![]() Would-be adulterers also make use of WeChat to find extramarital lovers. The app affords more contact with the outside world for otherwise-isolated villages, but not all contact with strangers has brought about positive economic and social changes. Using the concept of strangership, we argue ethical ambiguity surrounds WeChat’s arrival. This article addresses this lacuna by presenting ethnographic data gathered in the remote mountains of Xishangbanna in Yunnan Province. However, research into WeChat sociality remains largely focused on the cities, and this urban bias obfuscates the social experiences of using WeChat for the vast number of people who still reside in rural regions. Armed with this highly versatile app, users can now pay their bills, hail taxis, order food, book hotels, and even give alms to roadside beggars. It has since become a seemingly indispensable part of everyday life in China. We conclude by inquiring whether this emerging techno-nationalist model could be a plausible platform regulation in the future.ĭeveloped in 2011, WeChat integrated a digital wallet function two years later. Finally, we analyze the specific role of the WeChat Pay service in establishing a new monetary transaction standard. Drawing on the results of the analysis of technical documentation, business reports, as well as observations and interviews, we first present WeChat as both a platform and an infrastructure, and then we contextualize WeChat in the history of ICT infrastructure and the development of the internet in China. ![]() Moreover, our findings show that the infrastructuralization of the WeChat platform model in China is shaped by markedly techno-nationalist media regulations and an increasingly overt cyber-sovereignty agenda. Through the case study of the Chinese social media application, WeChat, we argue that WeChat is an example of a non-Western digital media service that owes its success first to its platformization and then to the infrastructuralization of its platform model. Google and Facebook) are typically described as digital platforms, yet these actors increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market power. In the current research on media and communication, Western internet companies (e.g. ![]()
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