{"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":39,"pdf_page":44,"physical_index":44,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a8c8b4a0a8ed2b0a5e5baea7974cf30350434e7a717d3ffad589e0616daa5e94"},"chapter":"Cambridge Elements","content":"These specially issued shares, though nominally small, permit state agencies significant powers to nominate company directors or grant them privileged control over board-level decision-making processes. Even when not used directly, they are likely to restrict the independence of companies and offer insight into their operations for the party-state – by embedding cadres in privileged positions within big tech firms.\n\nNone of this is to say that the party-state enjoys total or unidirectional power over its platform sector. On the contrary, it remains deeply reliant upon the dynamism and innovation capabilities of the private economy. The ‘regulatory storm’ ultimately blew over in 2023, and Jack Ma was politically rehabilitated in February of 2025 when President Xi convened a forum with Chinese tech leaders (Zhang, 2025). The CEO of Hangzhou’s DeepSeek – a private AI firm with few connections to the party-state which launched its DeepSeek-R1 large language model the month before – was also in attendance. Xi proclaimed his commitment to deploying the full resources of the state towards supporting the development of the new breed of AI models being developed or sponsored by China’s technology firms at a Politburo study session in April 2025 (Xinhua, 2025).\n\n4.4 Internationalization Drive\n\nChina’s digital giants have made significant progress in their efforts to expand overseas. Four of the US top-ten most downloaded smartphone apps are Chinese owned (see Table 5). And Alibaba Group, for instance, derives over a third of its revenues from its international operations (Liu, 2024b). China’s platform firms have profit motives firmly in mind when growing overseas operations. As Shen (2022b) writes, there exist ‘complicated forms of power struggles among different government entities and units of internet capital across hardware, network and application layers’. Firms like Tencent and Alibaba compete directly with one another for market share in fields like cloud computing.\n\nRather than acting as a constraint on their competitiveness, engagement with the state provides critical support for Chinese platforms’ efforts to internationalize their businesses. Key in this regard is the ‘Digital Silk Road’ (DSR), which was launched in 2017 as a component of the broader Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and aims to consolidate, integrate, and expand the activities of China’s platform firms in the name of international development objectives. The DSR is necessary precisely because most of what nominally constitute its activities are driven by the commercial decisions ofprivate internet firms, rather than centrally co-ordinated by ministries or carried out by state actors.\n\nState Platform Capitalism\n\n39","previous_page":38,"next_page":40}