This chapter delves into the political implications of data production on social media platforms on regime stability. It first investigates the meaning of political trust as a measure for regime stability. It then elaborates on political trust in China and lays out expectations about the role of benevolent leadership and citizens’ experiences on social media. The main empirical analysis concentrates on user experiences regarding space for online discourse and the diversity of opinions expressed on WeChat. The chapter finds that user experience of a less controlled and more diverse online discourse on WeChat is positively related to political trust in the regime. These empirical findings hold for political discourse, across digital platforms, and when content control undergoes changes over time. This analysis shows that user experiences greatly vary in terms of how much overt content control people encounter and the extent to which online discourse is seen as giving voice to diverse views and opinions. This variation feeds into how citizens evaluate the central government. Experiencing social media platforms as less controlled and more diverse aids in the creation of a positive vision of a benevolent central government, thus boosting support for the regime.

Unlike anticorruption institutions elsewhere, China’s anticorruption practices follow a self-regulatory model: it is regulated by the very institution that is targeted by anticorruption. Compared with its role in judicial affairs, the Party’s involvement in anticorruption investigation is much more forefront, direct, and prominent. In this chapter, I track the origin and institutional evolution of the Party’s disciplinary system during 1927-2012. I point out that the Party’s institutional design is founded on the cardinal principle to preserve the unified (absolute) command of the Party Center. Thereby, how to reconcile between the imperative to uphold this principle and the need to provide a measure of autonomy for disciplinary institutions to avoid capture has been the main theme of the disciplinary institution-building process. The introduction of a tiered interlocking disciplinary decision-making structure, the segmented investigation process, and the “dual-leadership” model are the direct outcomes of the Party’s efforts to balance the conflicting needs mentioned above. These arrangements had fueled the rise of the CCDI but also brought several problems and challenges, including legal deficiency, jurisdictional frictions, resource shortage, incentive issues, and abuse, which had set the stage for Xi Jinping’s unprecedented anti-corruption campaign and disciplinary reform upon his taking power in 2012.

I remember vividly the first time I heard this amusing little ditty. My late grandfather was an avid storyteller, and one especially hot afternoon during my summer vacation in Kolkata, he ventured to talk to me about the Second World War. He had been only a boy in Jessore (east Bengal) when the War struck, but he had remembered his abhigyata (that is, how he had experienced the War). It was not just a memory of being afraid of air strikes, what the Japanese would do if they actually came to Bengal, the horror of the famine of 1943 and the (later) tribulation of making a cross-border journey in 1947. It was also a memory of what he called ‘the sahebs being afraid’. This statement was followed by a chuckled reciting of the ditty quoted earlier.

This chapter introduces the analytical framework of the book. It presents a typology of two modes of governance – the command-and-control and popular corporatism logics – with examples from China. It presents each logic in its extreme form to emphasize their differences in the dynamic relation between the state, platform firms, and users. In the command-and-control logic, platform firms are intermediaries that follow and implement the policies of the state, while popular corporatism emphasizes the important role of platform firms. According to this alternative framework, large profit-driven platform firms have bargaining power against the state. That implies they not only refuse to comply without being authorized to do so by the state but also receive concessions from the state. The source of such business power stems from data that is produced by citizens. While positive incentives draw users to platforms, users may engage less or move to alternative platforms when given choices. In this way, users signal their bottom line to platforms through the actions taken on the platform. In authoritarian contexts, this dynamic may lead to conflicts with demands from political elites, thus motivating noncompliance and resistance by platforms.

The Quit India Movement as well as the revolutionary movement of colonial India continue to remain embroiled in debates, and, in more recent years, in controversy as well. While in the past, the revolutionary movement was relegated to the margins of the ‘Independence’ movement and seen more as a heroic yet failed enterprise, in the last decade or so, it has become an integral part of a hardened, performative, nationalist repertoire. The word ‘revolutionary’ continues to inspire a strong emotional connection.

Yet this emotional connection is itself varied, diverse and sometimes very complexly interwoven with one another. On the one hand, there is a kind of emotional connection between revolutionaries, their contribution to the anti-colonial movement and the civil society of India today that we get to witness when we visit the world of heritage, especially museums. In this context, I would like to take the reader through a brief journey that I took on a recent visit to two such important museums in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), in West Bengal. The first is the Alipore Central Jail, which has now almost entirely been converted into a museum. The second is the Special Branch Archives in north Kolkata, which used to also be the home of the Kolkata Police Museum.