{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","title":"State Platform Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781009619714","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","id":"d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","uuid":"d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","title":"State Platform Capitalism","normalized_title":"stateplatformcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781009619714","isbns":["9781009619714","9781009446594","9781009446587"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":98,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/State%20Platform%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4/search"},"page":{"printed_page":33,"pdf_page":38,"physical_index":38,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9b9d5cf54107ad6fcd8ad2e9a778f0ae7ce4466ca62c28af21b11d98dc09ade2"},"chapter":"Cambridge Elements","content":"4.3 Entanglements with the State\n\nDespite their Silicon Valley–inspired language and branding, China’s platforms had never been simple products of the ‘free market’, or evidence of ‘entrepreneurial spirits’ chafing under the pressures of a bureaucratic state. Rather, they owed their very existence to the Chinese party-state’s extensive and powerful internet content regulations. American internet firms entering the Chinese market during the late 1990s and early 2000s typically did not face formal exclusions, and were generally allowed to operate in markets where incumbents largely did not exist. However, they did encounter a thicket of regulations and licensing requirements which made doing business considerably more difficult than in most jurisdictions. Alongside cultural and language barriers, this meant their adoption was very slow – which eventually allowed local rivals to steal a march on US internet giants (Mueller and Farhat, 2022).\n\nFrom the late 2000s, China began to block access to sites like YouTube, Google, Facebook, and Twitter in response to concerns over foreign penetration of China’s otherwise strictly regulated media ecosystem. These bans dealt a succession of blows to US-based platform firms’ efforts to operate in China, leaving the field clear for China’s domestic internet firms to consolidate control over the domestic market. For instance, Baidu was able to quintuple its revenues in the year after Google’s withdrawal from China in 2009 (McKnight et al., 2023, 248–252). The rocky terrain of China’s internet economy and the state’s efforts to block foreign media content collectively amounted to an accidental infant industry protection policy for its nascent platform companies (Foster and Azmeh, 2020). The outcome was a curious kind of ‘Galapagos effect’ that allowed indigenous Chinese platforms that were largely disconnected from the US-centred stack to grow rapidly (Bratton, 2018).\n\nThe relatively late development of China’s internet infrastructure further enabled Chinese firms to pursue leapfrog development strategies (Li et al., 2018; Davis and Xiao, 2021). Most consumers bypassed desktop and laptop computers altogether. Already by 2014, 90% of Chinese accessed the web via mobile rather than desktop devices. As such, Chinese platform firms optimized their business processes and technical designs for smartphone systems in ways which US platforms (which had legacy desktop-optimized versions) found challenging, giving them a substantive advantage on home terrain.\n\nState Platform Capitalism\n\n33","previous_page":32,"next_page":34}