"The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China" with Prof Ya-Wen Lei
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.
Date:
29 November 2023, 13:00 (Wednesday, 8th week, Michaelmas 2023)
Venue:
1 St Giles', 1 St Giles' OX1 3JS
Venue Details:
1 St Giles Seminar Room
Speaker:
Prof Ya-Wen Lei (Harvard University)
Organising department:
Oxford Internet Institute
Organiser:
Ellen Mobbs (Oxford Internet Institute)
Organiser contact email address:
events@oii.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Professor Vili Lehdonvirta (Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research, Oxford Internet Institute)
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-gilded-cage-technology-development-and-state-capitalism-in-china-tickets-726824179687?aff=OxTalks
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Ellen Mobbs
