编者按：
今年四月，中兴遭遇美国商务部
“
掐喉
”
，面临购买美国零部件禁购制裁。美方手段引发中国社会强烈震动，如若波及华为等其余战略性企业，恐将严重挤压中国在新一轮结构重组中的内外布局。从全球政治经济视角看，该事件揭示通信技术在日益敏感的国际地缘政治中的支点位置，可谓是当今大国间博弈一触即发的痛点。此外，中兴的尴尬困境也撕开冰山一角，揭示中国通信技术发展在全球数字浪潮中的胶着状态，预示着中国发展转型道路上的诸多挑战错位、冲突与磨合。
基于中兴事件的冲击，本期
ICT
政策专题，三篇文章从理论和历史双重视角，检视以互联网技术为核心的
ICT
政策对中国在新时期发展转型的重大意义。从地缘政治、后发策略，再到劳动就业等多个视角，探讨传播与发展、技术与国际政治、国家与国际化互联网资本、国家主义与国家的全球性角色之间的关系与未来。
以下是第二篇文章
《
重返“互联网+”：数字经济能否助力中国经济转型？
》
，
作者洪宇建构基于国际产业链构成的分析框架，结合全局性俯瞰式叙事与纵深性解剖式分析，介入
“
数字中国
”
多个纬度和场景，揭示彼此不同但相互建构的关系，涵盖信息技术制造业、基础技术创新业与赛博商业领域三大板块。通过检视
富士康、美国高通公司和阿里巴巴
三家案例，本文指出，以互联网技术为龙头的现代传播业共享了中国政治经济体的复杂症候。这些症候表现各异，相互牵制：既有对低薪装配线的传统仰仗，和对国外先进技术的路径依赖，也有对各类外资的深入瓜葛。在如此格局中，
“
互联网
+”
政策执行极易造成风险偏差：国家并非单一的实体，其干预数字经济的意愿与能力分布不均；同时，在拉动转型升级的宏大背景下，
“
互联网
+”
政策更多响应扶持数字资本主义的议程，但数字劳工赋等重要议题似乎却遭到了搁置
。
（图片来源：网络）
篇幅限制，节选转载。全文刊载于
International Journal of Communication
2017
年第
11
期，
P1-21.
原文下载：
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6105
Pivot to Internet Plus:
Molding China’s Digital Economy for Economic Restructuring?
洪宇
Prelude: Pivot to Internet Plus
China and communications are two major engines generating decisive dynamics in the global
market economy. This is palpable especially during a worrisome global economic situation from 2008. Led
by disruptive innovation centering on digital networks, digital devices, and digitized information services,
the communications ecosystem has created a few high-growth outlets in the overall sluggish economy. In
China, meanwhile, the corporate-run cyberspace is building a global impact—as the country has the
world’s largest number of Internet users and is nurturing a few Internet conglomerates. New Web-
empowered ICT applications, from artificial intelligence to cloud computing to the Internet of things, are
poised to infiltrate and transform the economy and social life. As the digital economy of applications and
services has become one of the most important drivers in the world today, and as the Internet is the
backbone for such a digital economy, China’s rising power on this frontier encourages the Chinese state to
deliberately integrate network connectivity and networked applications into the country’s key national
strategy for economic restructuring.
Since the 2008 global economic crisis, the Chinese state has engaged in a rethinking of
development. Before 2008, China reaped rapid GDP growth by turning itself into a cog in the global
production system. But the export-driven and investment-dependent model is not sustainable; different
but interrelated symptoms include dependence on a low-wage assembly regime, dependence on foreign
technology, and deep entanglements with foreign capital of various kinds. After 2008, economic
restructuring, defined as a purposeful transition to a consumption-based and innovation-driven economy,
became a top state priority in a way never seen before (Naughton, 2014). The new administration pledged
to cultivate more sophisticated divisions of labor, foster domestic consumption capacity, and encourage
innovation and entrepreneurship (Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, 2010, 2015). But does
the Chinese state possess a coherent plan for change in light of the vulnerabilities exposed by the 2008
global economic crisis?
Notably, the state finds some answers in the realm of communications. Communications
underpinned China’s global convergence in the past three decades. The giganti
c volume of electronics
production for export and the country’s systematic deployment of networked applications showcase the
state’s intention to position ICTs as a driver of national economic develoment. In the current stage of
economic restructuring, the state further accords communications, especially Internet connectivity and
networked applications, an unprecedented status, culminating in the Internet Plus Action Plan in 2015.
The plan encompasses a long series of industrial, technological, and spending initiatives. The gist is to use
the Internet—with which innovative information applications and disruptive business and managerial
models can be deployed—as a crosscutting lever, both for integration with other areas of restructuring,
from banking system reforms to industrial modernization to the creation of renewable energy, and for
propelling a new digital capitalism capable of uplifting the Chinese economy in the global setting (State
Council, 2015).
The Internet Plus policy is just a prelude. The state’s 13th Five-Year Plan for 2020, which
incorporates Internet Plus, affirms the Internet and ICTs as the general-purpose catalyst for innov
ation,
structural reforms, and the new industrial revolution, all critical restructuring goals the 13th Five-Year Plan
pledges to achieve. Apart from driving China’s internal transformation, the Internet and ICTs are also
designated to support China’s global economic leadership. In 2016, not only did the Chinese state create
and chair the G20 Digital Economy Taskforce, but it also led the passage of the G20 Digital Economy
Development and Cooperation Initiative. As a major contributor to global economic stability and growth,
China is now forging a global consensus centered on the digital economy.
Analytical Purpose
This pivot to Internet Plus raises questions about the political economy of China’s digital
economy, which predates the Internet Plus strategy and therefore will condition its implementation. Using
the Internet as a metaphor to represent the broader “Web-oriented communications commodity chains”
(Schiller, 2014, p. 7) that encompass access devices, networks, and services and applications, I thus have
two foci of analysis: first, to historicize the political economy of China’s digital economy, especially the
liberalized and quasiliberalized sections of the digital economy, and, second, to characterize the nature of
the state’s interventions under the auspices of economic restructuring. Ultimately, I focus on the structural constraints that state power faces in the quest of turning the digital economy, an unevenly globalized
economic sector, into a critical level for economic restructuring.
Theoretical Positioning
The Chinese Internet research community has connected the Internet with development.
However, with some exceptions (Harwit, 2008; Zhao, 2010; Zhao & Schiller, 2001), the literature has a
disproportionate focus on social-political implications of the Internet (Tai, 2006; G. Yang, 2009; Zheng,
2008; also for reference, see Qiu & Bu, 2013; Sullivan, 2014), while taking Internet development as a
pragmatic yet unproblematic technoeconomic choice made by the authoritarian state. If asked, the
prevailing technoeconomic question is, can the state-guided economy build a free-market Internet (Kluver
& Yang, 2005)? In recent years, in light of China’s ambitious industrial policy intended for domestic
Internet-related industries, Western analysts conversely portray a tight fusion of interests between the state and Chinese capital (U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2016). Implicit in both propositions is a reductive
treatment of the political economy of the Internet to the state–market dichotomy. To go beyond this
simplistic state–market binary framing, it is important for future research to disaggregate competing state
imperatives, reveal disparate interests of various units of capital the digital economy entails, and to follow
complex, evolving, and even contingent state–business relations, which are contentious, collaborative, and
ambiguous at once.
The broader interdisciplinary field of the information society and ICT policy tends to prioritize the
perspective of industrialized countries, conceptualizing ICTs as the “drivers” of productivity and efficiency
and promulgating the Western model of market-led technological diffusion (Mansell, 2010). This dominant
perspective pays little attention to contextual issues that non-Western developing nations face, such as
opportunities and constraints in the global capitalist system. By extension, mainstream ICT4D literature
sees the Internet as a malleable tool and development as an acupuncture operation (Heeks, 2009), still
leaving ICT development as a neutral-sounding black box with insufficient analysis of its institutional and
political economy nature. Because the digital economy has become a multibillion-dollar business, the
linkages between digitalization and development are mediated by economic policy, the political economy,
and social dynamics. To avoid abstractly conceiving the Internet as the change agent, the research
agenda should include the political economy, especially state–business interactions, as a critical level of
analysis, in light of a country’s historical position in global digital capitalism.
Informed by these critiques and sensibilities, the analytical framework in this article synthesizes
the scholarships on digital capitalism and on China’s state–business relations.
China and Global Digital Capitalism
Critical scholars in the West have theorized how transnational corporate logic colonized digital
networks and even recast Internet-related activities and programs into “digital capitalism” (McChesney,
2013; Mosco, 1989; Murdock & Golding, 2010; Schiller, 2000). As a global system, digital capitalism
comprises transnational corporations, global production networks, and international governing entities. As
a historical trend, it presses developing countries to conform and to participate. As a concept, it
encapsulates the U.S.-dominated technoeconomic context within which national development takes
place—especially as it underscores the central role of communications in recasting global economic
dynamics (Schiller, 2000).
Developing countries are integrated into this hierarchical global system to varying degrees
(Heinrichs, Kreye, & Fröbel, 1981). In global digital capitalism, China is first and foremost a downstream
manufacturing powerhouse. However, new zones of market subsumption are forged as media, technology,
and telecommunications have become a new epicenter of market reforms in the 2000s and especially after
2008 (Zhao, 2008). Hit by the 2008 crisis, the Chinese state accelerated the corporatization of the state-
controlled realm of communications. The Internet Plus policy introduced in 2015, however, implies that
the measures intended to unleash state media capital had achieved limited results for economic
restructuring. Now, the Internet, which supports a new digital economy and heads a Web-oriented
commodity chain, is a new engine designated to power China’s political economy forward. The pivot to Internet Plus, therefore, represents a comprehensive drive to bothelevate and mold China’s digital economy to meet national economic preferences.
Although celebrated as a revolutionary force, China’s existing digital economy is partly shaped by the old economic dynamics—and the accompanying power structures. Disaggregating the Web-oriented commodity chain that crisscrosses China, this study reveals the transnational corporate dynamics that both contend and overlap with the state in shaping China’s digital economy. After economist Martin Hart- Landsberg (2013) noted the resistance registered by vested interests in the existing global economic dynamics against economic restructuring, this study explores further: In this new round of forging a new digital economy as part and parcel of China’s economic restructuring, to what extent can the Chinese state harness transnational economic dynamics and contest constraints born of the old growth model?
State–Business Relations in a Globalized Economy
Achieving economic restructuring requires the state to actively renegotiate with the global system—through domestic administrative and legal institutions. In the past three decades,
decentralization laid the institutional bedrock for the export-driven economy, with regulatory tasks and
law-making power delegated to local governments (Xu, 2011). This scheme equips local governments with
sufficient autonomy and incentive to act in an entrepreneurial fashion. To make a forceful push on
economic restructuring, however, political scientist Andrew Mertha (2012) suggests that the state needs
to “ensure that a not insignificant amount of power and wealth be taken out of the hands of local (and, to
some degree, national) leaders” (p. 8). Although recentralization and reregulation are already important
new trends in China’s market governance, they are by no means linear countervailing processes, but have
created ambiguous situations of decentralized centralization, where the provincial authority, after
consolidating vertical power, has a nonbinding relation with the state authority, but falls more under the
direct leadership of local governments (Friedman & Kuruvilla, 2015; Mertha, 2005a).
Still, the state has managed economic global integration at its own “gradual, measured” pace
(Kim, 2009, p. 75)—through differentiated regulatory approaches toward various sectors depending on
their strategic values (Hseuh, 2015). Along the Web-oriented commodity chain, for example, the state
retains its ownership domination and licensing authority in network operation and, thereby, is able to
wield some unusual regulatory power for facilitating import substitution in the adjacent liberalized network
equipment market. What political scientists have not noted, however, is that the strategic value of a
particular economic sector is not fixed, which therefore may play havoc with the established regulatory
structure and create new reregulatory imperatives. On the one hand, as the Internet enables ICTs to
integrate with all sorts of socioeconomic operations, the gravity of the digital ecosystem shifts from
telecom networks to proprietary platforms and mobile applications (Xia, 2016), negating considerably
state power in network management. On the other hand, the strategic value of the liberalized and
quasiliberalized Internet-related industries has significantly expanded to affect the broader goals of
economic restructuring. The resurgence of a capitalist class in cyber business is one sign of a power shift
(Y. Wen, 2015), and the Internet Plus policy is another sign, which opens up leeway for private cyber
giants to influence, if not hijack, the state’s agenda.
In this context, new theoretical and empirical questions arise: Can the state effectively reregulate
the digital economy—when state power over various issue areas is unevenly distributed on the scale of
centralization, decentralized centralization, to decentralization, and, more important, when the liberalized
sections where the state retains relatively little power have contradictorily become unprecedentedly
important? This study reveals that economic restructuring targeting the Web-oriented commodity chain
entails “multilevel bargaining across multiple issue areas both at home and abroad” (Kim, 2009, p. 78)
and that intervening factors, including the decentralization of state power and fragmentation of
bureaucratic authority, continue to dilute state reregulatory power aimed at curbing old transnational
corporate dynamics, but have conversely enabled “loopholization” for the new digital economy.
With these analytical blocks and questions, the following sections assess the state’s intention and
ability to make policy for change—along the Web-oriented commodity chain—by focusing on state–
business interactions involving Foxconn, Qualcomm, and Alibaba.
More Than a Controversy:
Foxconn and Low-Wage Accumulation
The biggest predicament China faces is the difficulty to correct the wage-depressing mechanism
that has made China a global factory, but has ruined the well-being and consumption capacity of its
worker and peasant communities (Hung, 2011). In light of the pivot to Internet Plus, does China’s digital
economy offer a better alternative, or is it linked to the low-wage assembly-and-export model that the
crisis destabilized? The latter is the answer—China’s ICT manufacturing is the number-one business for
the export-processing regime. From the 1990s, the country has grown into the low-cost global supply
base for electronics, hosting Taiwan-headquartered mega contract manufacturers responsible for final
assembly and export to the Western markets.
Foxconn is exemplary. With no brand name of its own, but providing comprehensive
manufacturing services for brand-name companies on the global scale, Foxconn along with other contract
manufacturers constitute the largest segment of ICT production in China in terms of revenues, production
facilities, and employment (Lüthje & Butollo, 2016). After Apple’s iPhone ignited a worldwide consumption
fad in 2007, Foxconn, the world’s number-one contract manufacturer with 70% of its operation in China,
has supported this wave of info-techno consumerism. Apart from Apple, other major brand-name
companies, including Chinese device vendors Huawei and Xiaomi, also work with Foxconn as their contract
manufacturer for final production.
To sustain its business development, however, Foxconn needs to go beyond what it has near
monopolistic power for: low-cost volume contract manufacturing. Despite its superb ability to slash cost
through industrial, mechanical, and organizational innovation, Foxconn has little power over the supply
chain, and its business model is dependent on inexpensive migrant workers. After 2008, to relieve the
downward pressure on corporate profits, Foxconn relocated massive production facilities to interior
provinces while diversifying into new business areas. The low-margin business is a major reason for
concern and is subjected to active upgrading efforts, but Foxconn’s low-wage system, which contributes to
labor unrest and, more broadly, to the depression of residential consumption capacity, has not been
changed much (Lüthje & Butollo, 2016).
The low-wage system, based on local minimum wages, derives partly from the decentralization of
economic decision making. From 1993, labor administrative authorities had and continue to have the legal
right to determine local standards of minimum wage, thereby causing systematic suppression of labor
compensation in the rush to attract foreign industrial capital (Bao, 2010). After 2008, as a gesture of
economic restructuring, local governments raised the minimum wage, but no place had it close to 40% of
the urban residential income (Q. Q. Zhang & Li, 2013). Without excessive overtime, the minimum wage
rarely meets the living wage standard. But export-processing enterprises use it as the default standard for
base pay, forcing workers to “willingly” accept overtime work (Qi, 2015). As a result, excessive working
hours were and continue to be a hallmark feature of the repressive wage system (Lüthje & Butollo, 2016).
Proposals submitted to the People’s Congress from 2010 to 2015 expose the widespread persistence of
excessive and unpaid overtime (Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, 2012, 2014; H. L. Lu, Shen, &
Pan, 2012).
The call for economic restructuring did encourage critical reflections on the low-wage mode of
accumulation, especially the excessive overtime practice. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions
(ACFTU) was unusually vocal. In 2015, Guo Jun, ACFTU party secretary, criticized Foxconn for its unlawful
overtime as causing suicides among workers. This comment pushed Foxconn back into the spotlight after
the series of worker suicides in 2010. The corporate giant reacted bluntly, ridiculing Guo for never making
an onsite investigation. As a mass organization under the party leadership, the ACFTU has neither legal
rights to organize strikes nor administrative power to impose business-related approval or penalty and
thus is crippled to defend the interests of labor. Echoing the decision of the 18th Party Congress in 2012
to rule the country by law, the ACFTU (2015) declared its intention to use legal means to improve union
work, specifically to use “media exposure and public condemnation” (para. 10) as a method of law
enforcement. Guo’s move reflected this new strategy.
But the brief media attention the ACFTU managed to stir up was far from enough for altering its
weak institutional position overpowered by decentralized state–corporate alliances. Although the ACFTU—a
weak hierarchical national organization—has deliberately decentralized its operation to encourage
primarily firm-level collective bargaining over wages with management (Friedman & Kuruvilla, 2015), the
labor law has not made this mechanism an ironclad requirement, giving leeway for disobeying
management (X. Y. Chen & Shen, 2015a, 2015b; Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, 2015).
Moreover, the bargaining is supposed to be nonadversarial, leaving the final collective contract an
agreement between the local government and the management (Zheng, 2009). With little power to
overrule local authorities, the ACFTU was and continues to be a weak watchdog mired in decentralized
labor relations, unable to ensure industrywide or nationwide wage increases in step with economic growth
as promised by the government’s restructuring scheme.
If progressive labor-law reforms represent an increase in centralization, local authorities are still
responsible for law enforcement in a decentralized fashion. But local officials lack incentives to correct
widespread substandard practices, especially if law compliance would add costs to local businesses;
besides, their punitive methods limited to warnings and fines are insufficient to overcome the corporate
incentives for noncompliance (Zheng, 2009). Given the nodal position labor administrative authorities
occupy in law enforcement, the 18th Party Congress emphasized strengthening such grassroots capacity. By July 2014, 28 provinces had passed workplace inspection regulations. The Chongqing regulation
effective in January 2015, for example, requires labor-intensive enterprises to keep records of employees’
regular and extra working hours and instructs them to set up procedures for whistleblowing (B. Yang,
2014). Such decentralized regulatory mechanisms are a positive development, but short of raising
minimum wage—across the industry and its various locations in the country—they are likely to have
limited effectiveness. In October 2014, intensified production but reduced overtime led Foxconn workers in
Chongqing to go on strike (Luk & Wong, 2014), where the minimum wage standard rose to 1,250 yuan
per month ($198), but still fell far below the monthly urban residential income of 3,700 yuan ($587).
