This research investigates the rise, transformation, and contested persistence of blockchain and AI within China’s digital governance ecosystem, tracing how AI inherits and transforms blockchain’s discursive legacy: the libertarian imaginaries of decentralization and cryptographic trust are rearticulated into new narratives of centralized data infrastructures, computational power, and algorithmic authority. Seen through this inheritance, blockchain’s trajectory appears not as a linear transition from hype to repression, but as a process of paradoxical infrastructuring, where blockchain’s affordances for decentralizing possibilities are alternately valorized, domesticated, and strategically redeployed within contradictory regimes of power. Bringing together Foucault’s theory of governmentality, developed to interrogate Cold War modernity, and Michael Szonyi’s framework of “the art of being governed,” which captures the tactical adaptations of subjects under premodern Chinese statecraft, this analysis reveals how infrastructural governance in China is shaped by the agonistic interplay between historically sedimented repertoires of rule and their contemporary rearticulation through participatory contestations and adaptive strategies enacted by a plurality of stakeholders. Since the reform and opening-up era, these logics have not coexisted peacefully but clashed in painful and dramatic ways, producing new modes of infrastructural subjectivation. The study foregrounds intermediary actors, including crypto developers, influencer-entrepreneurs, and policy-facing venture capitals, who perform decentralization while materially benefiting from its state-sanctioned translation. These figures occupy the ambiguous space between resistance and complicity, tactically navigating regulatory opacity and ideological elasticity. The discourse once attached to blockchain has not disappeared; it re-emerges in the AI era as tools for imagining trustworthiness and legitimacy, enabling blockchain actors to revalorize themselves after the burst of the earlier hype. Ultimately, what appears as a shift from blockchain to AI is better understood as a recursive recalibration of infrastructural power: blockchain’s imaginaries and architectures do not vanish but are folded into the emerging socio-technical apparatus of AI, that is, the interlinked infrastructures, institutions, and discourses through which governance and contestation are exercised. In this process, ideological contradiction functions not as a failure in governance but as a generative feature of China’s evolving techno-infrastructural governance.
Zeyu Hu (Wed,) studied this question.