Public consultation and policy change in China’s cyber governance

This article theorizes how public consultation in China shapes policy change. It shows that, in the drafting of China’s novel rules on Generative AI, public consultation led to a drastic regulatory U-turn and defied scholarly expectations. In response, this article shifts attention to the internal feedback mechanisms that shape how societal input is transformed into policy change. To map these factors, it uses natural language processing to compare drafts and final versions of official documents by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). This analysis demonstrates that internal dynamics like bureaucratic complexity and policy preferences shape consultation’s impact more than societal ones. In this case, consultation’s function becomes to reveal and calibrate potentially competing logics within the system (security versus development) without fundamentally altering its priorities.