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Globalisation and Contextualisation

Introduction

The internet came into our lives with the promise that it would foster the process of global connection and lead to what Castells has characterised as a 'networked society' (2009). Even before the popularisation of the internet, Marshall McLuhan's concept of a 'global village' (McLuhan and Powers, [1989] 2007) has long expressed the vision of interconnection around the world via new media technologies. The advent of internet technologies, of course, rode on the already integrated global financial and trade systems. Satellite technology has defined the imagination and expectation of media in our everyday lives since the final decade of the twentieth century. Yet, as we started writing this book in 2023, this term seems to have run out of some steam and no longer fascinates as many people as it once did. On the contrary, globalisation has been singled out in (far-)right political rhetoric as having threatened local jobs, caused inflation, worsened national debts, undermined national integrity, and threatened national security. This type of rhetoric was manifested throughout the Brexit campaign and is active in Trumpist politics in the US and the general surge of (far-)right political discourses across liberal democracies. Likewise, (hyper-)nationalism and populism have dominated the Chinese online spheres and society (Tse and Li, 2022). The once much celebrated 'Going Out' policy under Hu Jintao's presidency (2002-12) was replaced by the self-indulgent fascination with the Chinese Dream. The objective for China is no longer trying to integrate into the 'international community' but, rather, to 'restore' this once great civilisation to its 'former' glory - to stand out from the rest of the world - through economic self-reliance.

Then came the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, and the rejection of globalisation reached a new height. As countries around the world imposed lockdowns, travel restrictions and border closures, the global supply and production chains were forced into near hibernation mode. As supplies of everyday groceries and medical resources ran low, (wealthy) countries and individuals were stockpiling to prepare for the ultimate appearance of empty shelves. At the same time, diplomatic tensions heightened between China and the West over the origin of the virus and between the developed and developing worlds over the unequal global distribution of medical equipment and vaccines. As usual, international trade was weaponised in the form of sanctions and tariffs for diplomatic negotiations and geopolitical contests.

The global supply chain, a defining feature of globalisation and a pillar of global capitalism, came under siege by protectionists, who framed it as economically unsustainable and strategically dangerous to national security. David Ricardo's once celebrated theory of comparative advantage, which set down the theoretical justification for global trade, seems to have lost its charm. 'Decoupling' instead became the fashionable idea among major economies that blamed each other for causing the global shortages of supplies and uneven distribution of medical resources.* While Western politicians were investigating how to decouple from what they perceived as China's unfair domination of the global supply chain, few noted that China was fascinated by the idea of 'inner-circulation' (nei xun huan, ???), an economic concept that proposes to increase and preserve capital circulation by boosting domestic production, investment and consumption. Chinese tech giants have embraced and actively promoted ideological rhetoric both in their external marketing communication and in their internal communication for managerial control and operations (see Tse and Li, 2022). In other words, China was also trying to decouple from the West (consumption demands and the influx of financial capital).

We are not sure if either side has ended up with a more convincing argument, and the reality is that the rhetoric of decoupling has been short-lived; at the time of writing, trade talks and activities are back on the political and economic agenda of many countries, including China. As the world has reopened from Covid-19 lockdowns, both sides seem to have forgotten their respective manifestation of decoupling. However, its demise, at least not openly, does not point to a return to or re-embracement of globalisation. Again, if we focus on China, the country has been active in talks with Australia to recommence trading that was either paused or under sanction and heavy tariffs due to the latter's role in pushing for an investigation into the virus's origin. However, the gradual recommencement of trade talks and activities does not suggest a pause in the ideological manifestation of inner-circulation and the political campaign to 'buy Chinese'. For example, while China and Australia have resumed their trade in lobsters, China is pushing its domestic seafood farmers to scale up production, hoping to replace Australian lobster consumption in the domestic market (ABC News, 2021).

In this chapter, we focus on the ideological aspects and the changing rhetoric of globalisation to establish a context for the discussions to come. In two prominent case studies, the respective journeys in global expansion of Huawei and ByteDance, we use a somewhat 'reversed approach' - historically and geographically - to examine Chinese platforms and to make two points. First, while current scholarship around global media and culture tends to focus on a Western- or a US-centric frame of analysis, we consider here the opportunity to look at the changing responses to globalisation through the lens of Chinese platforms. Second, we want to illustrate that Chinese platforms have always been part of the global platform economies and culture, and they have been shaping the structure, trajectory of development, and even the culture of global platforms - a point made in the Introduction. Such a premise will allow us to examine how domestic dynamics such as the governance and policy, industry and labour, cultural practices and social orientations of Chinese platforms are located within several sets of contradictions in the global platform landscape and the dialectics throughout the process of globalisation: connection and disconnection, integration and exclusion, and territorialisation and deterritorialisation.

We take a comparative lens to evaluate how the two tech giants Huawei and ByteDance arguably embraced their respective journeys of 'Going Out' beyond the PRC and how they embody different modes of globalisation from the Chinese perspective. Of course, they are not the only Chinese tech/platform companies that have 'gone global'. We can gain a sense of the sheer size of Chinese platforms active on the global stage from India's ban: since June 2020, India has proscribed around 553 Chinese apps or apps with links to China on the grounds of national security and sovereignty (Sherman, 2023). This development shows a changing global environment that is increasingly redefined by national borders, allowing the domestic political and ideological agenda to advance to the centre of platform governance. Further, the case of India raises an intriguing question of what may be defined as Chinese; it was later proven that many (tech) companies alleged to be linked to China were nothing of the sort (ibid.). For example, Bigo Live is a streaming platform based in Singapore that was co-founded by David Xueling Li, a former chief editor of the popular online news Netease in China. Unlike ByteDance, which set up an overseas office in Singapore, Bigo Live was founded in Singapore and has always been in Singapore. The 'Chineseness' of these banned platforms is thus often perceived in an arbitrary way yet serves as a crucial parameter when evaluating the global platform landscape, a point we will develop later.

Importantly, we shall recognise that China has pioneered the use of this nationalist approach to regulate Western and domestic Chinese platforms through its Great Firewall. But the Indian case, as well as the ban of TikTok in the US, seems to signal the adoption of platform nationalism also in liberal democratic contexts in both Western and non-Western societies. Further, looking at the experiences of Chinese platforms outside China allows us to evaluate the evolution of global platforms beyond the techno-utopian version of total and ultra-libertarianism and the imagination of individuals versus the state (see Barbrook and Cameron, 1996).

We need to focus on the key pitfall moments and emphasise the continuity of these moments both before and after the rise of the platform economy in the early 2010s,* as the (Chinese) platform companies' experience with globalisation has been situated within the historical processes of global ideological contestations and dialectics.

We hence chose Huawei, a technology company that develops digital devices and builds telecommunication infrastructure, to illustrate the development of Chinese platforms. It has become a beacon in determining their opportunities, formats and approaches to global expansion and internationalisation. Huawei was one of the earliest pioneers to respond to the Chinese government's 'Going Out' policy framework (to be elaborated in chapter 2) by expanding its business beyond the PRC's borders. Its highprofile expansion has...