{"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":34,"pdf_page":39,"physical_index":39,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ae46fad4c41bef906ab49d3f4ad4e9cb2eb79190b43e444819adbc3cb5ecb311"},"chapter":"Cambridge Elements","content":"Restricting foreign firms’ operations did not undermine competition. Intense domestic rivalries drove Chinese internet firms to adopt adaptable and innovative business strategies (Zeng and Glaister, 2016). Their vast local base of operations – with over one billion internet users to date – offered opportunities to compete for users, innovate, and ultimately hone highly effective business strategies. For example, lax regulatory oversight (including a virtual absence of private sector competition policy) encouraged these companies to develop sprawling cross-equity holdings of smaller firms across multiple product lines (Jia and Winseck, 2018). China’s platforms increasingly exhibit the horizontal integration characteristic of East Asian business groups such as keiretsu and chaebol (Jia et al., 2018) – with Alibaba Group offering services in e-commerce, social media, fintech, cloud computing and electric vehicles, for instance. China’s app economy is characterized by ‘superapps’ such as Tencentowned WeChat – multifunctional platforms which integrate social media, digital payments and fintech, with services such as booking cabs and making restaurant reservations. Network and lock-in effects have cemented the role of these platforms in China’s digital ecosystem.\n\nAround the mid-2010s, policymakers recognized the critical and developmental potential of digital technologies. Since then, China’s digital platform economy has become folded into this China’s techno-nationalist developmental strategy (Jia, 2021; Zhang and Lan, 2023) – an increasingly comprehensive set of industrial policies dubbed by economist Barry Naughton (2020b, 82) as the ‘greatest single commitment of government resources to an industrial policy objective in history’.\n\nState capitalist practices target platforms in several ways. China’s digital platforms increasingly fulfil key institutional functions delegated by state agencies. Government services are increasingly delivered through PPPs that involve platform firms (Ma et al., 2023). For instance, WeChat provides a growing range ofessential administrative services such as digital identification cards, access to urban medical booking portals, and health codes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Didi systematically shares data with urban authorities to assist in transport planning and management (Chan and Kwok, 2022). And Shanghai’s mapping and food delivery platforms are delegated responsibility and authority to regulate food hygiene standards by the municipal government (Chan and Kwok, 2024).\n\nThese PPP arrangements have, in some cases, developed into full-blown ‘state-commercial complexes’ (Liu, 2024a). Alibaba Group’s construction of a data centre for Guizhou province’s government was initiated by the provincial and central governments in 2014. Within months, Alibaba Cloud’s engineers had constructed a cloud system at no monetary cost to the provincial government. In exchange, Guizhou offered exclusive access to its vast reservoir ofadministrative data which Alibaba Cloud could analyse and capitalize. It also provided privileged opportunities for Alibaba’s Taobao to develop e-commerce infrastructures in the province’s rural areas. Alibaba’s role in Guizhou was subsequently given national-level endorsement as a key node in the 2022 National Integrated Big Data Centre System (NIBDCS), which aims to build an integrated national system of administrative data.\n\n34\n\nReinventing Capitalism","previous_page":33,"next_page":35}