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The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China

By (author) Ya-Wen Lei

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| book description |

How Chinaâ€™s 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 transformedâ€”for better and worseâ€”by Chinaâ€™s 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 â€œhigh-endâ€ versus â€œlow-end,â€ and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and control workers and capital. She shows how Chinaâ€™s rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compressed development, the complex relationship between the nationâ€™s 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 Chinaâ€™s extraordinary transformation to Americaâ€™s 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.