In High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy (2024), Angela Zhang argues that interpreting China’s regulation of Big Tech primarily through the lens of state repression is a fundamental misreading. While repression is not absent, overemphasizing it obscures other explanatory forces that are central to understanding how China’s technology sector has evolved and continues to develop. This narrow framing distorts analysis by reducing a complex regulatory and political economy to a single causal narrative.
Such a misreading leads to systematic misunderstandings of China’s technological trajectory, including the state’s objectives, regulatory logic, and the adaptive strategies of firms. By crowding out alternative explanations—such as institutional experimentation, market governance, and state–business bargaining—it hampers a more accurate and nuanced account of China’s tech development and its future direction.
When Regulation Looks Like Repression: Understanding China’s Big Tech Oversight
China confronts many of the same regulatory challenges as the United States and the European Union, from antitrust concerns to data governance and labor issues. Yet its approach differs sharply due to the concentration of administrative power and limited institutional constraints. As a result, Chinese regulatory actions are often—and sometimes accurately—interpreted as exercises of state repression.
A central factor shaping this perception is China’s highly centralized political structure. Regulatory authority ultimately flows from the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, with minimal checks from independent judiciary bodies, civil society, or a free press. In recent years, the system has grown increasingly personalistic, with tighter ideological discipline and reduced agency autonomy. This concentration of power makes regulatory actions appear less like neutral economic governance and more like instruments of political control.
The style and timing of enforcement further reinforce this impression. China’s Big Tech regulation has often followed a campaign-like pattern: long periods of relative laxity punctuated by sudden, severe crackdowns. High-profile actions, such as the suspension of Ant Group’s IPO and rapid antitrust and data enforcement measures beginning in late 2020, erased hundreds of billions in market value almost overnight. For external observers accustomed to gradual, transparent rulemaking, these abrupt interventions resemble political punishment rather than standard regulation.
Procedural norms—or the lack thereof—also shape perceptions. Chinese firms rarely challenge regulators in court, and enforcement prioritizes substantive outcomes over procedural fairness. Public expressions of compliance or gratitude by companies like Alibaba can appear to outsiders as evidence of selective enforcement or political targeting. Combined with the absence of transparent legal recourse, these dynamics make regulatory actions look like disciplinary exercises rather than rule-of-law governance.
The intersection of economic regulation with censorship, surveillance, and data control further blurs the line between governance and political repression. Laws on data security, cross-border transfers, and national security are enforced alongside policies controlling information, limiting public discourse, and monitoring platforms. Because Big Tech firms influence social and political communication, regulatory measures against them are often seen as tools to curb private influence over information, not solely to protect consumers.
Finally, ideological framing amplifies the perception of repression. Campaigns such as “common prosperity” link economic oversight to broader political objectives, including reasserting Party authority and promoting ideological loyalty. While economic concerns like inequality are genuine, the rhetorical and political context invites suspicion that regulation serves dual purposes: economic governance and the reinforcement of political control.
In sum, China’s Big Tech regulation illustrates how a centralized, hierarchical, and ideologically guided system can make routine regulatory interventions appear coercive. While repression is not necessarily the primary motive, the combination of concentrated authority, abrupt enforcement, limited procedural safeguards, overlap with information control, and ideological framing produces a governance model that external observers often—and sometimes correctly—read as exercises of state power.
Rethinking China’s Tech Crackdown: Beyond the Misreading of Political Motives
Observers often misinterpret China’s recent regulatory actions as arbitrary political repression or ideologically driven hostility toward Big Tech. This misreading obscures the real problems that Chinese regulators are addressing. Far from targeting companies out of spite, authorities have confronted a platform economy burdened with accumulated market failures similar to those seen in the US and EU, including monopolistic practices, consumer fraud, data abuse, and labor exploitation.
By framing the crackdown primarily as political, foreign analysts underestimate the extent to which Chinese tech development had already become economically and socially unsustainable by 2020. Much of the regulatory intervention—though imperfect—is aimed at correcting long-neglected structural excesses rather than destroying domestic champions. The distortion of viewing China as irrationally hostile masks the genuine, systemic challenges that the country’s policymakers are attempting to resolve.
Misreading Volatility as Collapse: The Overstated Fate of China’s Tech Sector
China’s recent regulatory interventions in the tech sector have often been interpreted through a lens of repression, encouraging a narrative of inevitable decline. Observers frequently assume that political oversight will permanently stifle innovation and that every crackdown signals terminal hostility toward private firms. This linear view, however, misreads the dynamics of Chinese governance.
In reality, China’s regulatory approach is both volatile and adaptive. Periods of intense intervention are frequently followed by easing measures, recalibrations, and targeted support for innovation. Historical patterns show that once instability threatens growth, authorities adjust policies to sustain dynamism rather than extinguish it. Analysts who treat cyclical regulatory fluctuations as permanent repression thus exaggerate the inevitability of a tech-sector collapse, overlooking the sector’s resilience and the state’s capacity to balance control with growth.
Misreading Regulation: Overlooking Bureaucratic Incentives in China’s Tech Sector
The common narrative of repression treats the Chinese state as a monolithic actor executing a unified political will, yet this oversimplifies the reality. Regulation in China often emerges from bureaucratic competition, agency overreach, and principal–agent dynamics rather than top-down directives. Many regulatory excesses arise as individual agencies seek to expand their influence once broad policy signals are given, rather than from deliberate political targeting of firms.
Misinterpreting these dynamics as ideological repression leads analysts to misunderstand the true sources of regulatory risk. China’s tech environment is not rigidly ideological but institutionally volatile, shaped by fragmented governance structures and competing bureaucratic incentives. Observers who ignore these factors overstate the political determinism of regulatory actions and misdiagnose the sector’s resilience.
Misreading China’s Tech Regulation: Underestimating Learning and Convergence
China’s regulatory approach is often portrayed as isolated and ideologically rigid, but this framing underestimates the state’s capacity for learning and convergence. Chinese regulators actively study and incorporate lessons from U.S. and EU debates on antitrust, data protection, and platform governance. Far from rejecting global norms, China selectively internalizes international practices, adapting them to a state-centric framework that aligns with domestic priorities.
Viewing regulation purely as repression obscures these points of convergence. Observers who adopt this lens fail to recognize how China assimilates global regulatory ideas—such as scrutiny of platform dominance or data localization—into its own system. Misreading these dynamics leads to a distorted view of the Chinese tech sector, portraying it as ideologically inflexible rather than institutionally adaptive and globally informed.
Misreading China’s Tech Trajectory: Confusing Reorientation with Decline
A key consequence of viewing Chinese tech regulation through a repression lens is the misreading of the sector’s future direction. Analysts often interpret regulatory interventions as political punishment and assume they signal a decline in technological dynamism. In reality, regulation has redirected firms from consumer-facing markets toward state-prioritized “hard tech” sectors, including AI, semiconductors, and advanced industrial technologies.
This shift is not simply punitive; it reflects a strategic reorientation driven by geopolitical competition, industrial policy, and regulatory guidance. By framing these developments solely as repression, observers overlook how China is actively shaping the trajectory of its technological ecosystem. The result is a distorted perception that the sector is in decline, rather than undergoing transformation under state-directed priorities.
The Flawed Logic of Repression, Inevitability, and Decline in China Narratives
Long-standing grand narratives—such as claims that “China will collapse,” “China has peaked,” or that authoritarian systems cannot innovate—share a common analytical flaw: they mistake volatility and regulatory constraint for terminal decline. Observers often follow a simple causal chain: centralized power leads to repression, which reduces incentives, ultimately resulting in economic and technological failure. When recent interventions in China’s tech sector are interpreted primarily as political repression, they are treated as new evidence for this enduring claim, reinforcing the notion that the country’s system will inevitably stifle innovation and growth.
This line of reasoning overlinearizes Chinese governance. In reality, China’s regulatory system is neither uniformly tightening nor steadily suffocating the economy; it is cyclical, reactive, and adaptive, even if interventions are occasionally clumsy or costly. Historical patterns demonstrate that periods of stress are often followed by recalibration rather than collapse. From the aftermath of Tiananmen, to WTO entry, the 2008 financial crisis, property market interventions, zero-COVID policies, and the recent tech crackdown, analysts who interpret temporary disruptions as terminal decline consistently misread the dynamics of governance.
The parallel between tech regulation and macroeconomic control is instructive. Tech regulation framed as repression produces the narrative that “China is killing its own innovators,” while macroeconomic interventions interpreted the same way suggest that “China’s economy cannot sustain itself.” In both cases, observers extrapolate short-term system stress into long-term system failure, ignoring the adaptive mechanisms built into Chinese governance structures.
By treating cyclical volatility as inevitability, these narratives obscure the nuanced reality of China’s policy environment. Rather than signaling permanent repression or systemic decay, regulatory fluctuations reflect a state that experiments, recalibrates, and responds to emerging economic, technological, and geopolitical pressures. Misreading these signals as evidence of inevitable decline has repeatedly fueled exaggerated predictions about China’s future.
When Volatility Is Mistaken for Fragility—and Fragility for Collapse
A common analytical error in interpreting China’s policy environment is the failure to distinguish between volatility, fragility, and collapse. Volatility refers to sharp swings in policy, fragility to the heightened risk of unintended consequences, and collapse to systemic breakdown. Outside observers often conflate these categories, interpreting temporary shocks as evidence of deep structural weakness or inevitable failure.
In the tech sector, sudden regulatory crackdowns are frequently read as proof that private enterprise is no longer viable, while declines in market valuations are treated as irreversible destruction. In macroeconomic narratives, periods of growth slowdown are interpreted as signaling “the end of the China story,” and structural rebalancing is framed as stagnation. These readings ignore the adaptive, cyclical nature of governance in China.
China’s system often overcorrects in response to instability and then retreats when the consequences threaten legitimacy. For instance, regulatory easing followed the tech crackdown, just as growth-support measures were implemented after zero-COVID interventions. The pattern demonstrates that volatility and fragility do not automatically lead to collapse; instead, they are part of an iterative governance process designed to stabilize the system.
The parallel between tech and macro narratives underscores the misreading: “Big Tech is finished” mirrors claims that “China has peaked.” Both mistakes arise from conflating short-term policy shocks with structural exhaustion. Recognizing this distinction is crucial to understanding the resilience and adaptability inherent in China’s regulatory and economic frameworks.
The Misstep of Treating the Chinese State as Monolithic
A recurring misreading of China’s governance is the assumption that the state acts as a unitary, omnipotent actor. In narratives of repression, the Party is imagined as deliberately crushing tech firms. In theories of national collapse, it is seen as incapable of correcting mistakes. Both perspectives attribute outcomes to centralized intention, obscuring the complex realities of policymaking in China.
In fact, many regulatory excesses stem from fragmented governance rather than deliberate top-down design. Bureaucratic competition, agency overreach, information distortion, and weak feedback loops frequently generate outcomes that appear chaotic or punitive. Historical misinterpretations of local debt crises, SOE reforms, or property bubbles as centrally orchestrated disasters reveal the same error: what appears to be a monolithic failure is often the result of decentralized, adaptive, and sometimes messy institutional dynamics.
This misreading has clear parallels across sectors. The tech crackdown is often portrayed as a political purge, while economic slowdowns are interpreted as ideological rigidity. In both cases, analysts ignore institutional complexity in favor of simplistic narratives of repression or deterministic decline. Recognizing the fragmented, adaptive nature of China’s governance is essential to understanding the sectoral and macroeconomic developments that are often mischaracterized as evidence of systemic failure.
By treating the Chinese state as monolithic, observers overstate the coherence of policy actions and underestimate the capacity of institutions to recalibrate, respond, and sustain resilience amid volatility and crises. This perspective, therefore, distorts both the causes and consequences of regulatory interventions and economic fluctuations.
Rethinking Innovation Pessimism: The Recurring Misjudgment of Authoritarian Development
Innovation pessimism has long shaped assumptions about China’s technological trajectory. A common lens—the “repression lens”—posits that innovation requires liberal institutions and that authoritarian intervention is inherently fatal to technological development. This perspective underpins recurring claims that China cannot sustain Big Tech, cannot lead in AI or advanced manufacturing, or has reached its “innovation ceiling.” Yet such claims overlook a crucial dynamic: Chinese tech development is not being extinguished but redirected, often from consumer platforms toward hard technologies aligned with state priorities.
History reveals a pattern of misjudgment. In the 1990s, commentators insisted that China could only copy rather than innovate. In the 2000s, analysts argued that growth was export-dependent and thus unsustainable. By the 2010s, fears focused on debt and demographic pressures as guarantors of collapse. In each instance, innovation reemerged—frequently in forms that were unexpected, state-coordinated, and outside the conventional market-driven model. The trajectory of Chinese technology repeatedly challenges the assumption that liberal frameworks are the sole engines of sustained innovation.
The parallel is clear: just as “repression kills Big Tech innovation,” so too does the belief that authoritarianism necessarily suppresses economic dynamism. Both perspectives underestimate non-liberal pathways to innovation, failing to recognize that state-led, strategically directed development can produce technological advances even in highly regulated environments. Innovation pessimism, as a recurring error, stems less from empirical reality than from the persistence of ideological assumptions about how innovation “must” occur.
Beyond Moral Narratives: The Limits of Substituting Ethics for Institutional Analysis
A persistent analytical error arises when moral narratives are substituted for rigorous institutional analysis. In the context of China, this takes two familiar forms. The “repression lens” offers a morally satisfying story: heroic entrepreneurs stifled by an authoritarian state. Similarly, macroeconomic collapse or peak-growth narratives provide a comforting contrast: liberal systems stumble but self-correct, while authoritarian regimes inevitably implode. Both rely on moral clarity at the expense of analytical precision, privileging an ethical story over the messy realities of governance.
Institutional realism offers a corrective. China regulates because it confronts genuine governance challenges, overregulates because hierarchical structures and weak internal checks amplify caution, and selectively retreats when growth and stability are essential to state legitimacy. These actions are less a reflection of authoritarian malevolence than a calculated response to the institutional environment, designed to balance innovation, social stability, and political credibility.
The recurring misjudgment lies in evaluating China according to what it ought to be—a liberal, rule-of-law system—rather than how it actually operates. By substituting moral narratives for careful institutional analysis, both tech regulation and macroeconomic forecasts overlook the strategic logic embedded in China’s policies. Understanding these dynamics requires stepping beyond ethical intuition and engaging directly with the incentives, hierarchies, and constraints that shape decision-making.
Final Thoughts
Zhang does not deny the existence of repression in China’s tech sector. Rather, she argues that reducing Big Tech regulation to a morality tale of authoritarian control produces a caricature that obscures more than it explains: why regulation emerged when it did, why it mirrors global trends, why it oscillates instead of permanently tightening, and how innovation continues under constraint. Misreading regulation as pure state repression leads analysts to overstate decline, misjudge regulatory intent, and mispredict the trajectory of Chinese innovation.
This micro-level misreading reflects a broader analytical habit that has fueled decades of “China will collapse” or “China has peaked” narratives. These theories share three recurring errors: linear thinking in a non-linear system, ideological projection onto institutional dynamics, and mistaking volatility for terminal decline. Zhang’s contribution is to show that China’s system fails differently, adapts differently, and survives differently than conventional pessimistic frameworks assume—demonstrating that innovation and resilience often emerge in forms that defy moralized expectations.
References
- High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy. Angela Zhang, 2024