Infrastructures for sovereignty: Digital platforms in everyday life

This chapter demonstrates how digital platforms can be utilised as a critical terrain to examine practices of digital sovereignty in China. The rapid development of digital platforms has led to their deep integration into our everyday life. As platform companies’ influence grows, governments concern over sovereign control has grown. China has been an active champion of digital sovereignty in the sense that the state should wield supreme authority over its digital territories. Previous scholarly attention has predominantly framed practices of digital sovereignty in China as a form of top-down oppression. Using Giddens’ insights on ontological security, this chapter proposes two complementary viewpoints that may diversify our comprehension of sovereignty practices in the era of platformisation. First, the platform industry has been leveraged to facilitate the state to realise its responsibilities to citizens, for example, improving public services. This way, the state gains ontological security as a supreme power. Second, with the capabilities of digital platforms and a domestically engineered platform ecosystem, territorialisation can be achieved through users co-configuring a national habitus with platforms, bordering a national space through everyday practices. Therefore, the practices of digital sovereignty emerge from dynamic interactions among the state, the platform industry, and citizens.