ONE APP, TWO VERSIONS: TIKTOK AND THE PLATFORMIZATION FROM CHINA

The increasing presence of Chinese internet companies (to name but a few: Tencent, Tiktok, Alibaba and Huaiwei) in the global platform society (Van Dijck et al 2018) has aroused grave concern in the West over the issues of privacy and surveillance especially due to their inextricable connections to the Chinese Party State. If domestically Chinese platform economy represents an alternative cyber ecology that is deliberately nurtured by the Chinese state to counteract the global, silicon-valley based platform ecosystem, then this ‘parallel universe’ now also constantly attempts to expand its system and exert greater influence on the global stage. Together with the ‘parallel universe’ also comes an ‘alternative globalization’ that is rooted in China, in comparison to the globalization that is dominated by the European-American transnational capital and power.