講座 | The Chip Era and Digital Governance Forum 15、16 

2026-04-01 - 2026-06-30

ICCS Reading Forum
治理數位中國 Governing Digital China (2026)
Online
The Chip Era and Digital Governance Forum 15、16 
Date and Time: May 26-27, 2026, Taipei Time (GMT+8)

👥 Reading Group Discussion
May 26 (Tuesday), 2:00–4:00 pm (GMT+8)
Moderator: Moderator: Prof. Tzu-kai Liu (Assistant Professor of Ethnology, National Chengchi University, Taiwan)
Format: Online
Online meeting Link: https://meet.google.com/agz-kdev-wkn?authuser=0
Forum Language: English

📖 Book Talk by the Authors
May 27 (Wednesday), 4:00–5:30 pm (GMT+8)
Moderator: Prof. Joyce C. H. Liu (Director, ICCS, NYCU, Taiwan)
Speakers:
1.Prof. Daniela Stockmann (Director, Centre for Digital Governance; Professor of Digital Governance, Hertie School, Germany)
2.Prof. Ting Luo (Associate Professor in Government and Artificial Intelligence, University of Birmingham, UK)
Format: Online
Online meeting Link: https://meet.google.com/dey-qfvi-bto?hs=224
Forum Language: English

Synopsis
Governing Digital China (2026) by Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo.
This reading forum discusses the book Governing Digital China (2026) by Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo. It is organized into two parts: reading group discussions and a book talk by the authors. The book engages with the conceptual and empirical contributions of The Digital Dilemma, which interrogates how states navigate the tension between digital openness and political control. Focusing on China, it challenges the binary view that digital governance in authoritarian contexts is purely top-down. Instead, it introduces the concept of popular corporatism — a framework that foregrounds the dynamic, mutually dependent relationships among the state, platform companies, and citizens.

While digital technologies enable economic growth and innovation, they also facilitate collective action and potential political instability. The Chinese case is particularly instructive because it combines strong regulatory capacity with a thriving digital economy. The authors argue that this balance cannot be explained by state control alone; rather, it emerges through ongoing negotiation with platform firms and user practices. The book also critically examines the Social Credit System as a concrete institutionalization of these dynamics — one in which data generated through everyday digital participation are repurposed for governance, evaluation, and behavioral regulation, blurring the boundary between economic incentives and political oversight.
This forum invites participants to reflect on how this triadic relationship reconfigures our understanding of power, governance, and participation in digital societies. How might this framework travel beyond China — to South and Southeast Asia, or even to liberal democracies? And what does it reveal about the political life of everyday digital practices?

Speakers
💬 Daniela Stockmann 
Director, Centre for Digital Governance; Professor of Digital Governance, Hertie School, Germany
Prod. Daniela Stockmann is Director of the Centre for Digital Governance and Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School. Her current research focuses on the inte healthraction between government, platform firms, and citizens in the area of social media governance. She studies these interactions both in China and in Europe. Her forthcoming book “Governing Digital China” (with Ting Luo, in press with Cambridge University Press) challenges top-down notions of digital governance and explores the logic of citizen-influenced corporatism, highlighting bottom-up influences of China’s largest platform firms. 
The book is based on the China Internet Survey, funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (PhD 2007), the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and the University of Rochester. Before joining the Hertie School faculty, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. 

Her book, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China (Cambridge University Press, 2013), received the 2015 Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Beyond her academic work, she has served as advisor on Chinese foreign policy and European social media governance to policy-makers in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.

💬 Ting Luo 
Associate Professor in Government and Artificial Intelligence, University of Birmingham, UK 
Prof. Ting Luo’s research focuses on digital governance and policy, particularly on how digital development shape politics and governance. Although her empirical work centres on China, she situates these findings within a broader comparative framework to draw insights relevant to global contexts. Her methodological approach is diverse, integrating both traditional social science techniques, such as surveys and experiments, and advanced computational social science methods, including machine learning and quantitative text analysis. Ting’s work has received funding support from esteemed institutions, including the European Research Council, the British Academy, UKRI and the National Institute for Health Research.

Prior to joining the University of Birmingham, Ting was a senior lecturer in Political Communication at Manchester Metropolitan University, a post-doctoral fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin and Leiden University in the Netherlands.  She holds a PhD in government and a Master of Science in public policy and administration from LSE. 

Organizer
教育部高教深耕計畫特色領域研究中心 
國立陽明交通大學文化研究國際中心 
National Yang-Ming Chiao-Tung University International Center for Cultural Studies
(ICCS-NYCU), Sub-project II : The Chip Era and Digital Governanc

 

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