Affiliation:
1. University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Abstract
This essay provides brief accounts of some critical historical moments of Alibaba, one of China’s leading platforms, against the backdrop of the country’s accelerated market-oriented reforms since the 1990s. These accounts illustrate three theoretical approaches to explain the political-economic prerequisite of Alibaba’s growth: the neoliberal model, the developmental state, and the market transition theories. The essay concludes with challenges to the systematic conceptualization of the state–market relation in which Chinese platforms are embedded.
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