The Politics of Platforms/Pingtai平台: A Chinese Genealogy

Drawing on archival research for a book-length history of Chinese media governance, this essay presents a Chinese lineage of platform, or pingtai, in the fashion of Gillespie’s famous explication of the “politics of platforms.” Gillespie demonstrates that in the mid-2000s, tech companies began to call themselves as “platforms,” to take advantage of the term’s connotation as open and neutral enabler of the ideal market. Taken as global, this rhetorical strategy features frequently in transnational platform studies. The politics of platform in China, however, does not subscribe to the “root paradigm” of liberal capitalism. The invocation of pingtai has a pedigree traceable to the intellectual zeitgeist of the 1980s and state informatization and e-government of the 1990s and 2000s, which projected a distinct imaginary about information technology in relation to social organization. It is these deep-seated normative expectations that are driving the dynamic of platform governance in contemporary China.