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."