{"title":"The geopolitics of infrastructuralized platforms: the case of Alibaba","authors":"Hong Shen, Yujia He","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2128599","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Contemporary digital platforms have become increasingly infrastructuralized, and started to raise geopolitical tensions with their global expansion. Amidst the heightened geopolitical competition between the US and China, the growing power of Chinese infrastructuralized platforms has made them the center of recent geopolitical dynamics. Drawing from an exploratory case study, this paper discusses Alibaba, one of the most prominent Chinese Internet giants, as an infrastructuralized platform, and highlights its geopolitical struggles. Often perceived as an e-commerce company, Alibaba has become ‘infrastructuralized’: its now-massive digital empire has moved beyond e-commerce, expanding into almost every aspect of China’s and global digital economy such as logistics, finance, offline retailing, and cloud computing. This paper traces three highly visible cases in Alibaba’s global journey – its failed deal with MoneyGram in 2017, the uneven global journey of Alibaba Cloud, and the construction of the electronic World Trade Platform – to illustrate three key dimensions of the geopolitics of infrastructuralized platforms – namely, the geopolitics of everyday data, the geopolitics of the visibility-invisibility tension, and the geopolitics of modularity. By doing so, it contributes to the following two areas of scholarship. On the one hand, it contributes to the growing literature on ‘infrastructures and platforms’ by foregrounding the geopolitical dimensions of Chinese infrastructuralized platforms. On the other hand, it adds to the literature on the ‘geopolitics of infrastructures’ by bringing in a new type of infrastructure, complementing previous discussions on the geopolitics of traditional material infrastructures.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"25 1","pages":"2363 - 2380"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"6","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Information Communication & Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2128599","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 6
Abstract
ABSTRACT Contemporary digital platforms have become increasingly infrastructuralized, and started to raise geopolitical tensions with their global expansion. Amidst the heightened geopolitical competition between the US and China, the growing power of Chinese infrastructuralized platforms has made them the center of recent geopolitical dynamics. Drawing from an exploratory case study, this paper discusses Alibaba, one of the most prominent Chinese Internet giants, as an infrastructuralized platform, and highlights its geopolitical struggles. Often perceived as an e-commerce company, Alibaba has become ‘infrastructuralized’: its now-massive digital empire has moved beyond e-commerce, expanding into almost every aspect of China’s and global digital economy such as logistics, finance, offline retailing, and cloud computing. This paper traces three highly visible cases in Alibaba’s global journey – its failed deal with MoneyGram in 2017, the uneven global journey of Alibaba Cloud, and the construction of the electronic World Trade Platform – to illustrate three key dimensions of the geopolitics of infrastructuralized platforms – namely, the geopolitics of everyday data, the geopolitics of the visibility-invisibility tension, and the geopolitics of modularity. By doing so, it contributes to the following two areas of scholarship. On the one hand, it contributes to the growing literature on ‘infrastructures and platforms’ by foregrounding the geopolitical dimensions of Chinese infrastructuralized platforms. On the other hand, it adds to the literature on the ‘geopolitics of infrastructures’ by bringing in a new type of infrastructure, complementing previous discussions on the geopolitics of traditional material infrastructures.
期刊介绍:
Drawing together the most current work upon the social, economic, and cultural impact of the emerging properties of the new information and communications technologies, this journal positions itself at the centre of contemporary debates about the information age. Information, Communication & Society (iCS) transcends cultural and geographical boundaries as it explores a diverse range of issues relating to the development and application of information and communications technologies (ICTs), asking such questions as: -What are the new and evolving forms of social software? What direction will these forms take? -ICTs facilitating globalization and how might this affect conceptions of local identity, ethnic differences, and regional sub-cultures? -Are ICTs leading to an age of electronic surveillance and social control? What are the implications for policing criminal activity, citizen privacy and public expression? -How are ICTs affecting daily life and social structures such as the family, work and organization, commerce and business, education, health care, and leisure activities? -To what extent do the virtual worlds constructed using ICTs impact on the construction of objects, spaces, and entities in the material world? iCS analyses such questions from a global, interdisciplinary perspective in contributions of the very highest quality from scholars and practitioners in the social sciences, gender and cultural studies, communication and media studies, as well as in the information and computer sciences.