Information capacity and social order: The local politics of information integration in China

Abstract

AbstractHow do regimes employ information to govern society and maintain control? Recent scholarship argues that legibility is a fundamental component of state capacity, but the politics of information collection and use remain incompletely understood. This article examines how the local state in China uses information to amplify legibility and bolster social control. Extant literature focuses largely on information collection, but Chinese officials have adopted high‐tech information management platforms to solve a different issue: inadequate information integration across bureaucracies (“information islands”). Information integration platforms strengthen the local state's ability to govern by enhancing intra‐bureaucratic accountability and improving the local state's ability to demobilize contention. At the policy level, adoption of these platforms has implications for the Chinese party‐state's ambitions for social stability; their global spread could affect trends in governance worldwide. Theoretically, our findings indicate that legibility depends not just on the state's ability to collect information, but to integrate it as well.