On March 4, 2022, the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs hosted an event titled “China’s Growing Digital Reach.” The event was moderated by Lokman Tsui, a research fellow at Citizen Lab and Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The main speaker was Genia Kostka, Professor of Chinese Politics at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on digital transformation, environmental politics, and political economy with a regional focus on China. During the event, Kostka discussed her most recent research project, which explores how digital technologies are being integrated into both governance structures and local decision-making in China.
Kostka introduced the topic of digital governance in China by exploring the country’s capacity to accomplish its digital ambitions. She cited a special report released by the National Bureau of Asian Research on March 1, 2022, titled “China’s Digital Ambitions: A Global Strategy to Supplant the Liberal Order.” The report highlights three “asymmetric advantages” of China to achieve digital governance: its massive size affords the large scale production and access to data, its industrial capacity enables the heavy investment in physical infrastructure, and the unified commitment of its central government to become a global artificial intelligence leader has produced the image that China is willing to compete with other global digital powers.
Although the National Bureau of Asian Research special report provides several reasons why China may be able to achieve its digital ambitions, Kostka explains that the process of the digitizing governance in China is not as simple as it seems. In her research, Kostka tracked over 1,000 digital local initiatives in the three provinces Zhejiang, Anhui and Sichuan. She found that digital transformation was not a straightforward process; there were clearly gaps between what the central state desired and what was actually happening in provinces. For instance, she witnessed issues with the social credit system. Although provinces and local governments had implemented pilot programs to track businesses and individuals, there was a clear lack of citizen participation. Kostka and her team interviewed dozens of individuals who simply did not desire the new technology, and therefore the social credit system had become less effective. Furthermore, Kostka noticed that there was significant variation between regions. While some local governments were clearly dedicated to successfully implementing digital technologies into governance policy, other regions were less enthusiastic. This shows that there are clear disparities between national ambition and local realities. For the remainder of the event, Kostka explained why we see this digital implementation gap between what Beijing and local governments want.
To analyze this gap and the barriers to digital implementation, Kostka introduced three key frameworks: instruments, incentives, and capacity.
First, Kostka introduced China’s “digital planning system ” as a key instrument that acts a barrier to digital governance implementation. Kostka explained that these digital plans refers to China’s top-down approach towards digital governance, as the central government is clearly attempting to gather as much data as possible from the increased use of advanced technologies. These government plans have led to significant policy experimentation. For example, “Smart City” policies have gone through numerous pilot phases throughout multiple regions in China. Kostka explained that the central government hopes that they can learn from each pilot phase and use the feedback to understand what aspects need to be fixed. Despite the benefits of learning from the pilot programs, Kostka outlined clear downsides to policy experimentation as an instrument to achieve digital governance. For example, despite digital policy implementation, many citizens show little awareness that they live in a digitally monitored city. This shows how “digital system planning” has created barriers in digital governance.
Second, Kostka discussed possible incentives that cause the digital implementation gap.
The first incentive Kostka introduced was political and economic incentives. According to Kostka, the central government in Beijing is heavily reliant on the assumption that regions will comply with the central government due to the implementation of political and economic incentives. For example, Kostka cited the release of digital cadre targets, which issue targets for cities to reach in terms of their quality of online service at the provincial level, as a political incentive. In terms of economic incentives, the fact that the digital sector has become China’s fastest growing sector is appealing for GDP growth within provinces. However, Kostka argues incentivization as a mechanism for digital governance is not as successful as it might seem. For example, provincial government apps appear to be flashy rather than functional. Citizens have complained about poor quality, dormant websites, and zombie-like apps.
The second incentive was government collarborations with businesses. Although the central government is dependent on investments from the private sector, Beijing is not looking to have equal partnerships with companies. This public-private imbalance causes conflicts over data sharing and data ownership, among other issues. This all creates a very new form of collaboration that will be interesting to follow.
The third incentive was citizen participation and interests. Citizens play a very limited role in China; although they are sometimes allowed to protest and ask for change, the government is constantly collecting personal data. This is an example of top-down mandated digital transformation with limited bottom-up feedback processes. They also do not participate in the citizenship opportunities they were given. There is about a 20% participation rate within the local government-run social credit systems. There are sporadic protests that the government deals with and will continue to deal with.
Finally, Kostka discussed capacity, which encapsulates financial, technical, and political resources. To elaborate, there was a clear lack of funding for digital governance policy execution. The central government allows private companies to share the investment in operations, therefore creating limited companies with private and state-owned tech firms.
In conclusion, despite the apparent capability of the Chinese government to achieve digital governance, it is clear that there is a digital implementation gap that threatens Beijing’s goals. According to Kostka, using pre-existing command and control structures to push digital initiatives through China’s decentralized authoritarian structure has limited results.