Retrofitting Leninism

Retrofitting Leninism explains how modern Leninist regimes elicit and process bottom-up information from citizens in the service of top-down authoritarian control and public administration. The book revolves around the modern Chinese Communist Party and its use of information technology to augment legacy institutions for social and political control. While the empirical focus of the book is on contemporary China, the analysis also builds on a historical and comparative understanding of state and society relations under authoritarianism.