Description
The state role in the Global Production Network literature under the currently raised spectre of nationalism caused by the latest manifestation of geopolitical tensions warrants updated analysis. Although the products are likely to suffer from the heightening Sino-US tension, the rapid global market expansion of the Chinese online mobile game firms since the late 2010s has been witnessed and is under the spotlight of this paper. Drawing upon the second round of in-depth interviews and surveys with various concerned firms and non-firm actors in Guangdong, China in 2021-2023 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, special attention will be paid to the Chinese state. Unlike the market expansion in the mid-2010s which was largely limited in the region, the rapid expansion in recent years has been largely attributed to the rigid restrictive policies towards the domestic market introduced in the late 2010s against all game developers and publishers. This ‘regulation for facilitation’ strategy on the one hand responded to the internal bottom-up societal concern towards the negative impacts brought by the online games and on the other hand helped elude the external techno-geopolitical risk by indirectly pushing the domestic game firms to venture abroad. Apart from the empirical updates of the global market expansion of the Chinese game firms in the current time of uncertainty, the current paper applies the notion of Gramsci’s ‘integral state’ as the political-cum-civil society to read the state-GPN nexus by exploring how the government at different levels have leveraged the consensual and coercive power at certain times to ensure the ‘healthy’ development of the industry. This enriches the GPN literature by moving away from the Weberian lens which focuses on the functional agencies of the state to better understand the seemingly contradictive roles of the Chinese state being both the facilitator and regulator.| Period | 30 Aug 2024 |
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| Event title | The RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2024 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | London, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |