Regulating the platform giants: Building and governing China's online economy

Abstract

The online platform economy in China has grown to become one of the largest in the world. Its growth has contributed to China's economic development and played an important role in its innovation path. We present a three-stage structured explanation of China's governance approaches toward its homegrown platform firms. Using Chinese government documents and secondary sources to conduct a historical process tracing analysis, we argue that the growth of China's main platform firms and the government's governance of them was co-evolutionary, guided by the party-state's goals of maintaining social-political stability, economic growth and strengthening technological self-sufficiency. By so doing this paper addresses the fundamental question of how a “strong” and “capable” state such as China's has responded as platform firms went from providing various online services to becoming core infrastructure in the economy and society to the point of threatening core government objectives.