Platformization and Social Goods in the Chinese Context: Rethinking Embeddedness

This paper argues that platforms in China face a rather different logic of operation as opposed to that of the market liberal societies. Drawing on Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness, the paper argues that platforms face social and political constraints that shape the ways how they behavior and discursively legitimize themselves. Platforms in the Chinese context are under a distinctive kind of embeddedness that we call “state-led embeddedness.”

The concept of “state-led embeddedness” to captures the idea that, rather than seeing platforms as an innovation of a relatively autonomous market, they are intentionally supported, sustained, and developed by the state. As a result, state-led embeddedness denotes a non-competitive and subordinating state-platform relationship. As such, platforms' fiduciary obligations under this context are first to the general society under which they operate. Because of this special feature, platforms in a state-led embeddedness context often have to discursively legitimize themselves as providers of social goods and rely less on discourses concerning their individualistic economic benefits. What is at stake here is not simply that the Chinese national government always succeeds in shaping how platforms act to provide social good but that the nature of intergovernmental relations may carry out various notions of “platform for social goods” in practice.