Technologies of Governance in China: Law, Campaigns, and Social Credit

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

From COVID-related controls, to expanding facial recognition surveillance, to a crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party’s control of over a billion people seems only to increase. The system it has created looks highly effective and may be unique. Many of its technologies of governance appear highly innovative. The papers in this panel help explain these technologies, but also problematize them. Specifically, we look at the convergence, overlap, competition, and collision between three different technologies of governance with vastly different histories: 1) law and courts, which have been used to govern for thousands of years; 2) campaigns, which were most notably used in the Mao-era; 3) and China’s emerging social credit system, a recent innovation that is sometimes depicted more as science fiction than current reality.

While the panel offers different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the themes and findings of the papers knit together tightly. Li and Kostka’s paper shows that while theoretical support for China’s social credit system is remarkably high, it is largely ignored by the vast majority of Chinese. Haemin Jee compliments this by showing what the social credit is really used for: targeting commercial actors, consolidating information, and adding punishments and support to the existing infrastructure of laws and courts. The necessity of such institutional proliferation is seen in Cheng and Ma’s paper which demonstrates that even after reforms that seem to be aimed at compelling courts to take more cases against local governments, the effect is quickly dissipated. This phenomenon of legal reforms having only small or temporary effects is further investigated by Givens, Goron, and Scoggins as they use legal advice websites to show that scandals disseminated through viral social media and campaigns have more impact than changes to the formal legal system on the behavior of both average people and lawyers.

A few important themes run throughout these papers. Apparent innovations ranging from the creation of local social credit systems, to new domestic violence and environmental laws, to reforms of administrative litigation and policing may appear to be game-changing and yet prove to have little impact or to suffer from a rapid reversion to the status quo. In part, this seems to be because many of these innovations are not taken up by average Chinese or even the lawyers that represent them, a trend that can be occasionally reversed by social-media-fueled scandals and government-led campaigns. For all its innovation and institutional proliferation, the system the Chinese state has created still leaves considerable doubt as to the ultimate success and sustainability of its efforts to create a more sophisticated and effective system of technologies of governance.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Accepting But Not Using It? Digital Participation in Local Social Credit Systems - Genia Kostka, Freie Universität Berlin; Haili Li, Freie Universität Berlin

• Institutional Proliferation: How the Social Credit System Ensures Compliance - Haemin Jee, United States Military Academy, West Point

• Embedded Courts Meet Campaigns: Case Registration and Administrative Litigation - Ma Chao, tsinghua university; Chao-yo Cheng, Birkbeck, University of London

• Rule by Law or Rule by Campaign: Do Laws on the Books Matter in China? - John Wagner Givens, Spelman College; Coraline Goron, Duke Kunshan University; Suzanne E. Scoggins, Clark University

Chair

• William Hurst University of Cambridge

Discussants

• Andrew MacDonald Duke Kunshan University

• Yao-Yuan Yeh University of St. Thomas