Governing Digital China

China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, Governing Digital China (co-authored with Ting Luo) examines the governance of social media during both the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras, showing that it is radically different than this popular conception. This talk will discuss the book, digging into the divide between perceptions and realities of digital governance during the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras. It will explore the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens, with a view to whether the mechanisms that link the Chinese state, tech firms, and citizens neatly map on to digital rulemaking elsewhere.

Daniela Stockmann is Director of the Center for Digital Governance and Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School. Her current research focuses on the interaction between government, platform firms, and citizens in the area of social media governance. She studies these interactions both in China and in Europe. Her book, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China (Cambridge University Press, 2013), received the 2015 Goldsmith Book Prize. Before joining the Hertie School faculty, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. Beyond her academic work, she has served as advisor on Chinese foreign policy and European social media governance to policy-makers of the European Union, Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.

The event is part of the Seminar Series “Platform Politics and Policy”.

Researchers from outside the WZB who would like to attend may email the organizer, robert.gorwa [at] wzb.eu, to be put onto the seminar series mailing list.