This chapter concludes the book with a discussion of how China’s model of digital governance applies to China post-Covid and after the anti-trust campaign. Popular corporatism emerged from policy decisions aimed at addressing the digital dilemma and is shaped by reflections on and learning from the past. These decisions involved conversations with technology companies and their profit-seeking innovations, which offered solutions to concrete policy problems. However, such conversations were not devoid of contestation when interests misalign. The anti-trust campaign reveals the challenges in reducing corporate influence while reaping the benefits of data concentration. Citizens are not easily fooled either, as seen in protests against the abuse of government-led social credit ratings in enforcing China’s zero-Covid policy. Since the logic of popular corporatism is not unique to China, the chapter discusses implications for understanding the role of Chinese, Russian, and US-based technology companies in other authoritarian contexts. An important precondition for the application to other contexts is the state’s economic resources. Concluding with an eye on liberal democracy, the chapter emphasizes one key lesson from China’s digital governance – the power of a positive vision in uniting the interactions between the state, platform firms, and citizens.

The modern synthesis begins in Bloomsbury with a group of novelists, scientists, and philosophers that included two of the foremost geneticists of the time, J. B. S Haldane and Julian Huxley; the novelist who gave the world the most influential vision of a genetic future, Aldous Huxley; and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose The Scientific Outlook rivals Brave New World in its prophecies about the social transformations that genetics might unleash. Aldous Huxley’s vision of the modern world, with its dispassionate, impartial, and unsparing satire of all aspects of life, is closer to the scientific point of view of Haldane and other modern geneticists than to Huxley’s literary modernist peers. The failure to understand Huxley’s satiric vision has led to egregious misreadings of Brave New World to support attacks on twenty-first-century genetics and has distorted public policy recommendations by influential conservative voices.