Platforms are at the centre of US geostrategic objectives because, on one hand, they integrate the various components of the technology stack, while, on the other hand, they carve out digital ecosystems in which they can establish and enforce rules which bolster the global power of the United States. The United States uses subsidies and lucrative contracts to incorporate platform firms into the defence and national security sectors, while encouraging firms to bolster its geostrategic objectives. It also discourages its platform firms from engaging with their Chinese counterparts. Meanwhile it seeks to deny Chinese firms access to expertise, capital, and markets. To this end, the United States encourages other countries to establish exclusive relationships with US-based platform firms at the expense of their existing relations with Chinese tech firms. US platform firms have been willing, and in many cases eager, collaborators to these ends. The US variant of state platform capitalism is geared towards the construction and maintenance of a geographically extensive ‘national stack’ – devoid of Chinese technology – that progressively expands its role as supreme mediator of socio-economic relations worldwide.
4 The Chinese Stack
4.1 Introduction
China is home to the only concentration of globally significant internet giants outside of the United States (Table 3). Firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Huawei are principally domestically focused, and form part ofa technology stack with a considerable degree of operational autonomy from US platform services. But China’s platforms increasingly operate with the aim ofinternationalizing their operations, and they are the closest that US platforms have to global rivals. This section charts the integration of Chinese platform firms’ entanglements with the party-state, and the resultant emergence of a variety of state platform capitalism, before exploring how state and corporate motives align in Chinese platforms’ internationalization drive.
4.2 Private Power?
Until recently, some viewed China’s digital platform economy as a potential bastion of private economic and political power that could even potentially challenge the authority of the party-state (Tse, 2015). After all, China’s digital giants emerged in the shadows of the state economy, driven less by central planning or state subsidies, but by innovative and often ruthless entrepreneurialism in a fiercely competitive domestic market (Fannin, 2019). Moreover, despite regularly attending Party Congresses and otherwise being connected with the upper echelons of China’s political elite, China’s new breed of tech entrepreneurs cultivated an air of distance from the party-state. Their messaging, media and fintech apps were largely not integrated with extant stateowned systems, and seemed to point towards the weakening of state monopoly control of strategic sectors like banking and media.
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Reinventing Capitalism