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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Elaine J. Yuan (2024) studied this question.
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