Building the Relay: Gates, Labor, and IP Governance in China’s Transmedia Platform Economy

This paper proposes a deep interface framework to analyze how transmedia IP circulation is organized, governed, and made to extract value in China’s platform economy. Drawing on Bratton’s theory of interface and Terranova’s concept of informational modulation, we reconceptualize the transmedia chain not as a stable distribution network but as a succession of gates and chokepoints whose connectivity requires continuous labor across organizational, technological-algorithmic, and legal-regulatory registers. Through detailed analysis of China Literature (阅文集团), the dominant platform in China’s online fiction market and the source gate of its transmedia relay, we derive three concepts that name the specific form this apparatus takes at scale. Accumulated affect names the informational surplus that IP accumulates as it traverses the relay. A networked IP polity names the heterarchical governance structure that coordinates stakeholders across gates. Distributed authorship names the ideological formation through which the platform’s appropriation of that surplus is legitimated. By analyzing how infrastructural coordination transforms narrative production into a scalable platform asset, the paper contributes to debates on platform governance, cultural production, and the political economy of digital media.