Book Talk: 'The Gilded Cage:  Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China' with Professor Ya-Wen Lei

The Department of International Development invites you to a book talk on 'The Gilded Cage:  Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China' with the author Professor Ya-Wen Lei as speaker.

                                                                                       

Professor Lei’s fascinating new book shows how  China’s economic development combines a veneer of unprecedented progress with the increasingly despotic rule of surveillance over all aspects of life.

About the speaker

Professor Ya-Wen Lei

Ya-Wen Lei is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She is also affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Trained in both law and sociology, she holds an LL.M. and a J.S.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. After graduating from Michigan in 2013, she was a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University (2013–2016). In 2018–2019, she was a visiting professor at Sciences Po in France.

She is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her second book, The Gilded Cage: Techno-State Capitalism in China, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in Fall 2023. She has published in general sociological journals (American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Socius), specialised social science journals (Law and Society Review, Work, Employment and Society, and Political Communication), and a China studies journal (The China Quarterly). Her publications have received various awards from the American Sociological Association, the Law and Society Association, and The China Quarterly—the leading interdisciplinary journal in China studies.