Enmeshed Nationalism and the Making of Cross‐Border Digital Markets: Alibaba in Indonesia

ABSTRACT State platform capitalism and China's digital exports are frequently viewed as geopolitical frameworks, emphasizing zero‐sum competition and structural dominance. This paper challenges such conceptualizations by investigating the market‐making capabilities of transnational technology firms and the strategic agency of host countries. Focusing on Alibaba's expansion into Indonesia, we argue that Chinese digital exports and the Digital Silk Road are better understood through the lens of complex sovereignty and enmeshed nationalism. Host states, rather than passive recipients of foreign tech imposition, selectively trade degrees of autonomy for developmental capacity while actively conditioning platform entry upon strict alignment with their socioeconomic objectives. In so doing, Alibaba was able to bundle physical and digital infrastructure to create a functionally integrated, cross‐border market spanning e‐commerce, payments, logistics, and data governance. This result is best understood as conditioned asymmetry, whereby the host state conditions the terms of an asymmetry it cannot escape, ensuring its developmental gains come from sovereign conditions imposed on foreign platforms rather than their mere presence. Chinese state‐platform power and Indonesian developmental ambitions jointly produce an uneven, highly negotiated, yet durable cross‐border digital market. This paper sheds light on our understandings of complex sovereignty and regional market integration in the global digital economy.