Infrastructuralization of Tik Tok: transformation,power relationships,and platformization of video entertainment in China

Abstract

The article contributes to complicate the issue of ‘infrastructuralization of platform’ through an empirical study on China’s video streaming platform, Tik Tok. It aims at exploring how video streaming platform will transform in its infrastructural process and changing powering relationships between different actors in the platform ecosystem. After scrutinizing its technique features, business model, platform discourse, and power relationships with government, it argues that the infrastructural process of Tik Tok is not only embodied in its transformation from an entertainment community to an integrated platform, including services in e-commerce, online education, propaganda, and tourism, but more in its growing power of indispensability entrenched in our society. The main argument will be elaborated in two layers: first, Tik Tok attains its power on commercial monetization, content distribution, and acquisition of data sources through its infrastructural ambition of building a ‘video encyclopedia’ that can be salable, ranked, and archived. Second, Tik Tok has started to engage in fields of propaganda and tourism for city branding in alignment with central and local government. Tik Tok thereby wins its legitimacy in content management and government in turn plays as a role of stakeholder sharing the dividend from its contribution for state’s development goals. Therefore, the article not only fills in the gap of a case study on infrastructural video streaming platform but also intends to highlight changing power relationships between government and platform in the process of infrastructuralization.

Keywords

China digital platform infrastructuralization of platform power relationship video streaming

Introduction

Digital platforms has not only emerged as the new power shaping online behaviors and activities but also brought digital disruptions to the whole society. The penetration of economic, governmental, and cultural sectors has internalized various actors into the platform ecosystems and gradually turned into a hybrid form ‘platform society’ (Van Dijck et al., 2018). In this sense, scholars have shifted their attention from platform technical interfaces or affordances to a larger socio-economy context, considering what role will platforms play in dominating platform ecosystems and how should platforms be governed in a more integrated regulatory framework (Flew, 2018; Gillespie, 2018; Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Van Dijck et al., 2018). Particularly inspecting those ubiquitous and deeply embedded platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, Plantin et al. (2018) raised a question, can we really define them as infrastructures or platforms or simultaneously both? From this, it has opened up multi academic discussions on ‘infrastructuralization of platform’.

Previous studies on the issue have done remarkable work on empirical studies of infrastructural platforms serving as search engines, social networking or public transport (Chen and Qiu, 2019; Nieborg and Helmond, 2019; Plantin and De Seta, 2019; Plantin et al., 2018), but few deals with the cases as video streaming platforms. How will the video streaming platforms transform in their ‘infrastructural turn’ and in what area do they function as infrastructural services? In addition, the notion ‘infrastructuralization’ of platform resonates some scholars’ call for governmental intervention to regulate algorithms, data flow, and antitrust content of digital platforms as what they have done in physical infrastructures (Van Dijck et al., 2019). While ‘video sharing platforms function differently from search engines, raising the question whether they should be regulated as media companies or publishing houses’ (Van Dijck et al., 2019)? In China, state-market structure has always been a classical issue in political economy of communication. State plays a role as both regulator and supporter in developing digital economy so that the governmental and technological are deeply entangled resulting in a more complicated situation (Schneider, 2019). Thus, how we should recognize power relationships between platform, state and other stakeholders, users in an infrastructural optic? The evidence in China may launch new perspective for twisting the assumption that state may guarantee an inclusive future for platform ecosystem because of its capability in controlling high-tech platforms via powerful regulation or censorship.

In principle, the study attempts to contribute by proceeding with an empirical study of video streaming platform, which may deepen our understanding of transformations and power relationships in the theoretical issue of ‘infrastructuralization’ of platform. The rise of Tik Tok and the platformization of video entertainment in China provide ample cases to enrich our insights in examining transformations of video streaming platform and its ecosystem. Tik Tok originally existed as a short video community specializing in online entertainment. However, due to the excessive dependence of the platform on algorithms and the accusation of easy for teenagers to indulge in, Tik Tok was interviewed by the government department and criticized by the party-controlled media (The People’s Daily, 2018a). Henceforth, Tik Tok has readjusted their development objectives toward constructing ‘good life’ and began to cooperate with social institutions, universities, and so on, hoping to build the platform into a ‘video encyclopedia’ as the CEO Zhang Nan (2019) stated. It thereby unlocked its infrastructural turn and expanded services including ‘Wang Hong’ economy connecting with e-commerce, empowering traditional culture, online education, publicizing propaganda, and tourism. From the current results, this transformation not only conforms the expectations of the state and the public but also meets the needs of the platform’s own business interests. According to latest statistics from KrASIA (2019), DAUs (daily active users) of Douyin (domestic version of Tik Tok) and Tik Tok hit 320 million in July 2019, which occupies almost half of the Internet users in China.

Thus, the following questions warrant us to explore in depth: first, How the infrastructural process unfolds in Tik Tok metaphor of ‘video encyclopedia’? And how does its infrastructural ambitions underlying the rhetorical discourse relate to the monetized and data-driven logic entrenched in Tik Tok’s connective culture? Second, how does Tik Tok’s power relationships with state transform in its ‘infrastructural turn’, particularly compared with the situation that it was initially censored by the government? Last but not least, how the cases of Tik Tok contribute to ‘infrastructural turn’ of platform and to what extent will the infrastructural video streaming platform exert its influence on Chinese society?

As my study focuses on transformation and power, the analytical framework breaks into two parts: on one hand, I view Tik Tok, one of the video streaming platforms, as a subcomponent of ‘social media entertainment’ (Cunningham and Craig, 2019), demonstrating how the platform distinguishes from the logic of traditional creative industry, which needs to be understood from technological or commercial affordances emerging in the fields of social media studies and platform studies. I scrutinize the strategies of Tik Tok in China empowering the public sectors via its content selection and changing technological architectures to outline its transformation from an initial creative entertainment community. On the other hand, differentiate from studies of ‘social media entertainment’ adopt a creator optic, my study needs to address how platform extend its boundary in the platform ecosystem. Thus, the framework is also informed by ‘platformization’ (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Helmond, 2015; Nieborg and Poell, 2018), which refers to how political economy of creative industry change through the infrastructural extensions of platform burst into political, cultural, and other social sectors that affecting cultural production, circulation, and distribution. While existing scholarship usually investigates platformization process through the approaches of ‘datafication’ and ‘commodification’, it would be inappropriate to directly emulate the framework to analyze platform ecosystem in China. Different from the atmosphere that Western platforms are revered for free market and small government, China’s case should also involve national factors into the research framework, and become the third dimension beyond technology and business. For example, the infrastructuralization of WeChat has not only been marked as establishing an online monetary transaction system but also owe its success to the shaping of techno-nationalist regulation (Platin and De Seta, 2019). Chen and Qiu (2019) have also done fantastic work on studying infrastructuralization of DiDi through examining its labor-intensive process and relationships with power regulations, which inspires researchers on how to study the issue in complex Chinese Internet context. The article also collects and analyzes data based on multi-level methods including interviews, content analysis of industry reports, discourse of Tik Tok leader’s public speeches, and scrunitizing technique features and business models of platform. A total of 25 interviews we conducted from 2017 to 2018 involve various practitioners such as online celebrity, student user, algorithm engineer, product manager of promotional company, and directors of public media outlet.

In the article, I first discuss the shift from examining online intermediaries to broader societal concerns in platform studies and point out the lack of existing research and the necessity and possibility of doing research on ‘infrastructural turn’ of platform in China. Then, I analyze through the case of Tik Tok structured as follows: (1) transformation of Tik Tok from a creative entertainment community to an integrated platform; (2) how will Tik Tok reap power in commercialization, distribution, and acquiring data sources though its implied infrastructural ambitions revealed as ‘video encyclopedia’; and (3) how does Tik Tok collaborate with central and local government and its potential influence.

Platformization and infrastructuralization of platform

‘Platform’ emerged as a descriptive term for digital intermediary depends on four meanings in different contexts: computational, architectural, figurative, and political (Gillespie, 2010). For Internet and media studies, platform captured the researchers’ attention with the rise of ‘Web2.0’ (O’Reilly, 2005). In O’Reilly’s elaboration, Web2.0 companies rely on the Internet as a platform for producing, distributing, and circulating their products by harnessing the ‘collective intelligence’ of the audience, which means extending the architectural notion of platform to a technical intermediary concentrating on the connectivity, programmability, interactivity, and collaboration with the users or others form the third parties. Moreover, these interactions between different complementors and end users generate relevant data which are subsequent cleaning and modeling to calculate whether it will be profitable to optimize users’ attention sources, customize personal ads, or engage in the social media circulation. The process fundamentally transforms the operations of media industry and strategies of culture production, distribution, and circulation can be defined as ‘platformization’ (Nieborg and Poell, 2018).

As Nieborg and Poell (2018) addressed, three approaches such as business studies, software studies, and political economy contribute to the study of ‘platformization’. By learning from software studies, ‘infrastructure’ first met with ‘platform’. After a comprehensive comparison, Plantin et al. (2018) concluded that despite ‘platform’ and ‘infrastructure’ differ in scale and scope, they have more similarities in the age of digital super power as platforms become ubiquitous and traditionally nation-governed infrastructures become deregulated and privatized. Guided by software studies and understandings in functions of traditional infrastructure such as railway, scholars devoted attention on the crucial questions of what infrastructural service platforms allow the complementors access to the means of content circulation and then how the platforms reap benefits from the sides of ‘reaching out’ and ‘locking in’? Starting from this, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) are observed as infrastructural access to launch related studies as they are not only formatting or processing users’ online activities but also force the complementors’ business models and content distribution strategies to align with the platform’s data infrastructure, which thereby forms the technical properties to maintain platform’s monopolistic power and eventually grow up as a gatekeeper (Kitchen, 2014). For example, through messenger, Facebook owns a variety of stances to operate its infrastructural agenda and thus exert its influence globally (Nieborg and Helmond, 2019). In the name of initiative governing open data, Facebook in fact restricts app developers and users by ‘locking both groups into a landscape defined and controlled by Facebook’ (Plantin et al., 2018).

While efforts from software studies fill in the gap between platform technological interfaces and business models, with the continuous penetration of the platform into the social public domain, the explanation of political economy implications in a more complicated platform ecosystem seems insufficient. As the call from Van Dijck (2013), scholars should reconsider ‘online sociality’ in social media studies. Infrastructural platforms have started to penetrate existing social sectors such as public transport, healthcare, and education. To some extent, there have been no public space outside the super platform as the ecosystem has increasingly mingling with existing public institutions and predictable dependent on the private operational infrastructural services, including search engines, cloud computing, data analytics, app stores, video hosting, and social networking (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Accordingly, scholars have shifted their attention from examining affordance and technique architecture of online intermediaries to more extensive, cross cutting issues with social intruded fields. For example, online educational platforms have challenged traditional public educational administrations, concepts, and operations as a whole. Propelled by algorithmic mechanisms and their business models, they have rapidly altered the learning and teaching process and finally influence the equality of education in balancing people from different socio-economic contexts (Van Dijck et al., 2018).

Therefore, ‘infrastructural turn’ of platform have not merely stayed on emphasizing technique properties function similar as infrastructures, but is related more with indispensability and entanglement of platform in everyday life. Considering recent studies and industrial dynamics, ‘infrastructural turn’ can be extended into following enquiries: first, power relationships of platform ecosystem. As Plantin and Punathambekar (2019) mentioned in the special issue Digital Media Infrastructures in Media, Culture and Society, ‘an infrastructural optic helps us see how power relations between stakeholders and users shape how communication networks are imagined’ (p. 166). Second is the governance/regulation of infrastructural platform. The notion of infrastructuralization also contains an assumption that to what extent can private platforms subject to regulatory control as traditional infrastructure have been regulated as utilities? And as the private and public domains have been rapidly blurred, who will be responsible for the continuous outbreak problems in order to construct a platform for accountability (Van Dijck et al., 2019)? Third is the discourse of infrastructural platform. Super platforms now have adjusted their development goals and made statements as building ‘social infrastructure’. For example, Facebook articulates its enterprise operation with tenets of free reading and human connections and aims to build a community that is supportive, safe, informed, civic engaged, and inclusive (Rider and Wood, 2019); Alibaba intends to build an electronic world trade platform though Belt and Road Initiative and thereby realize ‘inclusive globalization’ (Vila Seoane, 2019). What will be the motivations and contradictions underlying the platforms appropriate connotations of those rhetoric as ‘social’ or ‘infrastructure’ would be a new focus in academic discussions. Previous studies in online video platforms, such as the researches on YouTube, the forerunner in this field, focus more on the issues of digital labor, online performance, and co-evolution between user-generated content (UGC) and professional generated content (PGC). While in the age of ‘infrastructural turn’, the questions related to the above three perspectives still remain to be explored further.

In China, the speed and scale of platformization is no less than that of the West. The fast development based on aspirations for building leading ICT infrastructure are also spreading throughout the nation, companies, and public, which rapidly evolve as techno-nationalist (Qiu, 2010). Chen and Qiu (2019) even coined the term of ‘digital utility’ to describe how DiDi, similar to Uber, working as a digital platform providing public transport service, transforms the old rental industry and becomes an indispensable tool for Chinese public transport. Despite most of the platform studies point to the ‘extractivist’ nature of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2016) in data exploitation and governmental intrusion to restrict online freedom of expression, striking findings of platform studies in China provide alternative responses to complicate the understandings. For example, while western citizens are sensitive to the privacy leakage of social credit system, Chinese people instead interpret it as a system promoting honest dealings in societal transactions (Kostka, 2019). In addition, governance on WeChat has not only been observed as omnipresent governmental regulation but also implied as a ‘Chinese model’ to govern the infrastructuralization of super platform in order to balance national and corporate interests (Plantin and De Seta, 2019). According to latest statistics (CNNIC, 2019), China’s short video users have grown up to 647 million by June 2019 and market size simultaneously reached 23 billion RMB in 2019. The extremely rapid development of the industry is traceable in part by exclusive technical filters, features, and various business models integrated with e-commerce, online education, and tourism, which would be unprecedented in its western counterparts. That is why we critically engage in the discussion by applying the case of Tik Tok to complicate the issues of infrastructuralization of platform and think about what does China mean for ‘platform society’ (Kloet et al., 2019).

Transformation of Tik Tok in China: from online entertainment community to integrated platform

Tik Tok, acting as an app for short video making and sharing, is used to create an online entertainment community since its inception. Video creators have all sorts of tools, filters, and Augmented Reality (AR) effects at their disposal to make their own videos or engage in various ‘challenges’ duplicating other users’ playing tactics. Instructed and organized by hashtags, actually consists of various ‘challenges’, creators easily search for the people who have common interest and feature themselves lip-synching, dancing, or doing a trick, always with 15-second-long clips set to music. Most of the users on the Internet tend to put a ‘cringe’ label on the content in Tik Tok, which means ‘so painful and embarrassing that a viewer can’t help but laugh’ (The Atlantic, 2018). Besides the public impression as an entertainment community, the real power make Tik Tok outstanding is its application in AI technology. Different from users’ habits in other social media platforms, users in Tik Tok navigate through videos by scrolling down like news feed, but not taping side to side. Zhang Yiming, CEO of Bytedance, declared that the company was not only working as an information aggregation and distribution platform, but more indicated as a technological company. He appreciated the algorithm-driven approach and believed that machine could perform better than humans in distributing information.

However, Tik Tok has not maintained such a position as an entertainment platform with a technological background, which stems from the dual pressures of government censorship and competition from business rivals. On one hand, Zhang’s pure statements on content entertainment and technology neutrality in China seem not to be endorsed by the government and public. Bytedance was punished by ‘unhealthy content’ in August 2018 (SARFT, 2018). Zhang’s rhetoric on technology and algorithm were also criticized by the state media such as Xinhua News Agency and The People’s Daily (2018b) and trigged the whole society in discussing how far can Douyin go without value beliefs and only depends on technology. On the other hand, Tik Tok was also accused by indulging adolescent excessive addition on the app without parental agreement. In addition, Tencent, one of three digital super giants in China, has restricted access to Tik Tok in the excuse of violation of its usage policies (Yang, 2019). Users in Tik Tok cannot share their favorite videos with their friends in WeChat through the web links directly. Under such circumstances, Tik Tok in China has begun to adjust its own strategy, not only to cope with the censorship of the government and accusation of the public, but also to expand its business scale to reach a wider range of users and fields that WeChat hasn’t engaged in.

China’s video streaming platforms’ ‘world leading technological and economic innovation is exemplified in e-commerce integrations’ (Cunningham et al., 2019). Tik Tok now has been connected with various e-commerce platforms and placed its creative atmosphere more under its monetized intentions. In alignment with e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and ‘Buy at Ease’ (Fang Xin Gou), the social media company has lured customers through its core services and introduced shopping features. It subsequently become popular as it not only makes it easy for the audience to watch and buy on one platform but also enables the creators to get a lot of income. With the help of e-commerce technology, Tik Tok in China has not been a creative community belong to young people in urban area, but also appeal to farmers in remote rural area making videos on their everyday life and promote their fresh products from farms, which also successfully fit its business into the state’s agenda of ‘Mass Entrepreneur and Innovation’ (Lin and Kloet, 2019).

In addition, according to the 2019 annual report by Tik Tok (2020), Tik Tok has been the largest platform for communicating knowledge, arts, and Chinese traditional culture. 14.89 million videos in knowledge communication has produced and reached almost 100,000 people in last year, of which teacher Chen’s chemistry class has been viewed over 130 million times. Moreover, 10 challenges on Chinese traditional culture have been viewed more than 100 million times, of which category on Beijing Opera is the most popular. Obviously, Tik Tok intends to build its image of online education and empower marginal cultural to cover the stereotype of silly videos, making tricks and pure entertainment. Many traditional cultural patterns are different from the previous ones under the reconstruction of digital and interactive video, attracting a large number of audiences, and redefining the labor mode, income source, and production rules of the cultural industry as well,

In a creator conference in Shanghai, Zhang Nan, the CEO of Douyin (Tik Tok’s Chinese version) clarified that social value of Tik Tok is to bring happiness to everyone and to let users get valuable information in every social domains from the platform. In her optimistic expectations,

Each video left by each user on the platform will become the scripts of human civilization, and eventually integrate into the video encyclopedia of human civilization. It will be the greatest significance for Tik Tok and short videos to exist. (Zhang, 2019)

The metaphor of ‘video encyclopedia’ has echoed the extension of Tik Tok into other public domains in online education, tourism, and e-commerce. It implies that if any institutions or individuals want to get involved in the above fields, whether it is to obtain necessary information or to promote their products, the platform is the carrier they cannot cross and must rely on. The dependence also reflected the fact that users’ data extracted from the process of consulting and searching will become ‘scripts’ integrated into the ‘video encyclopedia’, which make its database more and more ample and refined. Thus, Tik Tok is indeed launching its infrastructure process. First, it starts to enter into various public domains, rapidly attracts a large number of users, and is revising the original rules of these industries. Second, the narrative of its video encyclopedia contains its ambition to record, store, recycle, and commercialize user’s data in order to become omnipotent and make users have irresistible dependence.

Tik Tok as ‘Video Encyclopedia’

The metaphor of Tik Tok’s ‘video encyclopedia’ is obviously inspired by the operation mode of digital encyclopedia such as Wikipedia. As Wikipedia describes it, ‘the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit it’. In the understanding of Ms Zhang, users can enter the platform, watch their favorite videos, engage in the challenge games of interest, and gain knowledge and happiness, which are also free of charge. Tik Tok users can also revise videos, clip songs, and use various filters, virtual props, and special effects to redefine the original ‘Challenges’. However, compared to Wikipedia being a non-profit, volunteer-based platform, Tik Tok has a very strong centralization feature, which controls the production and distribution of video on the platform with algorithms and ‘challenges’. At the same time, the platform is also one of the most mature short video platforms in business models and monetization. Thus, how Tik Tok’s infrastructural process implies its extractive nature in datafication and commodification? What will be the tensions between the commercialized and popular ranking logic of platform and non-profit, crowdfunding and neutrality principles of encyclopedia?

Commercialized ‘video encyclopedia’

From the very beginning, the most central principle for digital platforms are underpinned by the notion of ‘free’ (Jenkins et al., 2013), but actually platforms obtain user’s data and attention sources, normally converted into ‘traffic’ in form of statistic and are always ‘monetized in the form of selling screen space for advertising and product promotion: refined demographic clusters of user data offered great potential for mass customization’ (Van Dijck, 2013). The rise of network economy enables online transactions to become a ‘frictionless’ exchange between sellers and buyers and ‘makes it possible for each item to get assigned its price and to find a new owner’ (Jenkins et al., 2013: 89). Although it is free to get access to the platform, use the technical features of the platform and participate in the ‘Challenges’ competition, the business model connecting the platform and e-commerce is doomed to the heavy profit nature of the platform, namely, the platform will associate users with recommended products through algorithms and creators they follow. On 16 January 2019, an e-commerce platform called ‘Buy at Ease’ (fang xin gou) which comes from ByteDance, the same mother company with Douyin, was connected to the platform, and creators were allowed to add the products from shops in ‘Buy at Ease’ to merchandise windows could be embedded into their videos. Profits from commodity sales would be shared by producers, platforms and creators in a certain proportion.

‘uncle Wen’s umbrella’ has been a representative example. Jianhua Zhang, a staff of Tik Tok, helps uncle Wen upload videos on his Youzhi Umbrella, a kind of traditional umbrella with Chinese aesthetics and crafts. In addition to selling goods, he also runs video tutorials on the platform to teach interested users to do-it-yourself (DIY) their own Youzhi Umbrellas. It increases his monthly sales as high as 100,000 RMB, and the maximum monetized value of a single video is 60,000 (Luo, 2019). The problem we encounter here is that how much role does the platform play in users’ e-commerce transaction? In other words, to what extent can the platform control the visibility and sales of the products without considering its quality and durability? Similarly, numerous online education companies in the production of speech slots, video lectures are not only publicizing for commercial products in business advertisements but also to find potential investors (36Kr, 2019). Because investors give part of their judgment power to the platform, believing that Tik Tok’s screening ability can provide them with more potential start-ups (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Screenshot of new products in Merchandised Window of ‘Uncle Wen’s Umbrella’

They all reveal that Tik Tok as ‘video encyclopedia’ may guarantee the properties of users in joyful scrolling video feeds and interact with creators they follow, but has also inextricably bounded with so much third parties of commercial interest. The knowledge in the video encyclopedia is available for sale, and it is always forged into commodities or commercial opportunities through guided performances and seamless algorithms, which can be frictionless recommended to the people who need it at any time. Moreover, by engaging in empowering user’s capability for monetization and serving as an intermediary between different business transactions, the platform reaps its power to expose, recommend, and regulate commercial transactions in addition to e-commercial profits.

Popular ranking ‘video encyclopedia’

Just as encyclopedias can be searched, Tik Tok also has search engines and ‘Trending Topics’ to offer trending hashtags for users. However, how does the neutrality and objectivity publicized by encyclopedia relate to the sharing logic and popularity rankings fostered by platform (Van Dijck, 2013)? Unsurprisingly, the ‘Trending Topics’ of the platform is closely related to the participation in the ‘Challenge’, the number of likes, comments, and shares, and the capability to bring goods. As an algorithmic engineer suggested, the popularity often depends different weights in proper sequence on your shares, comments, likes in the first round, while at the second round it refers to how closed you create with trending topics in Douyin, and once you pass the filtering mechanism, you will get more traffic support from platform (personal interview, 13 December 2018). The tacit negotiations steer users to undertake the strategic practices toward a production mode they know couldn’t let down their efforts. It will definitely stimulate the ‘producers of information to make their content, and themselves, recognizable to an algorithm’ (Gillespie, 2013).

When popular ranking system of ‘Challenge’ and Hashtags are deployed in the platform, Tik Tok embraces grassroots creativity but in fact controls the visibility of topics, videos, music, comments, and communities through most invisible algorithm and protocols. There are even many marketing professionals giving lectures by short videos to teach creators how to design their works so as to be better recognized and distributed by algorithm. The platform has added into a new algorithm mechanism to recollect and distribute the content used to be sank in algorithm hell. If the creator produces an extremely popular video, past content of him will also be reposted and recapture the attention of the algorithm. This compensation mechanism means not only an opportunity but also a compulsion for creators. As a creator who frequently uploads videos in Chinese traditional opera Kunqu reveals, she has to add elements of hot music and join in the challenge matches from time to time in hopes that Tik Tok will privilege traditional opera as well as these updates in the user’s feeds (personal interview, 13 December 2018).

Apart from grasping the power in controlling visibility of ‘Video Encyclopedia’, Tik Tok thereby has expanded its data source from the field of young people’s entertainment to a data chain throughout the whole social sectors via users’ online behaviors and frictionless transaction. The growing space of interconnected media has encouraged digital platforms to engage in the social areas that governments have neglected or have left unfunded: education, art projects, archives, and knowledge institutions (Van Dijck, 2013). As Zhang Nan Stated in her speech, the highest social value empowered by Tik Tok is to establish a ‘Video Encyclopedia’ that could store millions of users’ masterpieces – short videos, which will be archived, and continuously viewed, displayed in the future years of humankind. However, the ‘social value’ can also be equaled to the properties owned by the platform. The ‘raw’ data sources coined by Lisa Gitelman (2013) indicate that data are always ready prefigured through a platform’s gathering mechanisms. Tik Tok’s circulation efforts, in turn, calculate the raw data generated from the user engagement whether it is profitable for optimizing the content and then navigate the circle of ‘Challenges’ engagement-algorithm filter-content retention-data acquisition to map out the popularity in certain areas (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Category	Top account	Followers (million)	Likes (million)
Traditional culture	Mr Palace with Voice only	3.94	9.782
Basic education	Understand Math in Seconds	1.146	1.567
Life wisdom	Life Tactics	4.993	15.219
Popularization of science	Big Bang	2.576	10.953

Collaborations with central and local government

In China, technologies cannot be observed outside the political domain but have always been entangled with political power (Zhao, 2008). Despite the severe censorship in China still exists, just as the government did on Tik Tok previously, the power relationship between media and company cannot equate to fully control acceptance, particularly in digital era. In fact, the consolidation between digital platforms and state not only embodied in state’s active intervention on content regulation, but also including deepen cooperations with each other. Differentiate from disputes in Europe and America on the relationships between the infrastructuralization of platform and retreat governments, China’s government actually hopes the digital platforms to engage in ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’, which is embedded into an aspiration of ‘cultural empowerment’ in its ‘Internet Plus’ agenda (Keane, 2016; Keane and Wu, 2018). ‘Plus’, which is highlighted in the national strategy ‘Internet Plus’, actually refers to enable the Internet companies intrude into the social domains. It was also stated in 19th report on the work of government as ‘speeding up the “Internet Plus”’ in all sectors of the industry’, including ‘Internet Plus Education’ and ‘Internet Plus content construction’ (The State Council, 2019).

After the punishment by governmental departments, Tik Tok has adjusted its slogan from ‘Creative Community for Cool’ to ‘make your day’. Its Chinese translation (Ji Lu Mei Hao Sheng Huo) conforms to the new main contradiction of Chinese socialism proposed by the government, named ‘the contradiction between people’s growing needs for a good life and unbalanced and inadequate development’. The changed slogan suggests that Tik Tok empowers to construct ‘good life’ for users in its iteration, while also serves for alleviating the contradictions in Chinese Socialism. Since then, Tik Tok starts to invite public institutions identified either as political official accounts or enterprise official accounts to enroll in the platform. By means of strength in content distribution and promotion, Tik Tok allows top tier online celebrities to engage in these institutions in order to enable them to disseminate government affairs, promote cities images, and sell unknown agricultural products and so on. In the past half year, there were more than 2800 political accounts established publishing almost 100,000 videos which has received 5000 billion views (Guang Ming Online, 2018). People’s Daily, owned by state party accounts for 7 in the list of Top20 likes of short videos in Tik Tok. Most of these videos involve the official media’s interpretation of the National Day, the unrest in Hong Kong, and the lives of border guards.

The transformation cannot be simply recognized as government utilize Tik Tok to disseminate political propaganda, but more significant in unveiling governmental or public institutions has been gradually dependent on social media platforms from the other perspective. A surprised thing occurred that CCTV News, the national news broadcasting program shows every night at regular time, specially customized short videos for Tik Tok to communicate with netizens in humorous language after the end of show. It indicates that even if it is most official, orthodox program must reform its own form to adapt to the time, language, and performance of Tik Tok when the platform become the main distribution channel for people’s daily access to information.

In addition, Tik Tok initially revitalizes the tourism industry in China’s non-coastal regions through applying ‘Wang Hong’ economy and collaborating with local governments. For a long time, the focus of China’s economic layout has been on the southern coastal areas, and the development of the Internet has also been most prosperous in Tier 1 cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhou). According to Tik Tok’s official report (2019), through the joint efforts by the platform and local governments, many tourism cities and remote, impoverished towns have gone viral and even forged several online celebrity cities, such as Xi’an and Chongqing. Xi An, a northwestern city in China, has been the most attractive city in Tik Tok largely due to clips of outstanding performance by a Tumbler (Bu Dao Weng) actress. The Tumbler performance by the actress Feng Jiachen has been cut into various short video clips in ‘Challenges’ of ‘Sleepless City in Tang Dynasty’ (大唐不夜城), attracting 2.3 billion views and numerous people who want to witness the charm of the ‘Sleepless City’. The evolution of UGC has nurtured a sustainable business model in China entitled ‘Wang Hong’ economy in recent years (Tse et al., 2018). ‘Wang Hong’ is also interpreted as ‘influencer’ who connotates its capability in influencing fans’ opinions in cultural behaviors and consuming preference. It not only serves for a leading business model in constructing digital China in network economy (Hong, 2017), but in the case reveals a greater power that influences the city image and tourism industry. Currently, tourism in China has been popular with a ‘Clock In’ (Da Ka 打卡) culture blossomed by Tik Tok, which means you have to take perfect moments snap at an Internet famous site. It suggests that tourism in the age of video entertainment has less relevance with deep, personalized cultural experience in the masses’ version, but is more connected to photos, videos and subsequent performance, interactions in social media platforms. That is why the local tourism bureau also has to made the actress Feng Jiachen appear in various tourist attractions in Xi’an, playing with dolphins or taking photos with terra cotta warriors in order to attract visitors to ‘Da Ka’ more places in Xi’an. In this sense, ‘Wang Hong’ economy promoted by social media platform in China is not only a ramification derives from social media entertainment, but develops as a new economic dynamic for revitalizing local Real economy (Cunningham et al., 2019).

In this sense, infrastructural process of Tik Tok is not only limited to the data or commercial logic of the platform itself, but also endorsed by the central and local government. Since the platform adjusted its own strategy, more and more state-owned institutions and universities have navigated in-depth cooperation with the platform. The state no longer punished the platform for content issues, and the state-owned official media have not raised a wave of social criticism of Tik Tok in public opinion so far. Throughout the history of the relationship between Tik Tok and the government, government in China not only serve as a content regulator, but more inclined to be one of stakeholders of platform. In other words, the state urges the commercial platform contributes to the development of governmental goals for exchanging its legitimacy of data acquisition, content reliability, and prosper profit growth. One problem we encounter here is that in a remarkable inversion of common hierarchies, the administrative controls imposed on science and technology innovation by the country and society are gradually giving way to the operating rules of technology companies based on algorithmic mechanisms, data-driven, and proprietary business models (Caplan and boyd, 2018). Moreover, as the study theoretically explores the possibility of government involvement in this kind of infrastructural platform, China’s reality reveals that although the platform is under the strict control of the state, they may form an alliance as far as it is necessary.

Conclusion

Through our analysis of Tik Tok’s technique features, exclusive business model, platform discourse, and power relationships with central and local government in China, it will not be difficult to find that Tik Tok has transformed from an online entertainment community to an integrated platform including expanding services in e-commerce, online education, cultural empowerment, propaganda, and tourism, which has further evolved into a rhetorical discourse of ‘Video Encyclopedia’.

The infrastructural process of ‘video encyclopedia’ has not only embodied in its penetration into various social sectors, but more importantly, it unfolds the acquisition of platform power and change of power relations and induces individuals, institutions, and government organizations all follow the rules of the platform and gradually become dependent on it. Thus, our main arguments are divided into two layers: first, ‘video encyclopedia’ is actually operated by the principles such as salable, popular ranking, and data storage underlying its ostensible promise for building a non-profit, searchable, neutral platform space. The real intention of the platform video encyclopedia is to establish a database covering all kinds of social information fields, and make it have the capability of monetization through the connection with the third parties in order to grasp more abundant data resources and absolute power in commercial bargaining and controlling visibility of video content; second, infrastructuralization of platform in China is applauded by state instead of strict regulation. Through the alignment with central government and joint collaborations with local government, Tik Tok wins its legitimacy in content management and government in turn plays as a role of stakeholder sharing the dividend from its contribution for constructing ‘good life’.

In the study of Chinese social media platforms, scholars emphasized more on creators’ problematic working conditions under state-based intervention and censorship (Cunningham, 2018; Cunningham et al., 2019; Gillespie, 2018). However, more complicated power relationships between state and social media platform have been unfolded in infrastructural process of Tik Tok. Chinese government on one hand forces the digital platform take up the social responsibility and serve for the state’s development goals; on the other hand, it deregulates data acquisition of platform and ignores the social norms of knowledge, culture, and information exchange have been redefined by digital super power. In an era of information flow and fuzzy borders, the state may be able to control, regulate, and filter the information on social media. However, in some areas where social media is more specialized than traditional institutions, the collaboration between state institutions and technology giants has become an inevitable trend. State and government are thus transformed from role of regulators to a stakeholder of the platform, hoping to make the platform serve for the national interests spontaneously through regulatory concessions on the use of enterprise data and the expansion of business territory. A more urgent problem here is that if the standpoint of major digital platforms in China is to serve for national interest and expand data and commercial landscape of their own enterprises, where is the position vacant for users and whether the mode of collaboration will conflict with the public interest? It warrants us to study further on mechanisms, dynamics, and interactions between different actors in the ecosystem of infrastructural platform and think about intensively on what China means for increasingly blurring platform and society.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The author wishes to thank the funding from OAL Mobility Scheme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, which supports the research for this article.

ORCID iD

Zongyi Zhang

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