How China built the bureaucracy it needed to crackdown on tech giants.
Illustration by Luis Grañena
In the early 1980s, when Chinese leaders debated how to reform and open up China’s economy, Chen Yun advocated for a ‘birdcage economy.’ In his analogy, the bird was China’s economy, ready to take flight, while the cage referred to the state’s planning and control, which would prevent the bird from flying away.
Before the mid-2000s, most discussions on the birdcage economy in Chinese officialdom did not distinguish between different kinds of birds. But as the Chinese state endeavore
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