Digital China: Governance, Power Politics, and the Social Game

The chapter analyses China's social process of norms- and rules-setting in the digital domain and identifies the underlying normative dimension of its strategy. The study explains how China aims at institutionalizing and ultimately imposing its conception of governance in the cyber domain. To reach its objective, China influences and shapes other countries' socialization processes, so that they will adopt and assimilate Chinese norms and values, thus ultimately positioning Beijing as a normative leader and standard-and-norm-setter in the cyber domain. The research hypothesizes that China's policies should be understood as a linkage strategy underlying a multilevel socialization process: in order to defend and support its national objectives, Beijing resorts to institutional structures of governance and multilateral fora, bilateral mechanisms of material and social power, while building a normative narrative of its vision as an alternative model for growth and development. The research shows that Beijing adopts an integrated vision, combining socialization through governance with power politics, its digital policy being at the service of its political objective.