The tech rivalry between China and the United States is often portrayed as a battle for control over the future of the internet. Media and political discourse fuel the idea of two competing cyberworlds: a United States–led internet and a China-led alternative. In this essay, I show how this binary view oversimplifies a far more tangled reality. By revealing the techno-corporate network of China’s global platform ecosystem, I challenge the myth of a divided digital world by tracing how Chinese technologies expand globally—not by replacing Western information systems, but by climbing alongside and intertwining with them.

In recent years, China has become a major global supplier of network infrastructure, mobile devices, and platform services. As a result, Chinese technologies mediate social, political, and economic activities in recipient countries. In 2015, Beijing introduced the ‘Information Silk Road’ (later renamed the ‘Digital Silk Road’ or DSR) as the digital component of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This initiative promotes the development of transnational network infrastructure and aims to enhance information connectivity across BRI countries (NDRC et al. 2015). The DSR has sparked considerable debate in academia. Some scholars argue that China is constructing a ‘digital empire’ through the DSR, while others contend that it remains more rhetorical than real (Keane and Yu 2019; Oreglia and Zheng 2025). Concerns have also been raised about China’s influence on digital governance standards and the digital sovereignty of recipient countries (Erie and Streinz 2021). Despite these debates, there remains a surprising lack of a comprehensive visual representation of China’s global information system. What does the key mechanism of China’s global information system look like? Who are the main stakeholders? How might it affect dynamics in the artificial intelligence (AI) age?

This essay argues that China’s global information system involves a triangulation of China, the United States, and recipient countries. Much like ‘vines’ that spread by climbing (see Figure 2), Chinese tech companies have built a complex ecosystem comprising digital infrastructures, intermediary platforms, and sectional apps. Crucially, China’s digital expansion relies heavily on an information system dominated by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM), actively interacting with it, and embedding itself deeply into the digital geographies shaped by the social and technological conditions of recipient countries.

Rooted in Digital Hardware Manufacturing

China has followed a three-stage trajectory in developing its own digital ecosystem: from network infrastructure to mobile phone devices, and then to platform services. The outward expansion of Chinese tech companies dates to the early 1990s, when telecommunications equipment suppliers such as Huawei and ZTE entered international markets such as Russia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Initially, their overseas expansion was driven by constraints in the domestic market, as China’s information and communication technology (ICT) sector was dominated by foreign multinationals due to the government’s policy of ‘trading market access for technology’ (Wen 2020). It was not until 2001 that the Chinese Government’s ‘Going Out Policy’ actively encouraged Chinese ICT firms to expand internationally.

Another vital force has been mobile phone manufacturers. Fuelled by state campaigns such as ‘Made in China’ (中国制造) and ‘Created in China’ (中国智造), China has become a major supplier of mobile phones, ranging from shanzhai (山寨or ‘copycat’) phones to branded handsets, such as Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and VIVO (Zhao 2019). These budget-friendly devices, relying on grassroots innovation, appeal to working-class consumers across many developing countries due to their practical features and affordability. Thanks to China’s role as the ‘world’s factory’, Chinese hardware suppliers have laid the infrastructural foundations for the global expansion of digital platforms. In fact, to upgrade their position in the global value chain, Chinese hardware suppliers, from ICT firms to mobile phones, have expanded into data-driven business in pursuit of platform power.

Compared with hardware suppliers, Chinese internet platforms are latecomers. It was only in the early 2010s, driven primarily by the saturation of the domestic market, that major players such as Alibaba and Tencent began aggressively pursuing international markets. This outward expansion was motivated by the internal logic of financial capital accumulation, aiming for sustained revenue growth beyond saturated domestic markets. Today, Huawei, Alibaba, and Tencent have evolved into ‘ecosystem enterprises’ (生态企业), with a global network of data centres and cloud infrastructure (Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud), combined with computer and mobile phone devices (Huawei Phones), and platform services, including payment services (Huawei Pay and Ant Group), app stores (Huawei App Gallery and Tencent App Store), data analytics services (Huawei Analytics and Tencent Analytics), and online advertising (Petal Ads).

Drawing on their global networks of infrastructure, hardware devices, and applications, these tech giants are competing to expand their scale by acting as facilitators for smaller platforms to enter foreign markets. This strategy is often referred to as ‘borrowing a boat to go overseas’ (借船出海). Today, all major Chinese platforms and hardware suppliers have launched their own ‘Going Overseas’ initiatives. Moreover, they have formed their own ‘clusters’ (系)—affiliations with tech giants—by serving as start-up accelerators, knowledge providers, and financial investors. By 2023, Tencent and Alibaba had made 269 and 82 investments, respectively, in overseas tech start-ups. Through these investments, the giants can integrate start-ups into their infrastructure and services, combining vast amounts of data resources. Overall, leveraging China’s unique position as the ‘world’s factory’, its homegrown tech companies have built an expanding global platform ecosystem, comprising data infrastructure, intermediary services, and digital platforms. However, this description offers only a partial view of China’s digital expansion.

Climbing on the Shoulders of American Tech Giants

It is well known that Google and Facebook are banned in China. Less well known is that American big tech provides the key infrastructure for Chinese platforms to expand globally. Despite the popular narrative of Sino-US tech rivalry, the relationship between US and Chinese tech companies is more complex; they are more dependent than competitive. On the one hand, Chinese tech companies clearly depend on the GAFAM-led ecosystem in foreign markets. On the other, they adopt a creative strategy of ‘differentiation’ (差异化) to avoid competition with their US counterparts.

GAFAM controls the world’s dominant intermediary platforms, holding the power to set rules and coordinate between service providers and end users, while also operating infrastructural and sectional platforms (van Dijck 2021). Although China is the world’s major hardware supplier, it lacks intermediary platforms with genuine global dominance. For instance, almost all Chinese phone makers rely on the Android operating system and Google Mobile Services (GMS) for their devices to function. In 2019, when Huawei devices were banned from accessing GMS, the company saw a significant drop in global market share due to the unavailability of Google apps and services. Moreover, Chinese apps appear to depend significantly on intermediary services provided by Google and Facebook. According to a Shenzhen-based Tencent App Store manager whom I interviewed during my fieldwork in 2022–23, Chinese app developers typically allocate 90 per cent of their marketing budgets to advertisements and data analytics on Google and Facebook, which control most of the user data that power targeted advertising algorithms. Scholars have analysed how US big tech sustains ‘platform imperialism’ through technological disparities, users as a commodity, intellectual property, and symbolic hegemony (Jin 2015). These dynamics also apply to the relationship between US big tech and Chinese firms.

However, unlike the ‘anti-hegemony’ discourse promoted at the state level, Chinese tech companies generally refrain from direct competition with America’s big tech. To avoid head-on rivalry, they employ a strategy of differentiation, designing different products or targeting markets overlooked by US firms. For example, instead of competing with Amazon in the United States and the European Union, and before the China–India border conflict of 2020, Alibaba focused its investments in India and Southeast Asia. This international expansion echoes Huawei’s strategy of ‘encircling the cities from the rural areas’ (农村包围城市): avoiding competition in developed markets and targeting rural or less-contested regions instead. The world’s peripheral regions, which are often neglected by US big tech, provide Chinese tech companies with tremendous opportunities for international expansion.

Think Global, Act Local

China and the United States are the world’s digital powerhouses, but neither US nor Chinese platforms can simply impose their models on the territories they enter. As Star (1999) argued, infrastructure—like an information system—is both relational and ecological; it is embedded in other technologies, structures, and social arrangements. Likewise, the deployment of Chinese technologies must be embedded into recipient countries’ socio-technological conditions.

Indeed, during my fieldwork in Shenzhen in 2022–23, several Chinese tech expats rejected the neoliberal illusion that ‘the world is flat’, instead emphasising the fragmented geography—not only in digital terms, but also in human and natural terms. A user experience researcher at Tencent Games, for instance, revealed in an interview that product design depends on existing infrastructure. Payment methods for Tencent Game apps vary globally depending on local banking systems, which are further embedded in national identification systems. This example illustrates a ‘path dependency’: innovation is a highly localised process, shaped by space-specific factors, which are often the product of social, economic, cultural, and institutional conditions that have emerged from past technological and industrial trajectories specific to the place (Martin 2010).

Given the impossibility of generalising across different geographies, Chinese tech firms adopt a strategy of regionalisation—or localisation—tailoring their products to space-specific conditions. A senior manager at Transsion, the leading smartphone supplier in Africa, stated it clearly: ‘Different from Western companies that serve universal demands, our product is designed to meet specific regional demands. I would say our globalisation strategy is regionalisation.’ Studies have criticised the white male–dominated, urban-centric, and elite-oriented innovation models of high-tech companies, particularly those in the West (Lindtner 2020; Lu 2021). These high-tech companies, with core technologies and symbolic hegemony, tend to prioritise high-value-added sectors over low-end markets. Yet, based on their demand-driven grassroots innovation, Chinese phone makers have developed a place-based, context-conscious design approach, shaped by local culture, infrastructure, and social structure (Lu 2021). This approach, which is highly bottom-up and relies on a network of local partners, has proved highly effective in labour-intensive rural settings, which contrasts with Silicon Valley’s technological universalism. Drawing on this approach, Chinese tech firms have penetrated local communities and built extensive networks of connections on the ground over the past three decades, especially in areas left untapped by GAFAM.

Towards the Future

Several foundational works in Digital Media Studies have (mis)positioned China and the United States as equals in terms of their power in global cyberspace (Couldry and Mejias 2019; Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023; van Dijck 2021). This assumption is often taken for granted without critical scrutiny. As demonstrated above, China’s global information system reflects the country’s semi-peripheral status: while China has developed its own global platform ecosystem, it remains reliant on the infrastructural power of US big tech at the centre and tends to expand into areas with less competition at the periphery (Li 2021). The platform ecosystem is such a relational, ecological system—a product of global neoliberal capitalism. Chinese tech companies are embedded within, rather than challengers to, this global system.

Today, the world has entered a new wave of AI competition. As with previous technological revolutions, AI comes with promises of economic growth, social upgrades, improved productivity, and job creation. However, recent studies have revealed the structural convergence of AI and big tech (Ferrari 2023; van der Vlist et al. 2024). Drawing on their dominance in the platform ecosystem, big tech companies have formed their ‘clusters’ and accelerated AI initiatives—such as Open AI and Stability AI—by providing financial investment and cloud computing resources. Building on this, big tech can integrate all three components of the AI stack—infrastructure, models, and applications—into their cloud platform products and services. The industrialisation of AI, therefore, depends on these major companies, which control concentrated computational resources. In addition, scholars have shown how AI supply chains draw on existing geographical inequalities, much like traditional global production networks (Valdivia 2024). The creation of AI systems relies on several industries—including mining, chip manufacturing, data labelling, and data centres—which extract local resources and reproduce social and environmental struggles across the world, from Latin America to Africa. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that AI development will fundamentally transform the structure of the world’s production system, nor one’s position in it.

In China’s domestic market, tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, and Baidu now dominate the AI ecosystem. These firms benefit from enormous data reserves, digital platforms, and infrastructure, and—like their US counterparts—tend to exclude smaller players. The emergence of DeepSeek offers an alternative to Silicon Valley’s ‘bigger-is-better’ model, which has been marketed as ‘democratisation of technology’. However, it is important to note that DeepSeek remains embedded within the broader platform ecosystems of US big tech due to its lack of infrastructure and applications. To access global markets, DeepSeek has already been integrated into the technology stacks of Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon—once again underscoring China’s reliance on the infrastructural power of US tech firms when it ventures beyond its domestic market. In sum, the advent of AI reinforces existing global power structures, further concentrating resources and profits in the hands of the dominant technology players. The initial optimism surrounding AI’s potential to disrupt global power hierarchies now appears increasingly overstated.

This essay draws on the author’s paper ‘Digital Vines: Mapping China’s Network of Global Platform Ecosystem’, published in Information, Communication & Society in February 2025.