Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

We cordially invite you to lecture #3 of the BCCN Lecture Series "Digital Governance in China“:

From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China

By Lizhi Liu (Georgetown University)

December 14, 2023, 14:15:15:45 CET

Please register here: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/webappng/sites/fu-berlin/webinar/webinarSeries/register/8df470e12e264f959533abfdd58bd646

Abstract

A central question in political economy asks: how do developing states build market-supporting institutions (e.g., secure property rights, contract enforcement, and the rule of law)? Too often, political obstacles prevent developing states from adopting strong formal institutions. In this book, Lizhi Liu proposes that China has devised a novel solution to this political problem: institutional outsourcing. Liu argues that, with weak rule of law, the state has outsourced part of its institutional functions to key private actors, which she calls, private regulatory intermediaries (PRIs). Using as the context China’s e-commerce market, where 800 million active users generate more than 100 million transactions per day, Liu shows that online trading platforms (e.g., Alibaba’s Taobao.com and Tmall.com) have begun to serve as PRIs. More specifically, platforms privately supply market-supporting institutions to enforce contracts, prevent fraud, and settle disputes. In addition to legal functions, the state has effectively off-loaded a part of social and political functions to platforms. Not only do platforms enforce rules, they also assist the state in creating and reforming formal institutions through institutional experiments. Liu demonstrates that institutional outsourcing, as an alternative route to institutional development, is a more politically viable solution to market failure and governance deficit than the direct reforming of formal institutions. She further shows in the book that, China's e-commerce boom carries profound effects on state-business relations, household welfare, and the stability of the authoritarian regime in general.

This book project employs a mixed methods approach and draws on a variety of original or proprietary data. Qualitatively, Liu has conducted over 200 interviews during 14 months of fieldwork, supplemented by nine years of online ethnographic research. Quantitatively, she analyzes original datasets that include the web-scraped information of 1.76 million online stores, an original national survey, and a longitudinal survey on 2,800 households conducted with a large-scale field experiment.

Bio

Lizhi Liu is an assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Her research interests include the political economy of development, the digital economy, and Chinese politics. Her research has been published by American Economic Review: Insights, Studies in International Comparative Development, Minnesota Law Review. She received the 2020 Ronald H. Coase Best Dissertation Award in institutional and organizational economics and the 2019 APSA Best Dissertation Award in information technology and politics. In 2021, she was listed as a Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor. Her book on the political economy of E-commerce in China is under contract with Princeton University Pres

For more information of the overall lecture series please take a look at our Website.

Sincerely,

Your BCCN Team

You are cordially invited to participate in lecture #2 of the BCCN Lecture Series "Digital Governance in China“:

How Digital Surveillance Justifies Massive Lockdowns in China During COVID-19

By Xu Xu (Princeton University)

December 7, 2023, 14:15 -15:45 CET

Please register here: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/webappng/sites/fu-berlin/webinar/webinarSeries/register/8df470e12e264f959533abfdd58bd646

Abstract

China’s draconian response to COVID-19 drew considerable criticism, with many suggesting that intense digital surveillance and harsh lockdowns triggered the unusual public dissent seen in China in late 2022. However, this lecture argues that rather than backfiring, digital surveillance may have legitimized the government’s overreaction by making uncertain threats appear certain. The authors collected data on daily counts of lockdown neighborhoods and COVID cases from 2020 to 2023. Using a difference-in-differences approach with World Value Surveys (China 2012, 2018) and a nationwide online survey in 2023, they show that real-world lockdowns significantly reduced public perception of respect for human rights and trust in the government; however, these effects are moderated by the pervasiveness of COVID surveillance, proxied by cellphone usage. To establish causality, the authors use a survey experiment to show that digital surveillance indeed increases support for COVID lockdowns by making citizens more likely to believe they are close contacts. In contrast, surveillance cannot justify protest crackdowns. The findings suggest that uncertainty in threats to public safety may foster support for state surveillance and coercion.

Bio

Xu Xu is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Xu studies digital authoritarianism, political repression, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on China. He is currently working on a book entitled Authoritarian Control in the Age of Digital Surveillance. His other ongoing projects examine public opinion on state repression in authoritarian regimes, propaganda and new media in China, and state-society relations in China. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, among other peer-reviewed journals. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Pennsylvania State University in 2019, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 2020 to 2021.

Sincerely,

Your BCCN Team

We warmly invite you to the kick-off lecture of the BCCN Lecture Series "Digital Governance in China":

The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and Capitalism

by Ya-Wen Lei (Harvard University)

November 2, 2023, 14:15 - 15:45 CET

Please register here: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/webappng/sites/fu-berlin/webinar/webinarSeries/register/8df470e12e264f959533abfdd58bd646

Abstract

Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed—for better and worse—by China’s rapid rise to economic and technological dominance.

Drawing on fieldwork and a wealth of in-depth interviews with managers, business owners, workers, software engineers, and local government officials, Lei describes the vastly unequal values assigned to economic sectors deemed “high-end” versus “low-end,” and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and control workers and capital within them. She shows how China’s rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compressed development, the complex relationship between the nation’s authoritarian state and its increasingly powerful but unruly tech companies, and an ideology that fuses nationalism with high modernism, technological fetishism, and meritocracy.

Some have compared China’s extraordinary transformation to America’s Gilded Age. This lecture reveals how it is more like a gilded cage, one in which the Chinese state and tech capital are producing rising inequality and new forms of social exclusion.

Bio

Ya-Wen Lei is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She is also affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. She is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her second book, The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and Capitalism, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in November 2023. 

Dear BCCN-Subscribers, dear students, dear colleagues,

The Berlin Contemporary China Network (BCCN) and the Stiftung Asienhaus cordially invite you to a discussion on "China's Critical Voices" - with inputs from Andrew Methven and Zoe Qian, founders of the online platform Slow Chinese, as well as from Daniel Fuchs (HU Berlin/BCCN).

The experts from Slow Chinese offer insights about the usage of the Chinese language, idioms, and historical references. In their weekly podcast, they speak about linguistic ambiguities in Chinese media and online platforms. Afterward, Dr. Daniel Fuchs will illuminate the nature of social protest in China and how protesters appropriate official discourse and state rhetoric to express criticism.

Friday, 29 September 2023

17:30-19:00 (CEST)

The event will take place in a hybrid format - for more information and registration, please see shorturl.at/dnAD2 & the attachment.

Best regards,

Sarah Eaton & Daniel Fuchs