This chapter concludes the book with a discussion of how China’s model of digital governance applies to China post-Covid and after the anti-trust campaign. Popular corporatism emerged from policy decisions aimed at addressing the digital dilemma and is shaped by reflections on and learning from the past. These decisions involved conversations with technology companies and their profit-seeking innovations, which offered solutions to concrete policy problems. However, such conversations were not devoid of contestation when interests misalign. The anti-trust campaign reveals the challenges in reducing corporate influence while reaping the benefits of data concentration. Citizens are not easily fooled either, as seen in protests against the abuse of government-led social credit ratings in enforcing China’s zero-Covid policy. Since the logic of popular corporatism is not unique to China, the chapter discusses implications for understanding the role of Chinese, Russian, and US-based technology companies in other authoritarian contexts. An important precondition for the application to other contexts is the state’s economic resources. Concluding with an eye on liberal democracy, the chapter emphasizes one key lesson from China’s digital governance – the power of a positive vision in uniting the interactions between the state, platform firms, and citizens.

This chapter continues to study social media platforms but with a focus on the relationship between citizens and companies, particularly the co-production of data that serves as an important company instrument in the state–company partnership. It reveals inequalities in data production among citizens, systematically varying in terms of geographical distribution, privacy concerns, motivations, and choice. It differentiates different types of user behavior – discussing (producing political content and metadata) and lurking (producing metadata). Based on the China Internet Survey (CIS) 2018, it finds that Chinese users have similar motivations to users in other contexts, thus contributing to data production as privacy concerns remain less important compared to other motivations. This conceptualization of co-production rests not only on user participation on platforms, but also on the role of platform architecture and technological infrastructure that afford users’ choices. Through examining the role of the Great Chinese Firewall, the chapter finds that only about 12 percent of internet users jump the firewall to seek political information. A comparison of the three most popular platforms regarding their technological design show that Weibo and Baidu Tieba facilitate the production of political content more effectively compared to WeChat.

This chapter has two parts. The first part investigates how the Party controls courts. It finds that the Party maximizes its political control over judicial affairs by normalizing its political prerogative in judicial decision-making. The normalization process takes two steps. First, all judges within a court are embedded in a chain of command—from Party leaders to court leaders, divisional heads, and frontline judges—tasked with processing and translating political directives into partial judicial outcomes that serve Party-state interests when needed. The legality of these demands or their immunity from legal scrutiny is derived from the Party’s political prerogative. This practice is then replicated across all courts and among all judges nationwide. The second part of this chapter analyzes reported cases of judicial corruption to identify what has caused the spread of judicial corruption. It concludes that the root cause is the very normalization of the Party’s political prerogative. Because this prerogative is inherently arbitrary and vulnerable to abuse, its institutionalization creates systemic opportunities for corruption across the political-legal apparatus. As a result, what begins as political control ultimately facilitates the pervasive spread of judicial corruption.

This chapter opens Part I of the book, focusing on social media as a digital participatory space. It examines the relationship between the state and platform firms in social media governance over two consecutive leaderships. It firsts map the landscape of social media platforms in China and the variety of participatory spaces they offer. Based on survey data, it identifies two platform companies that have evolved into important players in managing social media platforms with a significant reach in political information – Tencent and Sina. It then examines the significant changes in social media governance over two consecutive leaderships. Under Hu, social media governance was characterized by loose command and control with many choices for users, while popular corporatism emerged at the end of the Hu Jintao leadership and took off under Xi Jinping. Based on procurement data, the chapter elaborates on the state’s reasoning to rely on Tencent and Sina as the only corporations with the expertise and resources to provide key services in managing online public opinion. Its findings demonstrate that under popular corporatism large platform firms can leverage their superior expertise, data, infrastructure, and reach to gain concessions from the state due to their consultant and/or insider status.

This concluding chapter outlines the contours of the Party-state and develops a conceptual framework to explain its distinctive mode of governance. At its core is a dual normative system: a legal system grounded in popular sovereignty is overseen and constrained by a power-based normative system designed to uphold the absolute authority of the Party Center—an organizing principle essential to maintaining the structural integrity of the Party-state. The chapter argues that the governance logic of the Party-state is best captured by the theory of Normalized Political Prerogative (NPP). According to this theory, governance unfolds through a three-step process: operationalization, normalization, and regulation. Together, these constitute the formal institutional foundation of Party-state rule. The NPP framework elucidates the systemic proliferation of corruption as an inherent byproduct of this mode of governance, the role of the Party’s disciplinary apparatus as a self-correcting mechanism to mitigate its adverse effects, and the evolving dynamics between institutions and leadership that shape politicking and power struggles within the Politburo.

In this chapter, I analyze the methodology of the Party’s anticorruption program under Xi Jinping. This program has two goals. The first is to shock and awe. This goal has been achieved successfully through the anti-corruption campaign in 2012-2017, which is attributable to two main factors: leadership qualities of both Xi himself and the campaign’s chief director Wang Qishan and the institutional infrastructure provided by the Party’s disciplinary system that had been built by Xi’s predecessors. The campaign’s success also shows that the institutional performance of the Party is susceptible to leadership influence, under which the same tools, devices, and mechanisms can be employed and exploited to different effects. The second goal of Xi’s anti-corruption program is to provide long-term solutions to some of the perpetuating problems of the Party’s disciplinary system. This reform marks a significant transformation in the Party-state relationship: instead of undermining the state for its own preservation, the Party now strengthens its political governance by empowering the state and drawing legitimacy from it. Lastly, I also discuss two recent developments: the gradual decline of Wang Qishan’s influence and the retraction of power from the CCDI.

This chapter seeks to explain the recurrence of judicial corruption despite waves of reforms. To that end, I track major reforms launched by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) over past decades and find a pattern: Most of them revolved on redistribution of judicial decision-making power. Instead of confronting the issue of institutionalized judicial partiality caused by normalized political prerogative, these reforms were designed to divide, centralize, decentralize, and recentralize judicial decision-making power. Since these measures are not geared to eliminate judicial partiality, they work best in redistributing rather than uprooting corruption. Recent reforms made efforts to set boundaries for the exercise of political prerogatives by banning “improper” interference while retaining “proper” interference. The reform may lift the costs of corruption, thereby reducing but not eliminating it, because the power that is most prone to corruption is the one that is entitled to “proper” interference. In the last section, I use a recent SPC scandal to expose the limits of the current judicial reforms and to illustrate the reach and the entrenchment of the prerogative-based judicial interference power.