Description
The paper interrogates how China’s globalising capital through the Digital Silk Road (DSR) addresses domestic contradiction, promotes China’s world (re)integration, and reshape the capitalist world-systems. Taking Alibaba as a case study, the paper explores the evolution of state-capital relationship behind Alibaba's trajectory of business development: how it reshapes domestic economy within long-term capital accumulation cycles, underpinning the circuits of Chinese capital within and beyond its territories and connecting it to the wider social formation when Alibaba's capital flows out to Southeast Asia (SEA). The paper conceptualises the DSR as China's spatial fix while acknowledging the dialectical interplay between territorial and capitalist logics of power throughout China’s accumulation cycle. It provides a historically-grounded, process-oriented analysis of transformation of Chinese capitalism, tracing its evolution since reform era to Xi Jinping's regime, focusing on recent strategies for mitigating capitalism's crises while maintaining hegemonic influence through spatial expansion and reconfiguration in the SEA.
Findings suggest that the expansion of Alibaba's business is rooted in an evolving, contested, but implicitly reciprocal relationship between the Chinese party-state and borderless, expanding internet capital. The state-capital nexus evolves through three stages in China’s accumulation cycle: (1) a Pre-Crisis Era (1999-2008), where both power interact positively, foreshadowing China’s economic ascent; (2) a Crisis-in-Transition Era (2008-2014), where tensions emerge, indicating economic turbulence within Chinese capitalism; and (3) a Crisis-Ridden Era (2014-present), where the two logics of power are rebalanced and reconciled across domestic and international markets, accompanied by a switch of crises to sustain China’s hegemonic influence. The paper concludes that the DSR is pursued as an accumulation strategy, where the state-capital nexus drives Alibaba’s global material expansion, competing with local and Western shareholders, while reflecting China's party-state interests and efforts to enhance its position within the world system by leveraging Alibaba’s ecosystem both in China and the SEA markets.
