The Emergence of China’s Smart State

A first-of-its-kind book interrogates the complex, dynamic interactions between political, market, and technological factors that structure China’s digital development.

China’s emergence as a technology leader has become a major factor in geopolitics, transforming global political and economic relationships. In its bid to achieve digital great power status, China’s government has reformed laws and policies, drastically increased investment, and become more assertive internationally.

Since Xi Jinping’s establishment in 2014 of a government Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatisation, the Chinese government has set ambitious digital goals around internet, big data, blockchain, cloud computing, operational technologies, and artificial intelligence.

The Emergence of China’s Smart State assesses the extent to which Beijing has been able to achieve its digital goals and, more broadly, how this reflects rapidly changing domestic and international political and economic dynamics surrounding China’s rise as a major technology player.

Edited by Leiden University’s Rogier Creemers, the book explores the complexity of China’s digital policy landscape, the process of learning and iteration the Chinese Communist Party continues to experience as external events impact the policy process, and the impact China’s innovation policies, regulations, and achievements have had, or may have, in the future.

“The goal of this book is to understand and explain the various facets of China’s digital ambitions and the policies by which it seeks to realise it. That means this is a book, first and foremost, about China itself,” writes Dr Creemers in his introduction to the book.

“That means two things: first, it does not primarily approach the subject of technology in China from the angle of Sino-American tensions, a dominant theme in the literature at present. Instead, the goal of this book is to adopt a Beijing-centric perspective. Second, this book does not take an evaluative approach that attempts to gauge the extent to which China meets the criteria of any particular academic or normative framework.”

Creemers’ point is that attempts to understand China through the prisms of Western theories and values “actually tells us very little about what animates or informs decision-making and policy evolutions in China… and blinds us to perceiving the logic and rationality of the Chinese system on its own terms.”

“Lastly, the point of this book is not to declare victory or defeat of the digital power strategy or smart state ambitions. Rather, it is to highlight the dynamic changes, complexities, and contradictions inherent in China’s digital development policies.”

Rogier Creemers is a lecturer in modern Chinese studies at Leiden University. His research focuses on Chinese domestic digital technology policy, as well as China’s growing importance in global digital affairs. Fellow editors Straton Papagianneas and Adam Knight are PhD candidates at Leiden University.

The book is published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. It is available in hardback and as an eBook, which has been made available free online.