Sino Stack

Context

The concept of a technological, infrastructural or even 'civilizational' Stack refers to the book:

• The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Benjamin Bratton. MIT Press, 2016.

For more details see also, Stack Sovereignty.

Specifically on China, see: The Grey Canon vs the Red Canon in the Sino-Stack.

Characteristics

Chor Pharn:

"The Sino-stack is best understood not as a single institution but as an ecosystem of new organisational forms that translate machine surplus into human welfare. Each of these forms already exists in partial, experimental form within China’s political economy.

• Platform ministries have evolved out of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the newly created National Data Bureau. These bodies no longer issue fixed plans; they operate continuous feedback loops between firms and state. When export quotas for electric vehicles or semiconductor materials shift, they do so in response to telemetry: live data from provincial dashboards, supply-chain sensors, and customs systems. Regulation functions like software—constant updates rather than periodic decrees.

• Civic model operators are emerging through provincial AI deployments. Hangzhou’s City Brain coordinates traffic, policing, and emergency response; Shanghai’s AI Health network triages patients across hospitals; Nanjing’s education bureau uses language models for tutoring and administrative triage. These systems behave as public utilities. Compute access is contingent on measurable human outcomes. If congestion or wait times rise, the algorithm’s priority drops. It is bureaucratic meritocracy encoded in software.

• Metabolic exchanges take shape in energy and carbon markets. The national carbon-trading system, the Green Electricity Certificate programme, and the State Grid’s energy-data exchanges all price reliability and cleanliness, not merely volume. Profit is tied to stability. Grid operators earn more by keeping power consistent than by selling more of it. This is the financialisation of coherence.

• Guild republics have appeared in industrial clusters such as Shenzhen, Suzhou, and Changzhou. They are networks of small firms and training academies that maintain the human layer of automation—robotics inspection, data labelling, model supervision. They resemble modern guilds: self-organised, publicly certified, responsible for the maintenance of a local competence ecosystem. The state’s role is to provide standards and credit, not to manage day-to-day operations.

• Sensorate authorities are the least formal but perhaps the most emblematic. Hangzhou’s “social mood index,” Chengdu’s community satisfaction dashboards, and the social-media observatories run by the Cyberspace Administration all feed affective data into policy adjustment. Where Western governments commission opinion polls, China runs live telemetry on public sentiment. Governance becomes responsive not through elections but through metrics of affect.

Together these institutions form a new administrative stack in which information, energy, and legitimacy circulate continuously. They extend the grey and red canons into the machine age: meritocracy monitored by metrics, mobilisation triggered by data."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-new-rome)

Discussion

The problems inherent in the Sino-Stack

Chor Pharn:

"The Sino-stack’s strength—its ability to couple machine surplus to social stability—is also the source of its fragility. Its contradictions are internal, structural, and visible.

Continuous feedback produces administrative fatigue. The grey-canon bureaucracy was designed for stability punctuated by inspection. The digital bureaucracy runs on permanent inspection. Officials, firms, and citizens live under metrics that update daily. Performance replaces ideology as the measure of loyalty, but perpetual evaluation breeds exhaustion. The state must find ways to re-introduce rest—ritual, grace, or forgiveness—without weakening accountability.

The same feedback creates metric capture. Once coherence is quantifiable, actors learn to game the indicator. Late-imperial scholars composed model essays to pass exams; modern municipalities perfect dashboards for inspection. Beautified data replaces policy substance. The challenge is to design audit mechanisms—statistical or civic—that restore friction to an otherwise self-confirming system.

A third problem is regional inequality. Wealthy coastal provinces adopt automation and AI governance quickly; interior regions lag. The stack risks reproducing within China the same asymmetry it criticises in the global economy: an efficient core surrounded by a dependent periphery. Coordination succeeds nationally only if slower regions can plug into the feedback network without being reduced to relay stations for the coast.

The fourth dilemma is privacy and consent. The sensorate layer — the continuous measurement of sentiment and trust—is indispensable to performance legitimacy, yet it relies on pervasive observation. When citizens perceive that surveillance produces tangible improvement, they accept it. When benefits plateau, suspicion returns. A system built on visibility must continually demonstrate benevolence.

The fifth is innovation constraint. When reliability becomes the supreme value, risk becomes vice. The same feedback loops that prevent collapse can also prevent renewal. Chinese planners speak quietly of “sandbox provinces” or “experimental zones” where deviation is authorised. Without institutionalised disorder, the system may age as perfectly as Rome—efficient, admired, and unable to change.

And finally there is the dilemma of virality. America’s genius lies not in its functioning but in its storytelling. Its institutions may decay, yet its myths of freedom, mobility, and self-expression continue to reproduce themselves across languages and continents. The liberal order survives its crises because people everywhere still want to live inside its imagination. China confronts the inverse condition: administrative success without narrative contagion. The Sino-stack delivers but does not inspire. Partners adopt its infrastructure, not its worldview. Like the Han bureaucracy, it spreads by necessity, not conversion. The strategic risk is that a civilisation built on coherence cannot command affection. If the United States remains a narrative superpower even after losing institutional competence, then China must become a narrative power precisely because of its competence. The Type-1 civilisation will endure only when coherence acquires charisma."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-new-rome)

More information

Bibliography

Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of Digital Government. Beijing: State Council, 2021.

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Development of New Productive Forces. Beijing: MIIT Press, 2024.

National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Implementation Plan for the Construction of New Infrastructure. Beijing: NDRC, 2023.

Xi, Jinping. The Governance of China, Vols. I–IV. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014–2022.