WeChat as infrastructure: the techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms

TLDR

Western internet giants such as Google and Facebook are increasingly leveraging infrastructural properties to sustain market dominance, a trend that frames the study of non‑Western platforms like WeChat. The study argues that WeChat’s success stems first from platformization and then from infrastructuralization, examines the role of WeChat Pay in setting a new monetary standard, and questions whether this techno‑nationalist model could inform future platform regulation. Using technical documentation, business reports, observations, and interviews, the authors portray WeChat as both platform and infrastructure, situate it within China’s ICT history, and analyze WeChat Pay’s influence on monetary transactions. The findings reveal that WeChat’s infrastructuralization is driven by techno‑nationalist media regulations and an overt cyber‑sovereignty agenda.

Abstract

In the current research on media and communication, Western internet companies (e.g. Google and Facebook) are typically described as digital platforms, yet these actors increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market power. Through the case study of the Chinese social media application, WeChat, we argue that WeChat is an example of a non-Western digital media service that owes its success first to its platformization and then to the infrastructuralization of its platform model. Moreover, our findings show that the infrastructuralization of the WeChat platform model in China is shaped by markedly techno-nationalist media regulations and an increasingly overt cyber-sovereignty agenda. Drawing on the results of the analysis of technical documentation, business reports, as well as observations and interviews, we first present WeChat as both a platform and an infrastructure, and then we contextualize WeChat in the history of ICT infrastructure and the development of the internet in China. Finally, we analyze the specific role of the WeChat Pay service in establishing a new monetary transaction standard. We conclude by inquiring whether this emerging techno-nationalist model could be a plausible platform regulation in the future.