Scottish Centre for China Research

Abstract: 

This talk explores the experiences of living in China, where sophisticated public and personal surveillance systems have been built to empower the state's ambition of accurate social governance with data and algorithms (Sun and Wang, 2022). With digital technologies applied into rural governance through the provision of everyday utilities and public services, a new social governance model is in the making, continuing and renewing the existing social order in rural China. Given the embeddedness of data, algorithm and platform in everyday life, the government does not need to tell what citizens to do or to follow any rules or regulations. The data and algorithmic system will operate automatically as tools of surveillance and governance if citizens use those smart technologies as everyday utilities.

Using the smartphone app, Xiangcun Ding, which is deployed in rural areas of the Zhejiang province in southeastern China as case study, this research focuses on the algorithmic construction and the algorithmic nudging of citizens’ social morality. This talk will illustrate how rating systems become a new social governing infrastructure that has enabled the state to exploit the materiality of everyday lives and social relations for moral governance in rural China.  

 

Short Bio: Yu Sun is the Lecturer in Media and Sociology at the University of Glasgow, the UK. Her research interests involve online deliberation, data activism, internet and digital infrastructure, algorithms and social governance, feminist media studies and China.