Cooptation, Collusion and Contestations: Development, Regulation and Globalization of the Internet in China

This dissertation investigates the antithetical sets of developments between a nationally-controlled Chinese internet and its increasing commercial success. It asks the central question of how does the Chinese government reconcile its political goal of maintaining a sovereign internet with the goal of sustaining and fostering commercial success? To answer this question, this dissertation uses primary methods of textual and document analysis and examines a corpus of first-hand and secondary documents including laws, regulations, directives, company financial documents, and news reports.

This dissertation develops a tripartite model, outlining the role and interplay between three actors in sustaining Chinas tightly controlled yet commercially vibrant internet: the Chinese state, internet companies, and capital. It is argued that the Chinese state remains as a key institutional force in shaping domestic internet regulation, gatekeeping entry and conditions of participation of capital in the domestic market, and supervising and supporting domestic internet companies. The internet companies, on the other hand, are agentic and creative in working around restrictions on foreign investment while retaining managerial control and collaborating with various state-led projects. Foreign capital enters the picture, transforming Chinese internet companies into financiers, owners and stakeholders in emerging markets.

This dissertation therefore challenges the top-down view of the Chinese state in directing and controlling the internet. It shows that the Chinese state is highly adaptive in political control and economic policy-making. Censorship and control have always constituted part of the institutional conditions interwoven into the political economy of the Chinese internet. It also systematically analyzes the often-overlooked role of capital in the industrial development of the Chinese internet. Overall, this dissertation unpacks the collusion and contestations between state, internet companies and capital, caught in between aspirations of building an explicitly nationalistic internet and the increasing need for global connections, flows of technologies, financial and human capital.