City brains and smart urbanization: regulating ‘sharing economy’ innovation in China

Abstract Starting from the officially proclaimed readjustment of the People’s Republic of China’s national development road map, this article engages in a theory-guided evaluation of the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) strategy in connection with its smart city initiatives. The government’s official quest to steer China toward a ‘new mode of urbanization’ has, as this article argues, facilitated the rise of the country’s ‘sharing economy’/’platform economy’, with the mushrooming of a private AI economy offering ‘smart’ algorithm-optimized solutions to complex urban governance dilemmas. To (re)strengthen control and to cement central authority, the Chinese government has set out to regulate and standardize this emerging private platform economy sector—while also attempting not to interrupt the innovation drive of the Chinese AI landscape as such. This article argues that these regulation efforts, contrary to conventional top-down steering approaches, rely on central-local collaboration and network coordination that involves a number of multiple actors operating under the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ of the central party-state.