Wanghong, short for 'wangluo hongren' (Chinese for 'people who have gone viral on the internet'), is often used as the vernacular term for influencers and microcelebrities in China, which are ...increasingly defined by their acute ability to convert internet viewer traffic to money with diverse economic models in its contemporary context of wanghong economy. This essay historicises the emergence of wanghong economy in which both the meanings and practices of wanghong are being produced and reproduced and it examines how wanghong economy's developing trajectory and economic models are underpinned by the strategic expansion of major domestic platform companies. Using the leading wanghong incubator, Ruhnn Holding Limited, as a case study, this essay deconstructs the profitable model of e-commerce wanghong that is widely adopted so far as a prototype across the wanghong industry. Such value chain integrates advertising and e-commerce and it further connects two powerful platforms, Weibo and Alibaba, by facilitating a transplatform business ecosystem that benefits, and is promoted by, both companies.
Although existing studies have connected the emergence and development of e-commerce with infrastructure, culture, and regulations, we approach technological and platform acceptance from the ...perspective of legitimacy building. In our study, legitimacy is categorized into market, relational, and social legitimacy, and the link between each type of legitimacy and acceptance is explored. We select the case of Alibaba and argue that Alibaba was especially competent in building legitimacy. Alibaba's continuous efforts to build legitimacy facilitated platform evolution despite its exposed weakness in intellectual property rights. These efforts rendered Alibaba as a de facto standard e-business model. This research suggests that any firm that wants market acceptance for its platform or e-commerce technology should focus more on building legitimacy among stakeholders than on anything else.
•Legitimacy building is considered critical for e-commerce development.•We study the legitimacy building through the case of Alibaba's e-commerce platform.•Market legitimacy is crucial to break the bottleneck in the business model.•Relational legitimacy is obtained when a firm is recognized to be trustworthy.•Social legitimacy requires firms or technologies to serve the benefits of society.
Platform monopoly has attracted wide attention from politicians and the public.. The European Commission has made unremitting efforts in platform antitrust enforcement in the last decade, but ...together with antitrust investigations, the stock prices of platform giants like Google and Facebook keep breaking their highest points. At the end of 2020, the Chinese government also started antitrust investigations towards platform companies like Alibaba. In contrast, the stock price of Alibaba crashed and lost more than half of its market value. By analyzing their CAR, we proved that the stock performance of Alibaba is significantly worse than Google after their most serious antitrust investigations. The difference reflects investors' different expectations of the European Commission and China's antitrust enforcement. A noteworthy problem then comes out: while the Chinese government is seriously strengthening platform antitrust and putting forward reforms in platform regulation, is there any authority that is able to effectively regulate the international platform giants and maximize the welfare of their users worldwide?
This research, based on a review of secondary information, explores how the government of China and the country's leading technological enterprises are working together to develop infrastructure for ...next-generation digital technologies, e.g. artificial intelligence, cloud computing, quantum computing, 5G networks, navigation satellites, and fiber optic cables; to establish technical norms and standards; and to provide services and digital content, e.g. digital messaging applications, mobile payment systems, and e-commerce platforms, to emergent markets; as well as how digital corporate giants of China like Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, ZTE, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, and Tencent have been challenging the prevailing status quo. Beijing seeks to assert its dominant role in world affairs through the Digital Silk Road (DSR) to globally influence and control a sizable part of the digital economy. The DSR has significant potential for enhancement of digital interdependence with the underdeveloped and some advanced economies by bridging the gap created by the absence of a critical infrastructure of global digital technology. There is no viable competitor to the DSR's exciting and long-term vision of a globally connected digital future for facilitating mutual growth and collaboration that will ultimately push for a dependency of other countries on DSR under the Belt and Road Initiative.
The rapid development of technology and communication solutions has resulted in a fundamental shift in international trade in general and it has provided a great foundation for significant growth of ...e-commerce industry. Multinational companies in online business aim at internationalization strategy from the beginning in order to remain competitive. Despite the interconnected world that thanks to the internet seems borderless, there are country and culture specifics influencing the characteristics and features of e-commerce key players. The paper analyses current trends and development in online shopping environment and observes global expansion of companies that are leaders in presented industry. The statistical evidence supports the increasing trend of e-commerce as well as new modes of consumers’ behaviour; most recently influenced by coronavirus pandemic in 2020 that forces a change of lifestyle and strengthens the importance of the online industry. The analysis focuses on e-commerce in China as an appropriate example in cross-border online shopping due to its immense development on diverse Chinese market and innovative solutions. The case of Alibaba Group, the top global e-commerce company and the only foreign company in top 5 of Czech B2C e-commerce market, is highlighted in regards to its large-scale business structure and advanced services being offered to its customers.
The digital Silk Road, which involves the internationalization of Chinese internet firms across countries that are party to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has remained underexplored in the ...literature. This paper employs a poststructuralist discourse theory to analyze one of the most important Chinese internet firms, Alibaba, and its initiative for global trade: the electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP). The article argues that the eWTP is a counter-hegemonic discourse that, based on the economic and technological power of Alibaba and its support of the BRI, attempts to globalize a China-centered and privately led global digital trade order to challenge the previous wave of US-led globalization. However, the eWTP has at least five contradictions. First, despite its criticisms of globalization, the initiative remains essentially neoliberal. Secondly, it sidelines inherent tensions with the Chinese state-centric internet governance model. Thirdly, it excludes some social identities and makes utopian promises. Fourthly, it is unclear to what extent it really will be inclusive. Finally, unless carefully hedged, it might entrap partner countries in new types of problematic digital dependence.
Despite the prominent role played by B2B electronic platforms (E-platforms) in assisting exporters, extant research pays scant attention to how, and under what conditions, exporters can deploy B2B ...E-platforms to enhance their sales performance. Drawing on signaling theory, we examine how the deployment of E-platforms affects export sales performance via foreign buyer contact. We also explore the moderating roles of institutional environment and export growth strategy. We test our model with a dataset composed of a survey and archival data on Chinese exporters that subscribe to Alibaba.com. The findings indicate that E-platform use positively affects foreign buyer contact and, in turn, export sales performance. This positive effect is even more substantial when exporters originate from regions with less-developed market intermediaries or when the institutional distance between the home and host countries is greater. In contrast, this effect becomes weaker when the level of export market diversification or product diversification is higher.
Biological invasions have become a worldwide problem, and measures to efficiently prevent and control invasions are still in development. Like many other parts of the world, China is undergoing a ...dramatic increase in plant invasions. Most of the currently 933 established (i.e., naturalized) plant species, of which 214 are categorized as invasive, have been introduced into China for cultivation. It is likely that many of those species are still being traded, particularly online, by plant nurseries. However, studies assessing whether naturalized and invasive species are currently being traded more or less than nonnaturalized aliens are rare. We extracted online‐trade information for 13,718 cultivated alien plant taxa on 1688.com, the largest website for domestic B2B in China. We analyzed how the presence in online‐nursery catalogs, the number of online nurseries that offerred the species for sale, and the product type (i.e., seeds, live plants and vegetative organs) differed among nonnaturalized, naturalized noninvasive, and invasive species. Compared to nonnaturalized taxa, naturalized noninvasive and invasive taxa were 3.7–5.2 times more likely to be available for purchase. Naturalized noninvasive and invasive taxa were more frequently offered as seeds by online nurseries, whereas nonnaturalized taxa were more frequently offered as live plants. Based on these findings, we propose that, to reduce the further spread of invasive and potentially invasive plants, implementation of plant‐trade regulations and a monitoring system of the online horticultural supply chain will be essential.
摘要
生物入侵已经成为一个全球性难题，而涉及其预防和控制的有效措施却尚未完善。和世界上其他国家或地区一样，中国正经历着植物入侵快速增长的阶段。目前，中国已经有933种已成功建立野外种群的(即已归化的)外来植物，大部分外来植物主要是以栽培为目的而被引进的，而其中214种已被列为入侵物种。大部分归化植物可能仍然通过苗圃进行交易，特别是线上交易。然而, 目前尚无相关研究能够评估归化非入侵植物和入侵植物的线上交易规模是否已经超过或落后于非归化植物的交易规模。本研究在中国最大的B2B交易平台(1688.com)上对13,718个外来栽培植物进行线上交易信息的收集。对不同入侵状态(即非归化、归化非入侵、入侵)下外来栽培植物的差异性进行了分析，包括进行线上交易的几率、线上苗圃的数量、销售的商品类型(即种子、活体植株、营养繁殖器官)。研究发现，归化非入侵植物和入侵植物的线上交易可能性是非归化植物的3.7–5.2倍。归化非入侵植物和入侵植物在线上平台上更容易以种子的方式被交易，而非归化植物则多以活体植株进行交易。基于以上研究成果，本文建议进一步实施植物贸易相关政策并建立线上园艺贸易供应链的监督机制, 以期限制入侵植物和具有潜在入侵风险的外来植物在中国的进一步传播。.
Research Question: Open innovation and the open business model exaggerate complexity (a transaction cost) in addition to the realization of emergence and its lock-in. Within a short period, Alibaba ...has become one of the global top e-commerce companies with several open innovation business models. Our research question was: “How could Alibaba become a global top e-commerce company in China in such a short time?” Research Method: We chose a deep interview method, participatory observation, and meta-analysis to answer this research question. Research Result: Alibaba has applied global, creative e-commerce business models through open innovation in a short time. In addition, it has overcome complexity—i.e., the cost of open innovation and the force that breaks down a company—through an open innovation-friendly culture. This is a “Jack-Ma style consumer confidence and new Guanxi culture”, a new and strong Chinese corporate culture. Alibaba has also undergone the expansion of its open business model feedback loop platform. This study investigated the expanded open business model feedback loop platform, the continuously strengthened open-innovation-friendly culture, and complexity, with the latter being the cost of open innovation, which was controlled by an open-innovation-friendly culture and open business model feedback loop.
Based on experiences in China where rural development has reputedly been accelerated through use of its e-commerce platforms to create Taobao Villages, Chinese digital conglomerate Alibaba has sought ...to export its vision of "inclusive globalisation" to other economies in the Global South. Its initiatives intended to reduce inequality by specifically supporting small enterprises. Some research has already charted its multi-dimensional Electronic World Trade Platform approach. However, its more narrowly-focused Digital Villages approach, currently being implemented in Latin America, has still not been analyzed. Drawing on data from interviews and documentary sources, this article analyses the activities of Atomic88, an Alibaba subsidiary in Mexico, which (initially) focused on digitally-enabled development of small enterprise. It finds that Alibaba's nascent position in an e-commerce market dominated by US and Latin American platforms led it to follow a quite different path from the Chinese Taobao Village Model. It sought out the action areas - training and consultancy - that would not directly compete with incumbents, and worked as an indirect facilitator of local actors, rather than directly intervening. While short-term inequality-reduction impact of Alibaba's approach could be called into question, what it has done is build relationships with key digital economy stakeholders in Mexico. These show signs of providing valuable stepping stones toward a larger and more direct presence of Alibaba in the Mexican market.
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