The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China
(Paperback)
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Publishing Details
The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China
By (Author) Ya-Wen Lei
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
1st December 2023
United States
Classifications
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Sociology
Political economy
Technology: general issues
Social discrimination and social justice
330.951
Physical Properties
Paperback
416
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
Description
How Chinas economic development combines a veneer of unprecedented progress with the increasingly despotic rule of surveillance over all aspects of life
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 transformedfor better and worseby Chinas rapid rise to economic and technological dominance.
Drawing on groundbreaking 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 Chinas rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compressed development, the complex relationship between the nations 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 Chinas extraordinary transformation to Americas Gilded Age. This provocative book 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.
Author Bio
Ya-Wen Lei is associate professor of sociology at Harvard University, where she is affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China (Princeton).
