ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 focuses on one of the key dimensions of Alibaba’s cultural profile: Its impact on people’s financial practices. First, it delineates the wide reach of Alipay, Alibaba’s enormously successful payment app, and how it became a core part of the basic financial infrastructure in China. It then discusses three incidents in the infrastructuralization of Alipay, foregrounding divergent visions and serious power struggles inside the state apparatus; these illuminate the often-contradictory imperatives between basic infrastructures and private platforms, as well as the increasingly acute conflicts between the state and its domestic Internet capital.
