Abstract
Introduction
As big tech companies continue to expand their operations, governing bodies globally have expressed concerns about monopolistic and oligopolistic market conditions related to the digital tech industry and its growing cultural and political power. In the West, the US government has demonstrated a bipartisan stance against big tech, culminating in antitrust investigations (Zhang and Chen, 2022); meanwhile, the European Union has taken action by implementing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and subsequent governing acts, as well as developing antitrust regulation to address the challenges that tech companies pose to the market (Van Dijck, 2021). The Chinese state has also begun regulating its national big tech companies by launching the Personal Information Protection Law, a data protection law that, like the European GDPR, regulates private companies’ data collection and usage in order to restrict the actions of Chinese tech giants (Calzada, 2022). Moreover, the state has initiated antitrust investigations against major tech companies within the country (Crossley and Goh, 2021; Zhong, 2021).
While recent efforts to regulate tech giants in China might be seen as aligned with the regulatory goals pursued by the United States and Europe, it is important to recognize China’s distinctive approach, which involves the long-standing practice on the part of the state of both regulating and collaborating with its major tech firms. De Kloet et al. (2019) argue that from a Chinese perspective the recent calls to regulate big tech and its digital platforms, prevalent among Western scholars and the public, fail to account for China’s unique trajectory of continuous governmental and regional oversight and intervention. Over the years, the Chinese state has maintained the long-standing aim of technonationalist politics, which has influenced the development of the local Internet sector, an aim balanced by the need for foreign capital to foster the growth of national tech companies (Jia, 2021). A result of this dynamic has been protectionist policies that block international competitors from the market, helping national big tech giants to grow and gain a foothold (Jia, 2021; Zhang and Chen, 2022).
In this article, we take up the task of articulating how the constant political–economic balancing of state interests and the possibility of state intervention figures in everyday perceptions of platform companies in the midst of change and disruption in the Chinese digital landscape. We introduce the term “flexibility imaginary” to interpret the collective adaptive capacity and responsiveness that the Chinese express in the face of changing conditions and unforeseen transitions. This imaginary encapsulates the idea of replaceability as a source of future speculations. In this context, flexibility is not merely an ability to adapt, but a proactive and tactical resource that fosters resilience and an overall sense that with collective or state efforts, things can and will be changed. Zheng and Huang (2018) describe the Chinese economy as a hybrid constellation, balancing between a free-market economy and state capitalism. With the concept “market in state,” Zhang and Cheng (2022) analyze how the Chinese digital economy is shaped by constant cooperation between big tech companies and the state. They (p. 1468) describe how the Chinese state “constantly juggles the political objectives of economic growth, employment, and national security,” highlighting the state’s balancing act in promoting economic wealth and job creation, meanwhile securing state functions, resulting in cycles of loosening and tightening regulation. Thus, the concept of “market in state” underscores the primacy of state directives within the market, in stark contrast to the Western “state in the market” paradigm, where market forces predominantly influence governmental policies. Acknowledging this intricate interplay between the state and the market in China is crucial for understanding the country’s regulatory stance toward its tech sector. Yet, as we will demonstrate with the notion of flexibility imaginary, it also feeds into the ways people discuss and imagine the role of tech companies in their everyday lives and in the broader economy.
Methodologically, the flexibility imaginary serves as a lens through which we examine how everyday imaginaries in China depart from Western ways of thinking about the power of corporate platforms. Analyzing semi-structured individual and group interviews with professionals in Hangzhou, we detail how the everyday imaginary fed by the constantly shifting corporate power in China is shaped by perceived relations between the state, platform companies, and local actors. By bringing Chinese perspectives into play, we disrupt the inbuilt universalism in discussions of the platform economy (Davis and Xiao, 2021; Steinberg and Li, 2017). Following De Kloet et al. (2019), we interrogate research discussions that reproduce Western ideological understandings of corporate actors operating relatively freely in the platform economy’s markets. A focus on the flexibility imaginary aids in unpacking assumptions, values, and expectations embedded in how societies and cultures deal with uncertainty and transformation. We show that flexibility imaginary touches upon many facets, from workplace dynamics and to shifts in governance and emerging technologies, and highlights the ambivalent relations among local actors, companies, and institutions in China. By zooming into the notion of replaceability as a key feature of flexibility imaginary that shapes local interpretations and political dynamics connected with big tech companies, we explain how platform companies have become inescapable elements of daily lives yet are still seen as transient. Our approach brings important new layers into the discussion of platform companies, challenging the role of corporate forces in the overall power dynamics of the digital economy as our informants actively envision and speculate on alternative trajectories. These speculations not only enrich the current debate on platform companies but suggest new directions for research, prioritizing diverse voices and visions in the study of digital developments.
Studying everyday responses to technical powers
As suggested above, the Chinese economic model is distinguished by an integration of private companies and the state, with the state and local governing bodies both supporting and regulating private industry. This means that state power co-shapes the platform economy through constant interaction with private companies and processes of institutional improvisation and innovation (Zhang and Chen, 2022). Since this differs ideologically from Western economic models emphasizing free-market ideals, scholars have advocated the need to de-westernize (Davis and Xiao, 2021), provincialize (Jia et al., 2022), and regionalize (Steinberg and Li, 2017) studies on digital platforms and services, expanding them beyond the Western context dominated by Silicon Valley big tech companies. Scholarly contributions that consider the interactions of regional public and private stakeholders in shaping the current landscape of the platform economy challenge tendencies to generalize and universalize research results by merely focusing on how Western societies and consumers deal with US-based platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook (Davis and Xiao, 2021; Lamarre, 2017; Plantin and de Seta, 2019; Steinberg et al., 2022; Steinberg and Li, 2017; Zhang and Chen, 2022).
Our earlier research in Hangzhou suggested that WeChat and Alipay have emerged as elements of everyday infrastructures (Grön et al., 2023), a notion that has been confirmed by various scholars (Chen et al., 2018; Plantin and de Seta, 2019; Shen et al., 2020; Zhou and Disalvo, 2020). On an everyday level, this means that daily practices are connected to WeChat and Alipay in ways that leave no choice but to use these services. The lock-ins reflect a broader trend whereby digital services have become indispensable to China’s daily infrastructure, profoundly integrating with public services, transportation, and banking, particularly in cities like Hangzhou. However, when discussing matters beyond their own daily experiences, our research participants noted that these services, while currently indispensable, are not irreplaceable, an observation that implicitly references the state’s actions in both promoting the growth of national big tech and keeping it in check, thus suggesting the potential for new entrants or activities to disrupt the current market dominance of WeChat and Alipay.
The notion of replaceability intrigued us, as it offered an alternative storyline to that commonly featuring in Western research and public discussions that focus on the power of big tech companies and the powerlessness individuals are said to feel the face of it (Bagger, 2021; Dencik and Cable, 2017; Draper and Turow, 2019). Digital services have become integral to daily life and opting out has become increasingly difficult, impacting not only everyday activities like communication and financial transactions but touching on broader issues of human agency and autonomy (Savolainen and Ruckenstein, 2024). Draper and Turow (2019) discuss the pronounced power imbalance between users and technology firms using the notion of digital resignation, developed in the context of the United States, suggesting that people believe that privacy violations, or surveillance practices more broadly, are inescapable. They argue that recognition of the inevitability of surveillance and associated data collection by corporations leads to resigned acceptance. It is thus a rational response to pervasive monitoring, thereby shaping power dynamics in the digital age.
As platform companies weave themselves into the fabric of daily life, it is increasingly important to analyze how everyday imaginaries and related narratives and emotional responses both promote and suppress visions and ideas about the role of big tech in society (Lomborg and Kapsch, 2020; Lupton, 2021; Ruckenstein and Granroth, 2020; Ruckenstein, 2023). Scholars have explored perceptions and imaginaries of data-gathering processes, algorithms, and digital platforms to investigate these dynamics. Concepts such as “folk theory” and “algorithmic folklore” have been utilized to explore how individuals comprehend the data-gathering practices and related governance mechanisms of platform companies (Savolainen, 2022). Scholars have also explored how social media users (Bucher, 2017), activists (Lehtiniemi and Ruckenstein 2019; Dencik and Cable, 2017), influencers (Bishop, 2019; Cotter, 2019), and public service providers (Van Es and Poell, 2020) understand the data-gathering practices and algorithmic processes of technology companies, and how they organize their actions based on these understandings.
The research confirms that individuals tend to demonstrate a pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of big tech’s pervasive data practices, as its services offer convenience in personal and professional life; however, this is not simply digital resignation. Instead, people express ambivalence toward the presence of big tech in their everyday routines. They enjoy the convenience that digital services provide but also experience frustration, sometimes even fear, about the growing presence of digital platforms in their lives and the potential futures that thus might be shaped (Ruckenstein, 2023). While Ytre-Arne and Moe (2021) observed signs of digital resignation in their empirical material—especially when their Norwegian respondents considered algorithmic operations confining, reductive, and exploitative—these descriptions were accompanied by irritation that is far from resigned. People might not openly challenge the existence of platform power, but they also do not passively accept all its implications.
These earlier explorations of imaginaries have successfully focused on the relationship between users and technological services, but less attention has been paid to the broader contexts where these relations occur. To zoom out from the user–service relationship, Van Es and Poell (2020) describe how professionals working in public, state-owned media in the Netherlands imagine digital platforms as part of their work. They coined the notion of a platform imaginary, which refers not only to “how users imagine platform audiences, algorithms, and data, but also the wide variety of other elements that constitute the platform experience” (Van Es and Poell, 2020: 3). These authors pay attention to how media professionals imagine and speculate about the governance of platforms and how the European Union could exercise such governance in the future. In a similar vein, we explore how imaginaries of the dominant digital services and platforms in China are shaped by the market in state approach and how they might play out in future visions. Thus, instead of focusing on how the digital services’ data-gathering practices and algorithms are imagined to work, our emphasis is on how platforms are imagined to be situated as part of social and economic structures and their future trajectories.
The term flexibility imaginary is inspired by Markham’s (2021) discussion of the sense of inevitability fostered by the portrayal of tech companies as dominant forces in everyday digital environments, leaving individuals unable to imagine alternative presents or futures that could disrupt the current hegemonic corporate power structures. Markham’s (2021) artistic research project, with interventions in Europe and Canada, aimed to foster flexibility of imaginaries and challenge prevailing perceptions of the digital world. Using participatory experiments, the project opened up imaginary spaces in which to think differently about the current tech landscape. However, despite these efforts, the participants Markham observed appeared to be stuck in their imaginary efforts. They perceived the tech landscape as inevitable, and struggled to envision alternatives, merely continuing to state that there is not much they can do, that they just need to accept ongoing technological advancements. Markham identified what she described as “discursive closure,” a notion that encapsulates the difficulties in articulating different digital futures due to entrenched beliefs in the inevitability of the status quo.
Building on Markham’s insights, we construct an alternative storyline with the flexibility imaginary and the Chinese notion of replaceability. By focusing on our participants’ concerns and considerations regarding continuity and change within their everyday digital environments—and how the governance of big tech influences and dismantles perceived inevitabilities—we highlight the ambivalent and flexible nature of perceived developments and utilize them as an opportunity to integrate diverse perspectives into the discourse and deliberation of digital futures.
In the following, we elucidate how our Chinese respondents examine the limits imposed by current platform companies and assess their value amid ongoing digital developments. Particular attention is paid to the cares and concerns of our participants when thinking about permanence and change in their everyday digital environments, and how inevitabilities, or the lack thereof, are related to the governance of big tech. We highlight the ambivalent and malleable aspects of digital imaginaries and show how our Chinese respondents are probing the limits of current platform companies and evaluating their worth. However, even though our participants can contemplate replacing dominant digital platforms, they still found it challenging to conceive of futures that would disrupt the ingrained state–corporate power structures.
Data and analysis
The analysis that we offer is based on 22 semi-structured interviews with Hangzhou residents in 2020 and 2021 (see also Grön et al., 2023). The participants were reached through the third author’s networks and additional informants via snowball sampling. The age of our sample ranges from 26 to 64 years, and most are highly educated—many with a degree in engineering; they largely consist of technology professionals with the ability to assess the financial, political, technical, and social implications of digital platforms. As such they could be thought of as “privileged observers” who can readily discuss the complex issues pertaining to digital platforms and speculate on alternative future trajectories.
We combined individual and focus group interviews in our study to increase the robustness of our findings. In the first phase, we held 10 individual interviews to get an overview of how digital tech is understood and features in everyday lives in Hangzhou. In the second phase of our research, we enriched and tested our preliminary findings through 12 individual and group interviews with couples, families, and groups of friends. Overall, we interviewed 28 informants, with 7 participating in both rounds of data collection. The third author conducted all interviews in Chinese, which were subsequently transcribed and translated into English. Prior to each interview, we provided written information about our study, and the participants signed an informed consent form. We sought a statement of approval from our university’s institutional ethical review board and have taken careful measures to protect our informants, pseudonymizing the data. Research participants had the option to select their own pseudonym, whether a full name or just a first name, while some left the choice to us. By seeking similarities and continuities between individual and group interviews, we could ensure that the topics and themes raised were of shared interest and concern, coming together as imaginaries.
In the individual interviews, we asked our informants to identify the digital services that affect their lives the most. Not surprisingly, most of them chose either WeChat or Alipay or both, confirming research findings detailing the dominant presence of so-called super apps (Chen et al., 2018; Jia et al., 2022; Steinberg et al., 2022) in contemporary China. Earlier studies have brought to the fore how difficult it is to draw a line between a digital service and its everyday context, generating experiences of context collapse and boundary crossings (Karppi, 2018; Paasonen, 2021; Grön et al., 2023). To gain a better idea of such crossings, we tailored a question to explore what our participants thought would be missing from their life if they could not use the service they had identified as influential. This line of inquiry revealed that many respondents not only considered alternative services but also contemplated how they would adapt to life without them. The notion of “replaceability” featured prominently in discussions regarding WeChat, raising the question of how a major platform could be viewed as so easily replaceable or even unnecessary. In the group interviews, we specifically asked informants about their views on the replaceability of digital services. Focus group interviews provide evidence of how participants jointly evaluate and discuss the topics and themes at hand, and as the participants provide audience for each other, it encourages them to offer more detailed descriptions of their views and relate them to those of others (Kitzinger, 1995). The discussions that our questions triggered predominantly centered around WeChat, although the potential to substitute other digital services was also considered. Yet, as our focus is on the wider platform imaginaries (Van Es and Poell, 2020) rather than individual services, we do not limit our findings to WeChat but discuss it along with other services that our participants pointed out.
Analysis was conducted by first marking the parts of the interviews where the replacement of digital services was considered and then closely reading and interpreting these excerpts. By tracing the notion of “replaceability” in our material, we adjusted our analytical lens to explore aspects of digital life that are seen as permanent versus those that are malleable. With the aim of doing justice to the perspectives of informants, we carefully assessed what we could argue based on our material. While our analysis touches on the themes of state and governance, the role of the state was not always explicitly addressed; therefore, we also draw attention to what remains unspoken in the interview material. This has meant that the analysis conducted by the first author has identified unspoken elements in the transcribed interviews, especially salient in instances where informants preferred to stay silent. The subtlety of nuance in communication has required ongoing assessment by our research team, which includes members from Finland and China, meaning that analysis of the material in our research group has been dialogical and collaborative, moving between insider and outsider perspectives of Chinese society.
As we open a participatory space for our Chinese interlocutors, our study is explorative in its nature. This introduces both methodological and empirical constraints, as we work with materials that highlight the perceived nature of digital services and their integration into daily life. Rather than offering a political–economic analysis of WeChat, Alipay, or other services, we approach digital services through narratives of how they were gradually experienced as more dominant. Despite limitations, we believe that the notion of flexibility imaginary and the analysis that supports it shed rare light on the overall dynamics of how people imagine their digital presence and futures, which contributes to a broader comparative understanding of the evolving relationship between digital infrastructures and everyday life. With this study, we not only learn about Chinese developments, but we can compare and contrast them with developments elsewhere.
We begin discussion of our analysis by addressing the links between the notion of replaceability, informants’ views on the dominant market positions of WeChat and other services, and whether those positions should be contested. The second section discusses the powerlessness our informants feel as individuals while still expressing the hope that, through collective efforts, changes could be possible. The final section explores informants’ perspectives on how state influence affects the digital landscape and can work as a catalyst for change in the digital economy.
Exploring perceived permanence and change in the platform economy
Challenging digital monopolies
Throughout the interviews, our participants were interested in discussing how and why WeChat became the de facto primary communication channel. For instance, Gao Yang, a 36-year-old analyst working in a commercial bank, described rapid changes in the market that could be observed after the launch of WeChat. He explained that the service “became popular within just over a year and instantly blossomed.” At the same time, the market share of QQ, Tencent’s earlier instant messaging service, was declining. Gao Yang, who held a doctoral degree in financial law, and was comfortable discussing developments that he had not personally experienced, concluded that Tencent launched WeChat to keep its position as the number one instant messaging technology company by providing an application for mobile phones at the time smartphones started to get more common in China. This rapid shift in the market led to a situation where people followed the trend and migrated to WeChat. Gao Yang simply “had to use WeChat” because people no longer replied to his messages in QQ. The previously used messaging service had been emptied of users.
Afu, a 40-year-old engineer working in the energy sector, offered further reasoning about WeChat’s current position, referring to the role of the state without making it explicit. “It’s a little bit special here in China,” he started and described how in other countries, such as Vietnam, people use many different services, including WhatsApp, Line, iMessage, and even WeChat. “Not like in China where everyone is using the same app,” he said, hinting at the state’s ban of foreign instant messaging services, something which boosted WeChat’s rapid success. Afu continued this line of reasoning by identifying consolidation in the WeChat app itself. “Don’t you feel that WeChat could enable you to do anything?” he asked, after describing how WeChat has evolved from a simple messaging app to a comprehensive super app with numerous features, functions, and mini-programs, far surpassing its original purpose (cf. Chen et al., 2018; Plantin and de Seta, 2019).
The observations of our research participants drew attention to the convergence of various forces—tech giants, policymakers, institutions, and users—that cemented WeChat’s and other services’ dominant roles. Nonetheless, while aligning with the overarching paradigm of market in state and recognizing the rapid rise of WeChat and other services like Alipay to near-monopolies, they also contemplated the possibility of digital services being challenged and eventually replaced; in other words, they could envisage flexibility in future platform economy. The discussions pointed out that there are dozens of similar services available and those could, at least in theory, replace the dominant ones. For instance, when discussing mobile payments through Alipay or WeChat, which have become the main payment method for hundreds of millions of Chinese (Shen et al., 2020), they still thought it would be possible to switch to another service or even go back to using credit cards. Discussions among interviewees referred to various services for mobile payments, including a state-led option. “The People’s Bank of China has launched a digital currency, and people will be more willing to use it because you can pay without an Internet connection,” Jian Jun, a 57-year-old education researcher, suggested, anticipating possible change.
After considering WeChat’s communication functions and mini-programs, the research participants also offered alternatives. Hui, a 27-year-old business manager, for instance, speculated on the potential development of platforms like DingDing, suggesting that it might grow to rival the popularity of WeChat. The presence of this kind of speculation is an indication of flexibility imaginary: it suggests that the digital landscape is seen as constantly evolving. Gao Yang, introduced above, highlighted the versatility within the WeChat platform, particularly the so-called mini-programs, and how they could be replaced by standalone applications. He emphasized that the absence of WeChat would not stifle innovation; instead, it could lead to the creation of specialized apps tailored to specific social interactions. Gao Yang used the success of the Ride-Sharing App (顺风车, Shun feng che) to illustrate how embedding communication features within an app can enhance its utility and foster personal connections. He argued that the human desire for social interaction extends beyond any single app or platform, implying that there’s ample opportunity to design alternative products that fulfill social needs in diverse and innovative ways.
The discussions suggested that in the context of market in state, human needs are seen as more enduring than the transient digital platforms—a provocative finding in light of Markham’s (2021) notion of discursive closure and the inability to articulate different digital futures. Chinese participants thought that since digital services are designed and developed to meet specific human requirements, multiple services can potentially meet these needs, making them interchangeable. Therefore, they viewed no single service as inherently superior in its capacity to meet the needs for which it was designed. Their technology imaginary was mundane and human-centric, focusing on functionality and fittingness rather than brand loyalty or technological superiority.
Powerless but not hopeless
As noted above, a number of our informants commented that, as individuals, they feel powerless in the face of technology. Lu Yang, a 26-year-old manager in human resources in the online education sector, shared insights from the workplace, noting that some leaders prefer WeChat for its ubiquity, which ensures availability “anytime, anywhere.” “If you don’t respond, that means your attitude toward work is not right,” Lu Yang stated and explained that ignoring WeChat messages is read as a lack of commitment. To control their workers, leaders can set up numerous work-related groups on the platform, an example that underscores how authority figures can dictate how digital tools are used. Hui, the business manager, articulated the inescapable influence of WeChat in her daily routine when she observed, “WeChat is something impossible to hide from.” Unlike other platforms where invisibility can be assumed, WeChat’s array of interactive features—from persistent voice and video calls to unavoidable group chats that can involve one’s superiors at work—create layers of social obligation. She explained that it is one thing to overlook a phone call, but WeChat demands attention. Moreover, being called out in a group chat, especially in the presence of a leader, adds a whole new level of pressure: “People can pull you and your leader into the same group and then scold you in front of them.” This omnipresence and the many collective pressures underscore WeChat’s pervasive stature in her life.
During the interview, however, Hui also challenged WeChat’s dominant position by considering the option that similar services, such as QQ or Alibaba’s enterprise communication platform DingDing, might replace WeChat. This kind of ambivalence was typical of the discussions. The informants often stated that, as individuals, they were obliged to use currently dominant services because they are intimately tied to everyday infrastructures in Hangzhou (see also Ruckenstein, 2023); their work, for instance, might be digitally mediated or organized. For An, a 42-year-old cleaner, WeChat is irreplaceable because she gets work orders through the service. Similarly, He Gufei, a retired middle-school teacher in her late 50s, who had earlier indicated a strong emotional bond to WeChat because of using it to keep in touch with her daughter and friends, could not at first see how the service could be replaced. Her husband Jian Jun, however, still active in work life, challenged her by asking “Why could it not be replaced?” After a short deliberation focusing on WeChat’s permanence and role in everyday life, Jian Jun concluded their discussion on the topic by stating that he thinks that change is inevitable: “I think it can be replaced, and it will be replaced sooner or later.”
The interviewees expressed a sense of passivity in the face of digital services, but they still envisioned how individual powerlessness might be overcome by collective action. Their attitude toward possible future transformations was open and often optimistic. The flexibility imaginary fosters a sense that with collective or state efforts, things can change. For instance, many believed that challenging the taken-for-granted or monopolistic position of digital services requires collective initiative from communities, institutions, or the government. “It’s not individuals who want change and then just make it. It depends on the community around you,” Rong, a 39-year-old business manager, pointed out, underlining that in Chinese culture change is often thought to take place via collective mechanisms. Traditional Chinese culture, deeply rooted in Confucianism, values hierarchy and collective organization over the individual. In interviews, “the collective” is mobilized as part of deliberations on who should take responsibility for steering the development of the platform economy. “For example, our whole company decided to shift from WeChat to Dingding, and then it worked,” Rong explains, pointing out that platform companies can be challenged, if the broader community is willing to do so.
In thinking about change, the informants emphasized that the dominance of a digital service often stems from user habits. For example, Kun Yu, a 32-year-old hydraulic engineer, observed that in Hangzhou, people typically use WeChat for messaging and Alipay for financial transactions, even though both platforms offer both services. He noted that Alipay’s payment feature is not superior to WeChat’s, but users have grown accustomed to it. This kind of habit formation extends to messaging on WeChat, Kun Yu suggested; after communicating with a friend a hundred times on WeChat, suddenly switching to another service would feel odd. Similarly, Pan, a 33-year-old project manager from the energy sector, highlighted the role of user habits in cementing WeChat’s status, stating that its widespread acceptance and familiarity make it the most convenient and efficient choice. Pang believes that displacing WeChat would be challenging, although not impossible with collective pushback. “If the number of users is large enough, I think the replacement could be very fast,” he suggested. After all, this is exactly what happened when Hangzhou residents migrated to WeChat. If enough users make the move, visible migrations between services can take place. As an example, the informants pointed out how the younger generation, people born after 2000, have already mostly switched back to using QQ instead of WeChat.
The state as a changemaker in the platform economy
Alongside collective pressure, state and local governance played a role in the flexibility imaginary, as they were seen as prominent sources of change in the digital economy. However, this was not always discussed in direct terms. There was a tendency to leave the role of the state and governance undefined, with these themes implied through indirect references. For instance, the informants often referred to them by stating that things are “different” or “special” in China. The choice of words suggested an assumed understanding of Chinese society held by both informants and interviewer, who was a native of China and had lived in the country for most of her life.
Although things were often left unsaid, and knowledge was shared implicitly, some participants were more vocal and straightforward about the role of the state or local governance. Pang, the project manager, for instance, talked optimistically about the local significance of Alipay in Hangzhou because of its integration with the Zhejiang government affairs system, Zheli ban (浙里办, Do things here). He described how this system streamlines administrative processes, allowing residents to minimize physical visits to government offices by providing preliminary guidance, specifying required documents, and digitizing them. “I believe that the government affairs system will definitely be extended to all areas of the country,” he said, predicting the growth of the system nationwide.
Kun Yu, on the other hand, pondered the government’s influence in determining service usage. He suggested that if a new service emerged or if the government mandated a specific service, people would eventually adapt to it over time, given a year or two. His wife continued the conversation by touching on the topic of capital, implying that the government might hesitate to replace a platform like WeChat due to financial considerations. She described how, technically speaking, it is possible to find a replacement for WeChat; however, the issue at hand is capital. “Like Tencent, its capital is so great it makes it almost a monopoly,” she said. When companies have amassed substantial financial power, bordering on a monopoly, the prospect of replacing their services becomes less feasible. On the other hand, He Xi, a 34-year-old manager, after repeatedly stating that the big companies are evil because “they do some very bad things for profit,” said he placed his trust in the state’s ability to rein in this sort of behavior. Referring to the latest regulative efforts by the state at the time of the interview, which included drafting a new cyber security law and investigating DiDi (滴滴出行, Didi Chuxing), a vehicle for hire company, he observed that the state has the will to regulate major tech companies.
In a related conversation, a 42-year-old man who named himself Blue talked about the government in very direct terms, noting that he thought that WeChat or other dominant services would not disappear from Chinese society—at least, not because people start to embrace other services. Instead, he claimed that changes would be possible only through the state’s intervention. “It’s not the people who embrace the service and technology. It’s the government,” he stated. He continued by pointing out the impact the government has on which services have reached the dominant position in everyday life and the market: There are two things entangled together: big companies and the will of the state. When a company, like Tencent and the Ali group, grows to such a large scale, and its products, like WeChat and Alipay, get support and endorsement from the government, these services and products become one kind of infrastructure of this country.
The flexibility imaginary in the market in state
Our Chinese participants’ reflections on the power of big tech companies reveal an adaptable understanding of the current situation, while their relationship to the platform economy could be described as “tagging along.” As individuals, they openly doubt that they have influence over current developments. Aligned with the notion of digital resignation (Draper and Turow, 2019), our participants expressed feelings of individual powerlessness; however, they were optimistic about the idea that the digital economy could change through collective efforts or state governance. They are not exactly digitally resigned, but their role is to tag along and be ready for whatever changes might take place. Another way to describe this might be compliance: the participants in our research are ready to adhere to a platform economy that results from practices, standards, laws, or regulations set by governing bodies or organizations.
As a key feature of flexibility imaginary, the notion of replaceability challenges the roles of corporate entities in the overarching dynamics of the digital economy. Thinking about the possibility of platform companies being replaced allowed our informants to envision and speculate about alternative paths. When evaluating these speculations against the notion of discursive closure that Markham (2021) uses to explain the stuckness of imaginary efforts, it is noteworthy that we did not detect a similar degree of determinism when it comes to platform companies. Instead, the speculations demonstrate a flexibility imaginary, which allows to think actively and innovatively about what would happen if dominant services were replaced or disappeared altogether.
This flexibility imaginary seems to stem from the idea that the Chinese state is more powerful than platform companies. The influence of large tech corporations’ digital platforms is not as significant as the role of state authority, which is a prominent, though silent, force in the broader landscape of digital technologies. State power appears to fluctuate constantly in the background, allowing the flexibility in perceptions of power relations. The perceptions that the state’s actions remain malleable and unpredictable suggest the many possibilities contained within the technonationalist digital infrastructure. In the interviews, the state emerges as a pivotal, but also vague changemaker.
As the various regulatory initiatives suggest, the state also features in platform debates in Western contexts, but in the Chinese case, the state’s power is more proactive and absolute. Our participants’ thinking resonates with the “market in state” (Zheng and Huang, 2018) model, and related cycles of loosening and tightening in the regulation of the big tech companies (Zhang and Chen, 2022). This dynamic has facilitated the growth of digital services provided by China’s largest big tech companies, Tencent and Alibaba, in cooperation with the government. From our research participants’ perspective, the market in state model underlines notions of the impermanency of the market landscape, which contrasts with perceptions of more enduring aspects of contemporary Chinese societal structures, such as state authority, leaders’ organizational aims in the workplace, and the fulfillment of human needs through digital services. Meanwhile, although the research participants tend to think that change is initiated by influential leaders, institutions, the state, or any combination of different actors, the situation is more complex, as the state cooperates closely with companies and other actors and constantly balances different political and economic goals.
When verbalizing the flexibility imaginary, our participants recognized collective resources for challenging the dominant platform companies that are mainly absent from mainstream Western everyday tech imaginaries. The mobilization of collective resources plays an important role in activism and critical debates in Western contexts (Lehtiniemi and Ruckenstein 2019; Milan and Van der Velden, 2016; Peña Gangadharan and Niklas, 2019), but Chinese participants readily discuss how to organize collectively without a critical or activist orientation. Here, they benefit from the cultural propensity to value collective organization over the individual, an approach which nurtures shared visions of how everyday behavior influences future digital developments and how collective action could modify technology-related habits. The primacy of the collective, however, also maintains everyday hierarchies that manifest in the way WeChat is used in workplaces and in the overall attitude of tagging along.
We want to underline that our aim is not create an essentialist view of the imaginary differences between China and the West. The difference in thinking that the focus on the flexibility imaginary suggests is not only between perceived capacities in China and the West; it is also due to research methodologies that open different kinds of participatory spaces. Whereas Markham’s experimental research specifically invited people to speculate about the future, our research participants did it on their own terms. Staying close to how research participants perceive platform power allowed us to delve into ambivalent responses and anticipations in future making. The responses of our research participants make it clear that the future is not determined by technologies, but by how these technologies are woven into everyday endeavors and attempts to master and be inspired by ongoing cultural and societal transformations. As Pink (2022) would put it, here we are all at the edge of the future, and in terms of imaginary horizons and future making it matters what we do, and what we think is happening at the edge. An open-ended study like ours provides an opportunity to examine historically ingrained and situationally arising thoughts, feelings, and practices. Future anticipations and speculations can emerge when people think about what would happen if digital services and infrastructures would be replaced or disappear.
While the Chinese respondents could see that important services could collapse and be replaced by other services, or by the state or local authorities, they did not challenge the status quo of the state–corporate digital infrastructure on which their everyday lives depend. Thus, the flexibility imaginary that we identified has limits, beyond which the Chinese perspective aligns with the perceptions elsewhere: digital infrastructures are taken for granted, and the only way out is to disengage from digital services. This echoes Markham’s (2021) idea of being either connected or disconnected, indicating that while our Chinese informants questioned corporate dominance, they largely accepted the permanence of digital infrastructures; they anticipated transformations within them but did not see them as a departure from the prevailing state–corporate digital paradigm with which their lives are intertwined. Despite the flexibility imaginary that highlights the power of the state and collective over platform companies, other imaginaries can remain limited, as there is pragmatic acceptance of the state–corporate cooperative practice and the wider digital infrastructure on which it depends.
Concluding remarks
This study has explored how professionals in Hangzhou perceive the roles of the individual, collective, state, and governance in the context of digital services and their daily lives. By applying the concept of “market in state,” our analysis has introduced complexity to discussions of corporate platform power and highlighted the need for research on digital platforms and services outside contexts that are dominated by Silicon Valley’s big tech companies. The themes and tensions that we have identified are tentative and should be viewed as a set of propositions rather than settled findings. We offer the notion of the flexibility imaginary as a methodological lens to assess future speculations and their absences. In Hangzhou, the flexibility imaginary intimately connects with the idea that the current dominant positions of technology companies can be disrupted because the state and the collective are seen as more powerful entities than the corporate actors. Elsewhere the flexibility imaginary might concern the way the state, or the people, bend to the requirements of the platform companies.
Chinese respondents emphasize the enduring nature of human needs, collective organization, and the state as opposed to the transient nature of digital platforms. This is important in light of discussions that have focused on the corporate power that companies have over individuals, institutions, national states, and international political coalitions. To get a more comprehensive view of the current situation, bringing human needs, everyday technology relations, collective resources, and the state as a changemaker to the discussion shifts attention to a power source beyond corporate actors: that located in the interplay of local actors, companies, institutions, and states. Our analytical focus was purposefully on the idea of platform imaginaries, which extended our analysis to the complex relationships that make the powerful positions of big tech possible. We suggest following closely how people discuss the interplay to gain a better understanding of what might be happening at the edge of the future; we call for further research examining how big tech companies and their services are situated and interpreted locally in various collaborative networks and political balancing acts (Maguire and Winthereik, 2021). This way we can also identify what kinds of future imaginaries and visions are at play. Studies that bring in multiple locations and perspectives can contrast and expand research on digital platforms and aid in thinking about where and how change is imagined as possible.
Our Chinese participants expounded on the flexibility imaginary in ways that can guide future research to identify and work around the current limits of imaginaries. Through our findings, we see potential in the notion of flexibility imaginary to tease out stuckness in future speculations. If corporate power is imagined as inevitable in the West, can it be challenged by thinking about the permanence and inevitability of the state, human needs, and collective actions? Could we speculate on different kinds of futures if we start the speculation from thinking about the role of the state, institutions, and collectives rather than centering the imaginary around big tech? In this way, we could perhaps envision how digital services could be promoted in a more humane and livable manner.
Footnotes
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