What should observers, whether they're inside or outside of China, understand differently after reading your book?
- [55:51]
C
Well, that's a big question.
- [55:55]
A
We're at the end, so I have to ask the big questions now.
- [55:58]
C
Yeah, I think I would say what we add to what's going on in China, I think maybe, Danny, we have a different story, but here I would see that we add more nuance. Although we are not the only one who add those nuance. But I think we add more nuance by seeing at the end of day, digital government in China is more a balancing act. The balancing between coercion and cooptation and it's how the state can manage these, you know, dedicated balance, you know, how much coercion. But if there's too much coercion, coercion you won't have digital innovation. But on, on the other hand, from the state's perspective at the end of day it's still a, you know, one party rule countries, right. They still want, they still, they have their fundamental concern about their ruling in China. So it's also if too much co optation or too much leeway to the company, they also worry about what might happen, whether they might have influence of their ruling. Right. That's what happened to for example the antitrust campaign in China, how they cracked down on Alibaba. I think that was 2021. So I think we actually here is you can see that as a balancing act and I wouldn't say that's too much different from outside of China and other countries because we are all looking into balancing, at how the state can manage this balance. Right. But just in different countries we are managing different kind of balance. I think that's how I think to what's going on. Yeah.
- [57:22]
A
There's another balancing act that you as authors have in your book, Danny. At the very beginning of the book you anticipate that this is going to draw fire from the, what you call the panda huggers, you know, very familiar with phrase and the dragon slayers alike that when you try to hew to the kind of sensible middle ground when you know you're not either cravenly apologizing and praising China's censorship and digital government systems, but at the same time you guys aren't exactly like thundering your indignation and your condemnation. But in finding that middle ground, you're not going to please anybody. That was your worry. I can say at least there's one reader who was very pleased by it. That's me, of course. But how has that reception so far been? Is it about what you expected? How have people received your work?
- [58:14]
B
So the book has only been out since December. So it's been four months into giving book talks and talking to people about the argument. I would say that most China scholars we've talked to very much appreciate especially the empirical data that is in the book in order to but also the approach of trying to on the one hand point out the negative sides of the system while at the same time also talking openly about for example, we end in the book about potential learnings from the system for Europe and for liberal democracy. And we do that from a perspective that is grounded in empirical evidence and try to stand sort of in the middle. So I would say so far we haven't received that big pushback. But at the same time, I also have to say that we have not been very active in terms of talking on social media about the book or going public with some of these arguments because most of this polarization between the panda huggers and the dragon slayers also happens in the public sphere. And so that then what kind of happens is that you're perceived to be either too critical or too positive, and you can't. You're kind of being squeezed in the middle.
- [59:47]
A
I would know nothing about that. All right now. Fantastic. I mean, I'm glad to hear it and I'm curious to see. I'll be sure to forward you any emails that I get from people who either read the book or listen to the podcast and really kind of engage with its arguments, with the book's arguments.
- [60:06]
B
Thank you so much. We would really appreciate that kind of feedback.
- [60:10]
A
You got it. What a pleasure having you both on once again. The book is called Governing Digital China. Its authors are Dian, Daniela Stockman and Ting Luo. Daniela is. Tell me about the Hirti School and I'm not familiar with it.
- [60:25]
B
The HRDI School is a public policy school based in Berlin. It's English speaking, we have lots of international students, and my role has become to become the director of a center for digital governance. And now I often talk about now China, but also in the context of digital governance now emerging in Europe that tries to distinguish itself from the United States.
- [60:50]
A
Yeah, very, very good. I mean, that's Europe's major export anyway, is like, you know, regulation, right?
- [60:58]
C
It seems so these days.
- [60:59]
A
It seems so. And. And Ting is at Birmingham. And thank you both so much for taking the time. Let's move on to the section of the show that I call Paying It For Forward, where I'd like each of you to nominate a younger colleague, not necessarily at your own institution, but, you know, somebody younger, up and coming, whose work you really admire and who you think is maybe more deserving of attention than they've been getting. So, Ting, why don't we start with you? Can you nominate somebody for Paying It Forward?
- [61:25]
C
Oh, I do have someone in mind. What I have in mind is, you know, because recently I work with her quite a lot, so I think I would nominate her here. So I think it's Ningleng from Georgetown University.
- [61:37]
A
Yeah.
- [61:37]
C
She also has a book that we sort of focus on different aspects. I think we speak to each other. So I think I would. I would have to say I would have to nominate her here.
- [61:45]
A
I have her book, but I haven't read it yet. Politicizing Business in China, Something like that, right? Yeah, great, great recommendation. So Ning Lung at Georgetown, author of Politicizing Business How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China. And yeah, it's interesting. I can see how you guys book and hers would be very much in dialogue and great recommendation. Now over to you, Danny. Do you have somebody to recommend for our Paying It Forward segment?
- [62:12]
B
Yeah, I would recommend Felix Garten, who happens to be my student, but that's not why I would nominate him. He is a postdoc right now here at the Hrdy School and he works on Chinese tech companies inside the European Union, but also in South Asia. And he looks into how these Chinese tech companies then, how they behave in. In other kinds of circumstances. So not inside this digital governance structure that we have just talked about today, but kind of also at the question, he looks at the question, to what extent can European regulations, for example,
- [62:56]
C
lead
- [62:56]
B
to different kinds of behaviors of these firms? And so far he does find that regulation actually has an impact on how tech firms that are headquartered in authoritarian states like China are operating abroad. So I find that really fascinating. While in other contexts like Malaysia and Singapore, where you have less regulation, their behavior then differs. So anybody who's interested in Chinese tech companies and wants to understand not only how they behave in China, but outside of China would be very interested in his work.
- [63:32]
A
And as more and more of them have a footprint outside of China, that becomes really important research. So, Felix Garten, G A R T E N. Right.
- [63:38]
C
Correct.
- [63:39]
A
Okay, great. Thanks. Thanks very much. All right, now onto the section of the show called Recommendations where I ask you each to talk about a book or. Or a film or some music or anything at all, a travel, destination, anything that tells us a little bit about you outside of your professional life. Why don't we start with you this time, Danny? Who do you have in. Or what do you have?
- [63:58]
B
Oh, yeah, I love to talk about the Legend of the Female General, which is a Chinese soap opera. It's on YouTube with English subtitles and Chinese and English subtitles. I love this. I really love the soap opera. It's very much also related to my passion for internal martial arts. I do Bagua Zhang. I'm taught by actually your sister.
- [64:27]
A
Yes, yes, you are taught by my
- [64:29]
B
sister is one of my. Is actually my teacher or shifu even. And so I'm Very passionate about internal martial arts arts and I love this show. So anybody who's interested in internal martial arts and great female internal martial arts warriors in China would perhaps like this show.
- [64:49]
A
I'll have to check that out and I'll be sure to include the Chinese title in the show notes when you guys look for that. Thank you, Danny. Now on to Ting. What do you have for a recommendation? Do you have a book that you've read recently or a YouTube video, a Chinese martial arts series? Anything at all.
- [65:03]
C
So I'm, I'm now currently in Bordeaux in France having my holiday so I think I'm in what I call a tipsy journey. So having, you know, drinks wonderful high quality wine every day. So I think that kind of says something about me.
- [65:20]
A
Have you ever favorite so far a Bordeaux that you particularly love?
- [65:23]
C
Well, I think I generally love the city. I mean a different kind of what I see, a different sort of a very relaxed and the chill place and I think that's explained my current sort of mood as well. So I'm more in a holiday mode and it's good to escape from everything for a moment.
- [65:44]
A
I couldn't agree with you more. I would love to take such a holiday and I mean Bordeaux, my God, lucky you. That's all the reason for me to be even more grateful to you for taking time away from your holiday to talk to me about your work. So thank you. I will put down as your recommendation traveling to Bordeaux in France. What a lucky, lucky you. Okay, I have recommendation. In light of what's happening of course in the Middle east, you know, with American. The American and Israeli war against Iran. I want to recommend two substack newsletters that I find especially good for gaining an understanding of China's relations with countries of the Middle East. Those are Jonathan Fulton's Chinamena newsletter which is at Chinamena M e n a newsletter.substack.com and another one written by a guy named Jesse Marks. It's called Coffee in the desert. Jesse marks.substack.com Both of them are excellent. They really do a good roundup. I know Jesse has been looking at not just state media but also sort of what various think tankers and academics are saying about the war right now that's happening. So the Chinese perspective on that, they're very, very valuable. So check that out. I've been just sort of putting together as much as I can about Chinese reactions to the American war in Iran. So those two have been of indispensable help as they always are in trying to understand the Middle east and China. So thanks again to both of you. Once again it was really a pleasure to have you on. It's a really fantastic book. I hope people get out there and read it. It's a relatively short book and it's excellent scholarship built on really interesting empirical research. So definitely go and pick up a copy of Governing Digital China. Thank you Danny thank you Ting.
- [67:38]
C
Thank you.
- [67:39]
B
Thank you so much Kaiser for having us and also having this opportunity to continue our discussion from 2014. Because this book is also kind of the second volume to the first. So yeah, yeah, thanks so much for this great conversation. Was great fun.
- [67:53]
A
Thank you very much. You've been listening to the Cineca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through substack@cinecapodcast.com where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Email me@cinecopodmail.com if you've got ideas on how can help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover it. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin Madison's center for East Asian Studies for all the support the show this year. Huge thanks to my guests Daniela Stockman and Ting Luo. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care. Support for this podcast comes from Progressive, America's number one motorcycle insurer. Did you know Riders who switch and save with Progressive save nearly $180 per year. That's a whole new pair of riding gloves and more. Quote Today Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $178 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between October 2022 and September 2023. Potential savings will vary welcome to Big
- [69:23]
B
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- [69:48]
C
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