Data Power and Counter-power with Chinese Characteristics

AbstractHow to make sense of China as a global data superpower? This chapter attempts to offer new insights that are historicised and holistic, considering China’s internal conflicts and its relations with the external world. It starts by outlining and debunking two myths about China, fetishising it as either dystopia or utopia. Then the dialectics of power and counter-power are introduced to shed light on the more complex Chinese reality that can only be fully comprehended, as this chapter argues, through the lenses of history and conflict. To illustrate this perspective, one that differs remarkably from the conventional wisdom that fixates on the powers that be (political and/or economic), this chapter provides an overview of the history of the computing and data industries in China that goes back to the early 1950s and traverses the Maoist and post-Mao eras with a certain continuity, while highlighting the crucial importance of geopolitics and national security concerns as well as internal class struggles and existential threats to the working people. Data power and counter-power are not only antithetical to each other, they also necessitate, reproduce, co-create, and strengthen one another; although in different historical contexts the specific constitution would vary. The chapter ends with an overall assessment of the Chinese model being neither utopic nor dystopic. Critical data studies should see China as an open-ended process of power/counter-power dynamism, full of conflicts.