{"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":35,"pdf_page":40,"physical_index":40,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fff37f620abdb67e2434f82adb3ad49f99c58af99831696d6c39c14a6fbc9890"},"chapter":"Cambridge Elements","content":"Contracting practices are systematized into broader techno-nationalist development strategies, in which platform firms are assigned roles as national champions. For instance, China’s National Development and Reform Commission approved investment plans for a range of tech giants in mid-2023 (Tang and Nulimaimaiti, 2023). This paved the way for them to access substantial state resources, including an anticipated \\$139 bn worth of government bond-financed funding directed towards developing ‘new productive forces’ in advanced technologies (including big data and AI) (Pomfret et al., 2024). Under the 2017 ‘AI New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’, fifteen firms were afforded key roles in developing open AI platforms for specific industrial purposes. These included Baidu (autonomous vehicles), Alibaba Group (smart cities), Tencent (medical imaging), and iFlyTek (natural language processing) (Larsen, 2019; Roberts et al., 2021). Designated firms are afforded access to privileged state financial and data resources (Horowitz et al., 2018) which aligns state developmental objectives with profit incentives for platforms. Baidu, for instance, was able to successfully leverage its role as a AI Open Innovation Platform provider to develop its Apollo autonomous driving platform – attracting third-party firms such as BYD (Ren, 2022), and leveraging its position to become a major provider of autonomous driving ride-hailing services.<sup>4</sup> Its software is open access and available for collaborators and rivals to both build on and develop. Partly due to this concerted techno-industrial policy drive, China now significantly leads the United States in AI patents filings (Bloomberg News, 2023).\n\nNational security is a crucial component of China’s techno-nationalist development plans. Platform firms play an important role in augmenting China’s military capabilities, through its ‘military-civil fusion’ (MCF) efforts to incorporate private-sector innovations into previously state-dominated military procurement (White and Yu, 2023). By one estimate \\$68.5 bn ofstate financing has been deployed on MCF projects from 2015 to 2019, with evidence that Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have collaborated with Chinese military institutions (Kania and Laskai, 2021). For example, the Joint Laboratory for Intelligent Command and Control Technologies was established by Baidu and the state-owned defence firm China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), and its aim is to upgrade the Chinese military’s information warfare capabilities (Creemers, 2019). Military contracts are simply the tip of a much larger iceberg. China’s radically expanded conception of national security prioritizes substantive cooperation from its digital platform firms over individual data protection rights (Bradford, 2023) – from surveillance practices (Huang and Tsai, 2022) to consumer safety regulations (Martens and Zhao, 2021). China’s government has also directed state-owned enterprises to replace US enterprise software with Chinese equivalents by 2027 through its secretive ‘Delete America’ directive (Lin, 2024).\n\nState Platform Capitalism\n\n35\n\n4 BYD subsequently broke its contract with Baidu/Apollo to work towards establishing its own autonomous driving software.","previous_page":34,"next_page":36}