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Power in the Age of Datafication: Exploring China’s Global Data Power

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Abstract

Anxieties about China’s growing data power have begun to drive geopolitical and technological competition. Yet, the size of Chinese data power is unclear. Most assessments are unsystematic. Drawing on Barnett and Duvall’s fourfold power taxonomy and insights into the stack-layers of information technology, this article develops a new conceptual framework. Using the concepts of compulsory, institutional, infrastructural, and productive data power, we assess how China exercises different forms of data power and what shapes and limits the increase of Chinese data power. The study concludes that China’s data power is less grandiose than often assumed. The Chinese state wields influence and obtains desired outcomes predominantly through compulsory and institutional data power operations. But by contrast, infrastructural and productive dimensions remain limited, largely due to China’s high compulsory and institutional data power. The intricacies of China’s case demonstrate the complexities of power research in the age of datafication as different forms of data power evolve in tension.

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Notes

  1. See on the long-standing debate  about the relationship between the state, the  Internet and digital technologies [33, 70, 89].

  2. Instead of the term “structural power,” the paper adopts the notion of “infrastructural data power”. Different from Michael Mann’s understanding, which highlights the capacities of the state to penetrate civil society and distinguishes it from “despotic power” of the state elite, we focus here on the global affordances of data infrastructures.

  3. English is used by 59.9% of all websites, while Chinese is only used by 1.5% of all websites. The language barrier is less relevant here, though, because all Chinese websites included here have an English version.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Douglas Howland, Nicolas Huppenbauer, Jacob Tong, Feinan Zhu and Louisa Schmökel as well as the anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for helpful comments and suggestions.

Funding

Postdoctoral Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Return Program of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia: research group “Infrastructures of China’s Modernity and Their Global Constitutive Effects”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of European Studies of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

    Ying Huang

  2. Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Ying Huang & Maximilian Mayer

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  1. Ying Huang
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Correspondence to Ying Huang.

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Huang, Y., Mayer, M. Power in the Age of Datafication: Exploring China’s Global Data Power. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 28, 25–49 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09816-0

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