This article examines Chinese digital transactions and platform expansion in Southeast Asia through a “double-zoning” framework and highlights local agency in platform governance. Drawing on policy analysis, discourse analysis, and interviews conducted between 2018 and 2024, the study shows how Southeast Asian players respond to Chinese (foreign) platform expansion through differentiated regulatory treatment of domestic, regional, and international operators. Zone One aims at ecosystem building, and Zone Two represents strategic regulation of transnational platform power. Through cases such as Grab and the TikTok–Tokopedia partnership, the article argues that platform governance operates as a multilayered, relational assemblage shaped by states, firms, infrastructures, and social practices. Southeast Asia is a key site to examine regulatory experimentation and hybrid platform governance.
Haiqing Yu (Mon,) studied this question.