Digital Leviathan: The Emergence of Platform Authoritarianism in China

• In Event: City and Local Governance in China

Abstract

As autocrats invest in the construction of digital administration and big data monitoring platforms, an aspirational form of digitally centralized governance has emerged, which we call platform authoritarianism. Big data monitoring platforms represent cooperation, if not collusion between the governance ideas of officials and the business power of digital platforms. Although different monitoring platforms are customized and have local and departmental diversity, platform authoritarianism is committed to centralizing data resources and integrating scattered data across bureaucratically fragmented institutions. This digitized form of urban governance has three political consequences. First, although the algorithms of big data platforms reflect the commercial interests of corporate executives, they also provide the technological basis for identifying political deviance. Second, rapid, algorithmic-based identification of public problems has enhanced the capacity of upper officials’ to supervise and discipline their subordinates, thereby increasing the administrative burden of street-level bureaucrats. Third, reliance on algorithmic bureaucracy has simplified law enforcement. Based on fieldwork in China during 2019 and 2020, this paper compares the application of monitoring platforms before and after the pandemic, and shows that Covid-19 accelerated centralization of governance through digital surveillance. While earlier studies of fragmented authoritarianism in China observed considerable scope for local creativity and bargaining between state and societal actors, the space for such interactions is increasingly constricted by the rise of platform authoritarianism in the digital era.

Author

• Jingyang HUANG, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology