Abstract
Contrasting existing scholarship in ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, this article builds on the theorisation of infrastructural capitalism as an emerging global-capitalist project entangled with both China’s state-socialist ideology and the latest nationalistic revitalisation agenda, serving both political and commercial goals, yet also rendering discontent and resistance in daily business and employment practices. Through participant observation across 13 Alibaba departments or subsidiaries, semi-structured interviews with workers in Alibaba and other Chinese platform companies, and the analysis of corporate documentation and media reports, our ethnographic study highlights the ‘physical and digital (phygital)’ nature of infrastructure, and theorises how discursive, symbolic, and sensorial techniques are adopted to direct and sustain infrastructural capitalism in daily organisational setting through three unique mechanisms: public-private partnerships, corporate prosumption networks (CPN) and imagineered global competition. This article’s key contributions are threefold: to dissect the intertwined discursive, symbolic and affective mechanisms through which the ‘invisible’ infrastructures of capitalism are made ‘visible’ and ‘sensible’; unpack the variegated impacts and inherent dilemmas of infrastructural capitalism; and reimagine the possibility of individual resistance and systemic transgression.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 11-30 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Global Media and China |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 11 Jan 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2024 |
Bibliographical note
The author would like to thank the GMAC editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions throughout the review process. He is also thankful to Darren Carter, Jenny Chan, Yiu-Fai Chow, Jeroen de Kloet, Anthony Fung, Kun He, Misha Kavka, Xiaotian Li, Jori Snels, Bo Wang and June Wang for their critical comments on an earlier version of this article.Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by The University of Hong Kong’s Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research (project no. 2014 104005118) and by HKU Faculty of Social Sciences’ Strategic Research Clusters Seed Funding. It was also, in part, supported by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant 2021 Research and Innovation Programme, under the project ‘China Fashion Power: Fashioning Power through South-South Interaction: Re-thinking Creativity, Authenticity, Cultural Mediation and Consumer Agency along China-Africa Fashion Value Chains’ (Grant agreement No. 101044619).
Keywords
- Alibaba
- China
- E-commerce
- corporate culture
- digital economy
- infrastructural capitalism
- phygital infrastructure
- platform economy
- public-private partnerships
- sensorial infrastructure
