Elaine Jingyan Yuan

This introduction repositions “platform” and “Asia” as unstable, contested imaginaries rather than fixed objects of analysis. Bringing platform studies into dialogue with Asian studies, we argue for a double move of deconstruction and reconstruction: interrogating how platforms are historically framed through metaphors, archives, and business genealogies, and how “Asia” has been imagined through colonial, Cold War, and postcolonial projects. Using Asia as method, we show how regional trajectories of platformization—superapps and platform business groups, infrastructuralization, and the absorption of informal economies—both provincialize Euro-American frameworks and generate new concepts. At a conjuncture marked by an uneven transition beyond neoliberalism, platforms in Asia formalize informality, extend state infrastructures, and mediate global capital, producing hybrid labor regimes and renewed state–platform entanglements while intensifying inequalities. We organize the special issue around four productive tensions: (1) technological/media affordances vs. cultural specificities; (2) methodological localism vs. theory-building; (3) state power vs. transnationalism; and (4) inter-Asia references vs. power inequalities. Across these frictions, contributors trace alternative genealogies (e.g., from Japanese convenience stores to K-pop fandom platforms), analyze platformized labor and entrepreneurial subjectivities, and rethink governance through fragmented, conjunctural state formations. We contend that metaphors are useful to think with—yet the dominance of “platform” as a corporate framing also calls for critical pivots to alternative figures that open different political and analytic possibilities. Viewed from Asia, platform capitalism appears as a dynamic, contested world-making process that renders visible the uneven, emergent shapes of post-neoliberal futures.

This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various levels have transformed themselves into ‘market agencies,’ acting through the market instead of governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves of ‘mass entrepreneurship and innovation’ under the current Xi-Li administration.

The “platform turn” across various disciplines has introduced a new framework for analyzing the global digital economy. This special issue critically engages with existing discussions by adopting a broad political-economic perspective on the platform economy in China. Aiming to deconstruct and contextualize the dominant concepts of “platformization” and “infrastructuralization,” we focus on three central themes under the overarching framework of Digital China : “Platform cum Infrastructure along a Techno-developmental Path,” “Platform Governance,” and “Platform Spatiality and Geopolitics.” These themes collectively deepen our understanding of the temporal and spatial dynamics of platforms, as well as their conceptual significance as evolving processes and outcomes. More importantly, we highlight how the development of Chinese platforms reflects not only the contours of China’s contested integration into global capitalism but also the state’s shifting socio-economic priorities and its broader aspiration to establish a distinct “Chinese model of modernization.”

This essay provides brief accounts of some critical historical moments of Alibaba, one of China’s leading platforms, against the backdrop of the country’s accelerated market-oriented reforms since the 1990s. These accounts illustrate three theoretical approaches to explain the political-economic prerequisite of Alibaba’s growth: the neoliberal model, the developmental state, and the market transition theories. The essay concludes with challenges to the systematic conceptualization of the state–market relation in which Chinese platforms are embedded.

Focusing on intermediation in cultural production in a digital ecology consisting of multiple platforms mediating simultaneously converging and diverging industries, this study critically engages with the thesis that platforms act primarily as a disintermediation vector in a linear value chain within a single industry. With two empirical cases of intermediation in the emerging virtual celebrity sector – one organizing the recursive loop of prosumption, the other articulating authenticity against technological standardization and overproduction, the study shifts the focus away from questions of labor and agency of individual creators and unpacks the conditions of intermediation in the context of new industrial models of value creation, commodification, and division of labor. The empirical cases demonstrate that the implications of platforms for digital cultural production are paradoxical – while their business models lead to a centralized process of value capture, their flexible organizational forms may afford new distributed patterns of value creation.

The two-child policy profoundly impacted on many aspects of Chinese society, ranging from population structure to economic development. Social media served as a public symbolic space for diverse viewpoints on the issue. Situated in a revised public sphere framework, this study explores how the two-child policy was contended by various publics using a semantic network analysis of Sina Weibo posts. The results demonstrate relationships among the various publics comprising family members, gendered individuals, and multiple social institutions. Our findings have important implications for understanding reproduction, gender and social relations, and social media’s role as a symbolic space in contemporary China.

This is a critical comparative analysis of the systematic ways in which technology and big data practices are employed in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in China and South Korea. This study argues that the success of the strategies depends not on isolated applications of technological tools but the responsive socio-technological webs of a wide range of actors and resources mobilized and coordinated through well-functioning technological, public health, and administrative infrastructures in the two countries. Moreover, the characteristic responses in the two countries, ranging from the coordination and mobilization by the state, health care and digital infrastructures as public good provision, to risk communication with the public, shed light on how the dynamics of risk society plays out along the developmental paths of the two East Asian societies. The future-oriented infrastructures for governance in risk society, the study concludes, are constituted in the imbrication of institutional, historical, and cultural factors, of which technologies are only but one part.

This study explores the role of social media as mediating structures for civic engagement. A network analysis of 2829 Facebook groups joined by 600 randomly sampled occupy Chicago (OC) participants shows that OC is embedded in diverse interconnected voluntary groups mediated by social media. The observed patterns of interconnection reveal a loosely connected, fragmented, and clustered structure. Such a structure may enable publics, as self-organized social groups shaped in networked flows of communication, to shift in and out of more established institutional structures and formal civic organizations to form ‘flexible network-domains’ at developing moments of mobilization. The study explains the empirical patterns of civic affiliation in the context of the broad historical structural changes and the specific characteristics of contemporary forms of mediated sociality.