The Gilded Cage: Techno-State Capitalism in China

Ya-Wen Lei, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology at Harvard University

Using Daniel Bell’s work as a springboard, Ya-Wen Lei analyzes the emergent post-industrial society in China, focusing on China’s techno-development from the mid-2000s to the present day. Noting the extraordinary transformation of China’s economy and society during this time, some scholars have compared China’s post-reform period to the Gilded Age in the United States. By contrast, Lei seeks to highlight the darker implications of these changes, what she refers to collectively as China’s “gilded cage.” She uses this term to capture not so much a literal space as the dynamic processes and relations set in motion by the Chinese state’s effort to move from an economy relying on labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to techno-state capitalism. The drive towards techno-state capitalism has included: (1) the proliferation of technological and legal instruments established by the state and large tech companies to regulate work and life, and enhance legibility, valuation, efficiency, and behavior modification; (2) the legal, economic, and cultural subordination of work, workers, and forms of capital deemed “obsolete” or “low-end” to those valorized as “high-tech” or “high-end,” despite China’s official socialist ideology; and (3) the intensified subjection of both “low-end” and “high-end” workers and capital to the precarious and despotic rule by instruments. In this talk, Lei will explain how this sweeping, lopsided, and unchecked rule by instruments came to be, and discuss the contradictions between the state and different kinds of capital and labor that have followed in its wake.

Ya-Wen Lei is also affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. She is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her second book, The Gilded Cage: Techno-State Capitalism in China, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in Fall 2023. Her work has appeared in American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology, among other peer-reviewed journals. Her publications have received various awards from the American Sociological Association, the Law and Society Association, and The China Quarterly.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by Tuesday, January 17th, by emailing ed779@georgetown.edu. A good faith effort will be made to fulfill requests.