The rapid growth of the internet in China has been propelled by the Chinese government’s push to develop the country’s information infrastructure and its tight control over the internet. The most recent stage of internet development in China, however, has been driven by a three-way dynamic between the State, internet companies, and international finance capital. This relationship has yielded three internet giants—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—that stand at the apex of the internet economy in China. They also rival their US counterparts like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, on several key measures. We examine annual reports and other financial documents to better understand these three companies’ character as ‘capitalist enterprises’ and the tight nexus that links them to international investment banks, venture capital funds, and other foreign investors. While these processes are now fundamentally shaping ‘the Chinese internet’, they have not yet been adequately explored in the scholarly literature, we argue.

In the 2000s, China and Russia emerged as outspoken actors with global ambitions. To communicate their status aspirations, both countries introduced a range of nation-branding institutions and initiatives. Global Internet governance – the design and administration of Internet technology and related policymaking – is among the domains where China and Russia have asserted their national brands. The Chinese and Russian governments co-advance the brand narrative of ‘Internet sovereignty’ in opposition to perceived technological and governance hegemony of the United States. Given the power that private online intermediaries wield in the political economy of the Internet, national digital media champions, China’s Baidu and Russia’s Yandex, have been integral to their countries’ Internet branding efforts. The article examines how China and Russia have forged a public–private relationship with respective digital media champions in the context of building and branding an Internet sovereignty agenda.

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We examine and compare data and privacy governance by four China-based mobile applications and their international versions: Baidu, Toutiao and its international version TopBuzz, Douyin and its international version TikTok, and WeChat. Together, these four applications represent popular Chinese apps branching into diverse overseas markets such as Europe, Brazil, North America, and Southeast Asia. We first present an overview of the ownership, functions, business models and strategies of the reviewed apps. To study the app's interface design, we employ the walkthrough method to examine privacy features during the account registration and deletion stages in app usage. Lastly, we conducted content analysis of the terms of service and privacy policies to establish the app's data collection, storage, transfer, use, and disclosure measures. Our analysis showed variations across apps and within the Chinese and international-facing versions in their data and privacy governance in app design and policies. Baidu has the most unsatisfactory data and privacy protection measures, while ByteDance's TikTok/Douyin and TopBuzz/Toutiao offer more comprehensive user protection from different jurisdictions. Moreover, this paper highlights the role of platform owners (e.g., Google and Apple) in gatekeeping mobile app privacy standards and the role of the state in imposing a data protection framework on overseas versions of China-based mobile apps.

Background China, with a population of 802 million internet users, a handful of the world’s largest internet companies, and an unfolding Social Credit System (SCS), is often criticized for exerting its data power to surveil and discipline its population. Analysis This article first provides a historical and situated analysis of the SCS as a part of China’s informatization and datafication processes. It then highlights problems in the current legal and regulatory data-protection framework and discusses the self-regulation practices of the private sector. Conclusions and implications  Overall, this case study provides a historical and contextualized understanding of China’s SCS and related big data developments and assesses the implications of these development for the globalizing Chinese internet, technology companies and the Chinese public.Contexte Avec une population de 802 million d’utilisateurs d’Internet, avec quelques des plus grandes sociétés Internet du monde, et une Système de Crédit Sociale (SCS) en pleine développement, La Chine est souvent critiqué pour utilizer son pouvoir de données pour surveiller et discipliner sa population. Analyse  Tout d’abord, cet article fournit une analyse historique et située de la SCS comme partie des processus de informatisation et datafication de la Chine. Ensuite, il souligne les problèmes du cadre juridique et régulatoire actuel en matière de protection des données et examine les pratiques d’autorégulation du secteur privé.Conclusions et implications  En global, cette étude de cas fournit une compréhension historique et contextualisée du SCS chinois et de l’évolution du Big Data, et évalue les implications de ce développement pour l’Internet chinois en pleine mondialisation, les entreprises technologiques et le public chinois.