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The rise of e-commerce platforms in developing countries is creating new business opportunities in rural economies, which drives governments to cooperate with private sector industries on the development of a good ICT infrastructure. This paper features a case study from central China to demonstrate how the private sector is collaborating with the government to deliver skills training workshops for rural residents and thereby facilitate e-commerce in developing regions. The collaboration between the public and private sectors represents a new strategy to facilitate a digital economy that incorporates marginalised communities in developing areas. However, findings from the fieldwork show that digital skills training for rural participants requires the provision of supporting resources, such as affordable e-commerce consultancy services and accessible technical assistance.

AbstractThis article develops a dynamic model to investigate renewable resource markets under different property rights. We find that different property rights regimes in renewable resource markets yield very different equilibria. Under private property rights, the valve point increases with the natural growth rate, productivity, number of firms, and marginal costs. Under common property rights, "the tragedy of the commons" inescapably occurs. This study suggests how to avoid ecological disaster by implementing a set of public policies.

China has in recent years seen the rapid adoption of multifunctional social networking applications such as WeChat. This paper aims to explore if China's social stratification has influenced the adoption and use of mobile social apps and if social apps such as WeChat can help to bridge the digital divide by providing urban and rural users equal access to diverse information and communication resources. The study is based on 4 months of fieldwork in the Henan Province of central China and combines quantitative data from surveys and qualitative data from semistructured interviews and focus groups. We found that there still exists a digital gap in the adoption and use of mobile social apps such as WeChat between rural and urban China, but such differences are also associated with demographic variables such as age, gender, and education level. Meanwhile, we found that WeChat has become more than a communication tool; it has also played an essential role in everyday problem-solving and information seeking for both rural and urban users. Our qualitative interviews and focus group studies reveal how WeChat influences various aspects of daily life in developing areas in China. We argue that although some divides in information seeking are being overcome, other new divides are emerging.

TikTok has enjoyed wide popularity in the Global South. But in the summer of 2020, a tit-for-tat altercation erupted over the use of the app in India against the backdrop of a border dispute between India and China. India banned TikTok, along with other Chinese mobile applications. This ban raised larger ongoing issues around user privacy, cybersecurity threats, and content regulation issues on social media platforms and telecommunications equipment around the world. In this article, we explore these issues and the wider debates on social media. To do so, we interviewed policy makers and academics, as well as representatives from India's technology industry. We also applied computational linguistic analysis to 6,388 Twitter posts about the ban by Indian users. The discourses on Twitter show intense nationalistic rhetoric and that Indian Twitter users were vocal in urging the government to ban TikTok. In-depth expert interviews suggested intense geopolitical conflicts behind the TikTok ban. We situate these findings with a broader analysis of the current geopolitics of social media platforms.

The proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021 "Democracy in Flux: Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres" have been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII121, 16DII122, 16DII123, 16DII124, 16DII125, 16DII126, 16DII127,16DII128 – "Deutsches Internet-Institut").