ABSTRACT
Different from digital political governance, digital business governance involves no written laws or legislations. The regulation of Internet users’ everyday practice is enhanced by the design features of the Internet services. This chapter uses TikTok as a case study to address how giant Chinese high-tech companies regulate Internet users’ everyday practice through the design of social media applications. As a social media application, TikTok is primarily designed to enable Internet users to share and view short videos. With a particular algorithm design that feeds users with customised content, TikTok becomes the most popular of its kind in the Chinese social media market, and its popularity is arguably based on these unique design features. In this way, a case study of TikTok underlines how high-tech companies engage in profitable digital business governance in the contemporary Chinese context. The outcomes of the discussion contribute to orchestrating thinking in the East Asian rising power by articulating the entangled relationships between Internet users, capitalism, and authoritarianism.
