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The Gilded Cage: Techno-State Capitalism in China
Using Daniel Bell’s work as a springboard, I analyze the emergent post-industrial society in China, focusing on China’s techno-development from the mid-2000s to the present day. Noting the extraordinary transformation of China’s economy and society during this time, some scholars have compared China’s post-reform period to the Gilded Age in the United States. By contrast, I seek to highlight the darker implications of these changes, what I refer to collectively as China’s “gilded cage.” I use this term to capture not so much a literal space as the dynamic processes and relations set in motion by the Chinese state’s effort to move from an economy relying on labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to techno-state capitalism. The drive towards techno-state capitalism has included: (1) the proliferation of technological and legal instruments established by the state and large tech companies to regulate work and life, and enhance legibility, valuation, efficiency, and behavior modification; (2) the legal, economic, and cultural subordination of work, workers, and forms of capital deemed “obsolete” or “low-end” to those valorized as “high-tech” or “high-end,” despite China’s official socialist ideology; and (3) the intensified subjection of both “low-end” and “high-end” workers and capital to the precarious and despotic rule by instruments. In this talk, I will explain how this sweeping, lopsided, and unchecked rule by instruments came to be, and discuss the contradictions between the state and different kinds of capital and labor that have followed in its wake.