Ya-Wen Lei on the Techno-Developmental Regime in China

Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvc6K_WDHMY

"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, will be published by Princeton University Press on November 21, 2023."

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From the transcript:

"As China's economy falters, we're all trying to understand the underlying social challenges, uh, that Xi Jinping is facing. And Professor Lei really gets inside the Chinese system doing her research with real people at the grassroots level. She spent many weeks and months on the factory floors in China talking to workers and managers about how the rise of technology, uh, and tech production has affected their lives.

Professor Lei trained in both law and sociology. She holds an LLM and a JSD from Yale Law School and a PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan. She is the author of the contentious Public Sphere Law Media and Authoritarian Rule in China. And her second book, the Gilded Cage, Techno State Capitalism in China, has just been published. So we're very excited about that.

We're also really delighted that our discuss it today is Professor Susan Greenhalgh, who also does her work from the, looking at China from the ground up and at the grassroots level.

"Professor Greenhalgh:

I'll be just a minute because we need to give all our time to Professor Lei.

I have the great pleasure of introducing yo in her new book on techno-capitalism, which she's going to speak about in this book.

Professor Lei traces the development, especially since the mid 2000s of a so-called techno developmental regime, characterized by the expansion of instrumental power over the people by means of new technologies and new legal norms.

So she brings her skills as a sociologist and a legal specialist into this work.

She traces what she calls the dark side of China's Gilded Age, spelling out the origins, the nature, and especially the contradictions inherent in China's current developmental model.

In this important book, professor may not only engages with classic thinkers in political sociology, Max Faber, Daniel Bell, Frankfurt School philosophers and so forth. She develops a theory of China's contemporary side tech-driven political economy that assured be a classic in Chinese studies and in the comparative literature on the developmental state. So in other words, she succeeds in doing what many of us aspire to, but few achieve, namely writing a book that contributed contributes importantly to China's studies and comparative political sociology. One more point, what makes her work really distinctive is her grounding of the analysis in the central role of [ ] science and technology."