After “BAT,” What? Reimagining the internet for social development in post-crisis China

Abstract

Taking the critical political economy approach, this paper continues Dallas Smythe’s and Yuezhi Zhao’s inquiries into technological development in contemporary China. It examines the trends and struggles of the “BAT” model—named after the three most influential Internet companies in the country, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent—in China’s digital expansion, which has been intimately connected to transnational financial capitalism in the past decade. Reflecting on this expansion’s all-encompassing socio-political consequences, a blind spot in the successful BAT story, the paper examines whether the BAT model is sustainable for China’s social development and, if not, the opportunities and alternatives lie ahead. The paper argues, in view of BAT’s financial and infrastructural turn, that how China’s ICT sector could move beyond a capital-driven mode of growth and reorient technologies for public and social development is a critical epistemological question.