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Paper Short Abstract:

Using digital social protection infrastructure as a point of departure to connect both online and offline research sites, this paper investigates how digital welfare delivery infrastructure in China is planned and designed.

Paper Abstract:

Previous scholars suggest that digital technologies depend on everyday infrastructures such as power plants, WIFI network and social media platforms to function and connect with people (Pink etc.). Along a similar vein, I use digital social protection infrastructure as a point of departure to trace its planning and designing stages during which multiple actors become involved. I investigate one of the key steps of the public digital infrastructure expansion, wherein the Chinese local government designs training programs for its service delivery personnel. Based on ethnographic interviews and participant observation online, I introduce the digital platform, Cloud Exercise, wherein people can gain access to the training materials and enter trivia games to compete with their colleagues. Cloud Exercise is a lightweight application within WeChat, China's most popular messaging platform. It showcases rankings of participants based on points they accumulated via trivia contests, and the percentage of materials they completed, ranging from quizzes on welfare policies, administrative procedures and situational responses. My paper demonstrates that specific rules of the competition are designed not through straightforward, automated decision-making but through negotiations between the project manager, programmers as well as government officials. This process, I argue, not only reveals the institutional logic of subordinating public services to quantitative indicators, but also shows how local government outsources its responsibilities to the private sector and to individuals through the practices of standardization. My paper, therefore, contributes to the body of literature that scrutinizes how the shaping of digital spaces become entangled with offline social relations.