Description
Chinese social media platforms have provided not only new ways for communication but also new tools to implement surveillance and monitor the digital activities of Chinese citizens, from social media participation, interactive entertainment services, municipal e-services and mobile payments to online video portals. The integration of WeChat into the daily lives of Chinese citizens has empowered Tencent to accumulate an extremely profitable trove of user data on a level that even Facebook or Google could in no way achieve (Wildau, 2017). Despite the pervasiveness of surveillance, few have been done to examine the implications of dual forces of platform capitalism and state surveillance on the ways that Chinese internet enterprises operates in mainland China. This article seeks to examine the correlations between behavioural data surplus and state surveillance and further address whether China is developing a model different to the kind of Surveillance Capitalism identified by Zuboff. In so doing, this article combines two levels of studies: meso-level study on the institutional strategies and the hybrid model Tencent has developed, and macro-level policy study on the recent government policy reports and regulatory framework. This study seeks to offer a comparative examination of the Chinese variant of surveillance capitalism and how Chinese digital platforms have implemented the affordances of the internet differently from their western counterparts. It uses the case of Tencent to exemplify how Chinese digital platform operators have attempted to balance out the tensions between ideological surveillance and commercial exploitation of data surplus. This article argues that the hybrid model that Tencent Group operates has been cannibalising a wide range of marketplaces and engaging in aggressively capitalist-style mergers and takeovers.
