The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780691212838)

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.

Author: Ya-Wen Lei
ISBN-10: 069121283X
ISBN-13: 9780691212838
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/21/2023
Pages: 368
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.40w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2024