China’s Digital Civilization: Algorithms and Society

This book focuses on the “algorithmic turn” in state surveillance and the development of new platforms that allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to shape human behavior in all areas of life through its widespread social credit system. Perhaps no country has gone further than China in setting up overt systematic tracking, surveillance and constant computational evaluation of its citizens. Everyday life is saturated with a pervasive digitization that affects social mobility, economic opportunities and personal freedoms. Global organizations operating in China have to take account of the ramifications of these systems for data protection within the CCP’s explicit project of forming a digital civilization. The volume covers the new technological practices that have transformed how states acquire and analyze personal data, the “TikTok-ification” of society as social credit platforms built on the familiarity with this popular app’s interaction paradigm and the fast expansion of the digital economy that followed the new legal status of data as a production component in 2019. Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists and the general reading public, will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions posed by research into China’s digital civilization project from media, journalism, communication and global studies.