Towards a processual approach to digital platforms' infrastructuralization: the case of WeChat in China

This article adopts a processual approach to analyzing a digital platform’s infrastructuralization process. By viewing a platform as an evolving sociotechnical assemblage, it conceptualizes the process as a series of moves that produce and are produced by the contingent associations of various elements within the techno-material and sociocultural realities of a society. In each of the moves, platform functions change, informed by the goals of expansion, profit, and/or capital gain, but also responding to contingent associations at the specific time and space. This process can be examined via three analytical parameters of platform functions, i.e. associated milieu, lock-in, and detachment. To explore this approach, this article examines the case of WeChat—particularly WeChat Pay—and dissects the critical associations through which it morphed from a mere social network app into a go-to infrastructure for Chinese citizens. The processual approach transcends Euro-American-centrism by helping researchers develop knowledge about platforms that are embedded contingently and deeply in non-Euro-American societies’ regional specificities. It also transcends methodological nationalism by applying methodologically operable and applicable tools to cases within and beyond China, rather than empirically generalizable models that essentialize platforms’ development in a society or culture. © 2025 The Centre for Chinese Media and Comparative Communication research, The Chinese university of Hong Kong