The article interrogates what has prompted China to establish its digital state as a sort of orientalism distinct from the Western route of postcolonial datafication by questioning how Chinese modernisation perceptions have led to digital transformation. As the article methodically traces the genealogy of law and policy reforms as a catalyst for social change, it demonstrates how China adopts its “whole-of-nation” system, or more precisely, (party-)state capitalism, and prototypes its modern strategy to digitise native public services, particularly through the digital identity infrastructure, as an institutional concentration that exemplifies the positive and exclusionary nature of social big data in streamlining administrative procedures. Two driving variables behind China’s digital transformation are identified: quasi-neoliberal market processes and technology’s social change spillover effects. Since its inception, the contemporary Chinese state has created a cybernetic justification for social governmentality as a method of redressing the information imbalance in the process of ruling the state polity. Thus, data provides a top-down correctivist paradigm of social relationships with a delicate granularity that is susceptible to digital non-scarcity when technology, integrated into data-empowered state capitalism, is beyond the sociotechnical imagination.