Last week, Jack Ma called for a new “e-WTO” with the aim of helping small businesses get on the Internet, as the best hope in the fight against poverty. This appeal came after Alibaba’s largest ever “Singles Day” a week earlier, with almost US$14.3bn of merchandise sold in 24 hours. Alibaba’s social media accounts even reported that Premier Li Keqiang called CEO Jack Ma to wish him a successful day. “Singles Day” is now the world’s largest shopping day,dwarfing even the United States’ “Black Friday.”
These are the latest manifestations of a worrying obsession with e-commerce and the Internet in Asia’s largest economies. In March, Beijing announced its new “Internet Plus” plan to expand Internet connectivity. Premier Li, when describing it, brought up the “mobile Internet”, “cloud computing”, “big data”, “intelligent manufacturing” and the “Internet of Things,” in a manner similar to business leaders in America. Nor is this digital obsession restricted to China. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s headquarters received as much, if not more, media attention as his address on sustainable development to the United Nations days earlier.From the almost breathless manner in which business leaders use words like “innovation”, “the sharing economy” and “maker spaces”, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish real analysis from wild speculation when talking about the Internet and e-commerce. The assertion is that digital expansion would allow countries to skip entire stages of development, such as investing in real infrastructure, preventing life-threatening pollution, managing resources carefully, and installing value systems in an increasingly ethically-challenged world. What the focus on e-commerce actually represents is the continued inability of the developing world to free itself from Western ideas about models for economic growth and definitions of modernity.
The claim that the Internet will fundamentally transform development is unproven and untested. What is clear is that the Internet makes consumption easier, faster and more expansive than ever before. Analysts have thus looked to e-commerce and China’s Internet giants to help “save” China’s economic model from slowing down.