The Political Economy of Live Streaming in China: Exploring Stakeholder Interactions and Platform Regulation

Abstract

Watching online videos provides a major form of entertainment for internet users today, and in recent years live streaming platforms such as Twitch and Douyu, which allow individual users to live stream their real-time activities, have grown significantly in popularity. Many social media websites, including YouTube and Facebook, have also embedded live streaming services into their sites. However, the problem of harmful content, data misuse, labour exploitation and the burgeoning political and economic power of platform companies is becoming increasingly serious in the context of live streaming. Live streaming platforms have enabled synchronous interactions between streamers and viewers, and these practices are structured by platform companies in pursuit of commercial goals. Arising out of these interactions, we are seeing unpredictable streaming content, high-intensity user engagement and new forms of data ownership that pose challenges to existing regulation policies. Drawing on the frameworks of critical political economy of communication and platform regulation studies by Winseck, Gillespie, Gorwa, Van Dijck, Flew and others, this thesis examines regulation by platform and regulation of platform in a Chinese context. The thesis asks how Chinese live streaming platforms control and mould communicative activities through their proprietary algorithms, contracts and policies, and examines how multiple stakeholders work together to regulate the platforms in order to defend and maintain the public interest. To examine these issues, the historical transformation of live streaming in China, the role of the state and live streaming regulation and the complexity of the platformisation have all been explored in detail through the lens of the selected theoretical frameworks. The thesis concludes with some reflections on contemporary platform studies and recommends that future researchers take a more holistic view that explains the complexity of the cultural and political structures underpinning the platform ecosystem. It points out that exploring platform regulation in the context of Chinese live streaming can contribute to the existing body of platform theory and, in that process, ‘de-Westernise’ existing platform regulatory studies.