Let me clarify that the focus of my book is economic development rather than narrowly defined technology policy. I use the metaphor of a “gilded cage” to capture two key aspects of China’s socioeconomic transformation since the mid-2000s: first, the success of China in creating the second-largest digital economy and some of the world's largest tech firms; second, the expanding legal and technical instruments established by both the Chinese government and China's big-tech firms during China's shift from a labor-intensive, export-oriented economy to a more high-tech-oriented developmental model. These instruments can be thought of as the rules of the game. Thus, the metaphor of a “cage” reflects how these rules constrain and shape people’s behavior and interactions.
I also want to emphasize that the book examines both a developmental state and digital capitalism, without fitting squarely into either scholarly tradition. The literature on the developmental state focuses on the role of the state in economic development, while the literature on digital capitalism often focuses on the role of big-tech companies, especially in the U.S. context, in imposing instrumental control over a wide range of actors from users to workers, based on their technological capacity and data. In the case of China, one of the most important aspects of the economic transformation since the mid-2000s has been the emergence of a digital capitalist system characterized by the rise of tech capital and an asymmetrically symbiotic relationship between tech capital and the state.
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