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

Lei, Ya-Wen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 069121283X ISBN 13: 9780691212838

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

How China’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 transformed―for better and worse―by China’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 “high-end” versus “low-end,” and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and control workers and capital. She shows how China’s rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compressed development, the complex relationship between the nation’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 China’s extraordinary transformation to America’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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ya-Wen Lei is professor of sociology at Harvard University, where she is affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China (Princeton).

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• ISBN 10: 069121283X
• ISBN 13: 9780691212838
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar