Meicen Sun Presentation

Internet Control As A Winning Strategy: How the Duality of Information Consolidates Autocratic Rule in the Digital Age 

This research project advances a new theory on how the Internet as a digital technology helps consolidate autocratic rule. Given the duality of information as containing both data and ideas, information flow restrictions, such as Internet control, benefit domestic data-intensive sectors by preventing domestic consumers from accessing foreign digital products and services, while hurting domestic knowledge-intensive sectors by preventing them from accessing novel ideas. Information flow restrictions therefore act as a production subsidy for domestic data-intensive sectors apart from being an innovation tax for the economy. Exploiting a major Internet control shock in China in 2014, this research project finds that Chinese data-intensive firms have gained from Internet control a 10% increase in revenue over other Chinese firms, and about 2.5% over their U.S. competitors. Meanwhile, the same Internet control has incurred an up to 35% reduction in research quality for Chinese scholars conditional on the knowledge-intensity of their discipline. This occurred specifically via a reduction in the access to cutting-edge knowledge from the outside world as measured by text similarity between Chinese and foreign research abstracts. These findings suggest that while politically motivated information flow restrictions do take a toll on the country’s long-term innovation capacity, they lend a short-term benefit to its data-intensive sectors. Conventional wisdom on the inherent limit to information control by autocracies overlooks this crucial protectionist benefit that aids in autocratic power consolidation in the digital age. 

Meicen Sun is a PhD candidate of international relations and political economy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology focusing on the tech-power nexus. Her research examines the political economy of information and the effect of information policy on the future of innovation and state power. She has presented her research work with the American Political Science Association, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the International Political Economy Society among others. Prior to MIT, Sun conducted research at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC and the UN Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Africa. Her writings have appeared in academic and policy outlets including Foreign Policy Analysis, Harvard Business Review, World Economic Forum Agenda, and The Diplomat. She currently serves as a Global Future Council Fellow at the World Economic Forum, and has spoken at forums including the United Nations, the Carter Center and the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center. Sun holds an AB with honors from Princeton University and an AM with a Certificate in Law from the University of Pennsylvania. Bilingual in English and Chinese, she has also written stories, plays and music and staged many of her works -- in both languages -- in China, Singapore and the U.S. 

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