This chapter opens the book with a puzzle. It starts by delineating two tales about the Chinese internet – one emphasizing state control and the other digital innovation and the rapid growth of China’s tech industry. To make sense of these two seemingly contradictory stories of greater openness to support digitalization while also increasing political control – also referred to as digital dilemma – the chapter introduces the core elements of popular corporatism and looks at how it differs from the more familiar command and control that builds on strong hierarchically organized state-centered logics. It considers existing work on digital dilemma and posits that its digital governance approach to the Chinese model is based on the dynamic relationship between the state, platform firms, and citizens. Because voluntary participation of citizens is important for the state to obtain feedback about their policies as well as for the companies to develop their organizational and informational resources in the state–company partnership, it focuses on two examples of digital participatory spaces in this book – social media platforms and the social credit system (SCS) – to illustrate the Chinese model during Hu and Xi’s leaderships.