Institutional reforms and regulatory shifts in China's digital platform sector: how domain-specific centralization shaped the 2020-2022 transition

초록

Please find the abstract below: Between 2020 and 2022, China's digital platform sector underwent a substantial regulatory shift, marking a clear departure from the previously lenient approach toward digital platform firms. While much of the existing research has focused on external factors-such as the unchecked growth of tech giants, the Chinese Communist Party's goal of "common prosperity," and the U.S.-China rivalry-this paper highlights internal institutional changes that facilitated this regulatory transformation. Specifically, it explores how the 2018 bureaucratic restructuring within China's regulatory apparatus fostered "domain-specific centralization," concentrating regulatory power within agencies overseeing key domains such as financial regulation, antitrust, and data security. It argues that such centralization reduced regulatory overlaps and gaps, allowing the state to control major digital platforms more directly. Using case studies of Ant Group's suspended initial public offering, Alibaba's antitrust fine, and Didi's data security investigation, this paper shows how variations in centralization across domains shaped regulatory outcomes. The findings provide new insights into China's evolving regulatory governance and offer broader implications for the relationship between the state and business in the digital economy.

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