High wire: How China regulates Big Tech and governs its economy. By AngelaZhang, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024. pp. 432. USD 34.95 (hardcover). ISBN : 9780197682258
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: A few years ago, Eli Friedman and Richard Smith debated in the journal Spectre whether China is a capitalist society.Defining capitalism as a "a system in which human need is subsidiary to value production" (Friedman, 2020), Friedman argued that China was fundamentally capitalist.Its leader was "defending globalization in Davos and advocating for the market to play a 'decisive role' in resource allocation."Smith countered that China was, instead, a "hybrid bureaucratic collectivist-capitalist economy in which the bureaucratic collectivist state sector is overwhelmingly dominant" (Smith, 2020).While the "hybrid bureaucratic collectivist-capitalist" formulation is a mouthful, it significantly and helpfully complicates our understanding of Chinese economic governance.In High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs its Economy, Angela Zhang both underscores the complexity of Chinese bureaucracy, and helps readers understand it by applying an analytic framework of crystalline clarity.The framework is both spatial and temporal.Spatially, she asks us to imagine the Chinese regulatory infrastructure as a troupe of acrobats attempting to stand on one another's shoulders in a reverse pyramid atop a bicyclist crossing a high wire (thus the book's title).Reminiscent of Roger Boesche's characterization of Tocqueville's vision of social order as a finely balanced mobile (Boesche, 1983), Zhang's high wire act metaphor emphasizes volatility and fragility in a "dynamic pyramid model."The precarity of this arrangement leads, in turn, to a temporal model of government intervention with respect to Big Tech: one of lax regulation, harsh crackdown, agency overreach, and regulatory easing.In tracing this dynamic of underreach and overreach, Zhang focuses on the platforms operated by large Chinese firms like Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance.She analyzes platform regulation and self-regulation in two of the book's four parts, after developing the book's analytical framework in its first part.Her account of platform regulation is focused on competition, data, and labor regulation.Platforms' self-regulation takes on many consumer protection roles.The self-regulation portion of the book is particularly illuminating, explaining how Chinese netizens participate in low-level economic governance tasks.These range from "crowdjudging" (e.g., deciding in large groups whether certain unbranded products are confusingly similar to branded ones) to "riot" (e.g., writing very negative and unfounded reviews about stores in order to protest a policy change at an online mall).When self-regulation fails, government can strategically intervene or withhold help, based on either Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Principles, connections, or some combination of the two.Those looking for a simple, top-down model of tech governance in High Wire will be disappointed.Zhang argues that power is fragmented within the Chinese regulatory bureaucracy, noting that, in "the most recent round of the law-enforcement campaign against Big Tech, at least 14 central ministries joined the Supreme People's Court and a number of other CCP and social organizations in helping to devise new legislative proposals and implement policy guidance from above."The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) takes the lead on competition law, while the Cyberspace Administration of China has authority in data regulation.But each of these agencies can influence the other and can be interfered with by other entities, such as the National
Source: Regulation & Governance
DOI: 10.1111/rego.12635
Author: Frank Pasquale
Institution: Cornell University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403340703