Think all e-commerce platforms are the same? Think again. In this article, the author’s turn to fashion to explore China’s economic and cultural expansion in the Global South, zooming in on examples from Kenya. Check out the abstract below, and then click through to the main article to learn more:
China as data coloniser? rethinking cultural production, cultural mediation, and consumer agency on Kenyan and Chinese e-commerce platforms
Peer-reviewed research by: Tommy Tse, Yin Zhang, and Nanne Van Noord
Has China become a neo-colonizer, exporting its cultural and economic power to the world based on its agenda of building soft power? Existing scholarship on neocolonialism and data colonialism largely focuses on how China’s infrastructural expansion and increasingly platformised cultural sectors can achieve its ambitious platformised cultural sectors overseas. Yet, how China’s cultural power is manifested, negotiated, or resisted in people’s daily lives in a South–South setting remains under-researched and under-theorised. This article uses everyday fashion in Kenya as a case study to investigate China’s cultural and economic power expansion in the Global South. We examined how cultural differences are negotiated and mediated on two Chinese(-invested) e-commerce platforms. Through focus groups and platform walkthrough method, our findings serve to enrich existing theories of cultural production–platform relationships applicable in the study of various cultural and creative sectors, to offer new understandings of how symbolic, sociopolitical and cultural meanings of fashion are constructed through divergent platform affordances, and to reveal the various forms of cultural negotiations and resistance in different contexts, multiplying our frames of reference.
Click here to read the full open-access article.
This article is licensed through the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License.
Knowledge Stitch amplifies academic research. If you have research you would like readers to check out, click here to suggest your work.
Full Reference //
Tse, T., Zhang, Y., & Van Noord, N. (2024). China as data coloniser? rethinking cultural production, cultural mediation, and consumer agency on Kenyan and Chinese e-commerce platforms. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 0(0).