The Gilded Cage - Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China

How China-s economic development combines a veneer of unprecedented progress with the increasingly despotic rule of surveillance over all aspects of life

Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed-for better and worse-by China-s rapid rise to economic and technological dominance.

Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of in-depth interviews with managers, business owners, workers, software engineers, and local government officials, Lei describes the vastly unequal values assigned to economic sectors deemed -high-end- versus -low-end,- and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and