Lin Zhang

This article brings critical data studies into dialogue with agri-food scholarship to theorize the data fix—the use of data infrastructures to manage economic, social, and ecological contradictions under digital capitalism. Drawing on China's mushroom industry in Gutian, it traces how the data fix operates through the assetization of data, land, and labor. Historically, China's trajectory, from cybernetic socialism to the agriculture digital brain, reveals a distinct mode of state-led assetization, in which data function both as speculative assets and as instruments of governance. Unlike North American corporate financialization, China's collective land ownership and state coordination constrain market speculation while transforming governance itself into a site of value creation. The article situates China's hybrid model within broader debates on data colonialism and Southern data politics, arguing that the data fix provides a comparative framework for understanding how digital infrastructures reconfigure agrarian relations, state power, and capitalist accumulation across uneven but interconnected global contexts.

This response to the four review essays on The Labor of Reinvention reflects on the politics of producing knowledge about China and its implications for understanding global techno-capitalism at the current conjuncture of uncertainty, transformation, and geopolitical tension. Building on Arif Dirlik's “China Paradigm” and Stuart Hall's “conjunctural thinking,” I argue for an approach that attends to the articulation of global and local forces and the contradictions inherent in China's hybrid development. Responding to Yifan Cai, I elaborate on China's evolving state–business relations, tracing the emergence of a “Market in the Fragmented State” in contrast to US oligarchical models. With Gulinigaer Yishake's insights, I revisit the role of family and social reproduction in shaping women's entrepreneurial subjectivities, particularly among ethnic minorities, and link these to longstanding crises of reproduction in rural China. Extending the conversation beyond China, I engage Sandeep Mertia's comparative analysis of India and China to highlight both shared and divergent state–society configurations, infrastructural capacities, and dependencies on the Global North. I also take up Andrea Pollio's call to move beyond a China–US binary toward “Silicon Elsewheres,” foregrounding African and Southern agency in reconfiguring data economies. Finally, I outline my new book project, which traces the circulation of biomedical innovations across China, the US, and Indonesia, analyzing how policymakers and entrepreneurs navigate the tensions between innovation, equity, and self-reliance. The China Paradigm, I argue, continues to generate contradictions and inspire new configurations of techno-capitalism, unsettling global hierarchies while attracting critique, emulation, and resistance.

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.

This article maps China’s emerging governance regime of big tech firms in the 2020s through the case of Alibaba. Contesting dominant media narratives that frame the Chinese state as either clashing with or aligning with private platforms, it provides an alternative perspective rooted in Chinese political traditions, based on long-term ethnographic observations and industry analysis, and informed by changing global sociotechnical and geopolitical conditions. In this hybrid model, the pragmatic Leninist central state both leverages and controls private tech giants to balance economic growth, social stability, and national security amid geopolitical tensions and a slowing economy. Local governments, meanwhile, maintain a fragile symbiosis with platforms like Alibaba to advance their own political and economic goals. This “market in the fragmented state” contrasts with the current oligarchical U.S. model, where big tech firms often capture state power to serve corporate interests. Despite their monopolistic and infrastructural tendencies, Chinese platforms operate within a fragmented, state-dominated system that both enables and restrains their growth, depending on shifting political dynamics. Understanding this emerging governance regime diversifies the current conceptualization of state market relations globally and state governance of big techs beyond Silicon Valley. It also sheds light on China’s ongoing techno-driven restructuring and global expansion and prompts questions about the influence of geopolitical competition on China’s governance approach and its global implications.

The history of the internet, whether in China or elsewhere in the world, is often told through the stories of successful and often publicly listed companies, state policy initiatives and chronology, or prominent individuals and groups such as tech company founders and influential social and political activists. This short essay tells a different story of the Chinese internet history in the past 30 years from a social reproductive perspective, centering on rural e-commerce and families caught in between the rural-urban divide, against the wider currents of the state’s rural informatization campaign, Chinese Big Techs’ expansion into the countryside, and ongoing transformation in urbanization and rural-urban conversion. The goal is to move beyond a techno-determinist, individualized, and male-centric framework of analyzing digital media and the internet to adopt a materialist, feminist, and substantivist approach.