The China That Policy Templates Cannot See: Beyond Fragmentation, Digital-Material Power, Think-Tank Templates, and Chinese State Transformation

This critical review examines Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri’s Fractured China: How State Transformation Is Shaping China’s Rise. The book remains an important contribution because it challenges the assumption that Chinese foreign policy can be read as the direct expression of a coherent unitary state. This review accepts that contribution, but argues that a fragmentation-centred framework becomes incomplete when decentralisation and internationalisation are not analysed alongside recentralisation, strategic digital-industrial infrastructure, and the material foundations of computational power. The paper moves beyond the loose category of “technology” and develops the concept of digital-material power to examine how platforms, data, hardware, energy systems, educational pipelines, industrial capacity, algorithmic governance, and narrative infrastructures now shape state transformation and geopolitical rivalry. It also identifies a broader problem in some policy-media and think-tank readings of China: the oscillation between threat inflation and naive accommodation. To avoid replacing one simplification with another, the review triangulates Western academic and policy sources with Chinese/China-based scholarship and Russian/Russia-focused perspectives. The argument is not a defence of China or an attack on the West. It is a methodological correction: China should be studied neither as an omnipotent strategic machine nor as a merely fragmented state, but as a historically embedded, institutionally adaptive, and increasingly digital-industrial party-state. The review concludes that stronger China analysis requires contextual literacy, source pluralism, digital-industrial evidence, and a willingness to revise policy templates when the evidence no longer fits them.