The aff’s portrayal of China as a threat only perpetuates further capitalist practice. The desire to restructure the geopolitical economy plays into the capitalist mindset of endless growth and competition.

Alami and Dixon (2021) emphasise that contemporary state capitalism is best conceptualised systemically: as a world-historical, variegated and mutually reinforcing dynamic of proliferating state economic interventions aimed at fulfilling economic and (geo)political goals. The intensifying rivalry between the United States and China crucially connects state capitalism with geopolitics. China's party-state has deepened its expansive reach across its political economy as competition has intensified, both through the growing share of SOEs in the economy and in deepening control over the private sector (Liu and Tsai, 2021, Pearson et al., 2021). Meanwhile, the United States has moved in a similar direction, albeit within pre-existing ideological constraints of its political system. Starrs and Germann (2021) observe sweeping changes in (1) the US tariff regime, designed to target Chinese imports in particular; (2) the inward investment regime, aimed restricting Chinese firms’ access to high-tech US companies; and (3) export regulations, through the use of technology export bans to target Chinese firms like ZTE and Huawei. Baltz (2022) similarly discerns heightened local procurement requirements enacted through the reformed implementation of the Buy American Act, alongside evidence for a growing consensus on the value of state-led investments in strategic technology development and mission-oriented development projects in areas such as supply-chain reshoring and 5G provision. Despite these profound shifts, the depth of Sino-US economic integration renders the cost of complete decoupling prohibitive for both the United States and China (and for third countries, many of which conduct a majority of trade with China but rely upon US security guarantees) (Rosen and Gloudeman, 2021). The geopolitical economy of the ‘new state capitalism’, then, far from generating autarchy, is instead ‘characterized by geopolitical-economic competition to integrate territory’ into respective spheres of influence via connective infrastructure and logistics networks (Schindler et al. (2021: 2) and to exert greater control over cross-border economic integration (Liu and Dixon, 2021, Liu and Lim, 2022). The most significant project in this regard is China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has extended China's reach across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America through a sweeping range of state-backed infrastructural investment and development financing (Gallagher, 2016, Jepson, 2020, Lampton et al., 2020). The BRI has in turn prompted the entry of the US government directly into the infrastructure financing space with its Development Finance Corporation (Schindler and Kanai, 2021) and the nascent US-led G7 ‘Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment’ (PGII) infrastructure financing partnership. In this way, the Sino-US conflict generates state capitalist imperatives far beyond the borders of its two protagonists. A critical component of the BRI is the ‘Digital Silk Road’, the objective of which is to expand the influence of Chinese hardware and software platform firms overseas through the provision and financing of digital infrastructures. The DSR has completed projects valued at US$79bn as of 2019, a mixture of the Chinese state capital and investment from its private platform firms (Cheney, 2021: 89). American commentators have begun to raise the alarm at the speed of China's technological catch-up, asserting that Silicon Valley's global leadership in digital technologies is under direct threat. In language that echoes the hyperbole surrounding the Cold War's supposed ‘missile gap’ and the space race, Hillman's (2021: 9) analysis is illustrative: While American leaders were busy singing the praises of connectivity, the United States was not investing enough in actually connecting the world, including rural and lower-income communities at home… But as Western firms raced to roll out high-speed internet, they focused primarily on larger, richer markets, creating digital divides… China turned these fault lines into runways for its tech giants. Now they are cleared for takeoff. Until recently, Hillman's notion that this competition represents a ‘network war’ that the United States may lose would have been met with scepticism, given the global reach and dominance of the United States ‘digital empire’ (Nieborg et al., 2020). But recognising the growing presence and prowess of Chinese platforms, the United States has rapidly entered into direct competition with these firms to secure the dominance of its own national stack in third countries. Understanding the significance of the ‘network war’, however, requires close attention to the novel business form at its centre: the platform. Platforms In this section, we demonstrate empirically how platforms have become increasingly important to the US–China rivalry and argue that they should be at the center of analyses of the ‘new state capitalism’. For Alami et al. (2022), state capitalist practices are driven at the most fundamental level by state responses to technological upheavals in the context of long-run macroeconomic and geographical shifts in the world economy. Expansive state interventions are effectively necessitated by the demands of ‘competing in sectors at the technological and productivity frontier (5G technology, big data, the internet of things, artificial intelligence and robotics)… [and] ensuring the favourable participation of firms in global value chains’ (Alami and Dixon, 2021: 18). Expanding on this insight, we assert that state capitalism is animated not only by the rise of frontier technologies which compel more intensive forms of state economic activity but also that this technology-state relationship is (as it has historically been) mediated by changing forms of business organisation (Bodrožić and Adler, 2022). Crucial in this regard is the emergence of the platform as a novel form of business organisation (Davis, 2016, Vergne, 2020). Platform studies have largely – and erroneously, in our view – conceived of platforms as effectively beyond the reach of, and oppositional to, states. By contrast, we argue that platforms are amenable to state oversight, that they possess distinctive affordances that make them geopolitical agents, and that both China and the United States do indeed seek to instrumentalise and mobilise platforms for geopolitical–economic ends. We refer to this growing fusion between states and platforms in the context of geopolitical rivalry as state platform capitalism (SPC).