From October 20 to 22, along the banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, the 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference returns once again. Nobel Prize and Turing Award winners will take the stage to discuss the future and trends of technology, and the internet-famous professors who "rescue" people from anxiety and the era of involution—Macfarlane and Xiang Biao—will hold a live dialogue!
Seats are limited, so act fast. Let us join together in this appointment with sustainability! [Click to register] (Source: Langfang Daily) Reposted from: Langfang Daily.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, China's economic structure has continued to improve, innovative momentum has accelerated its concentration, and new technologies, new business forms, and new models have emerged rapidly. As one of the most dynamic representatives among them, the platform economy is influencing China's industrial forms and consumption ecosystem with unprecedented depth and breadth. From the consumer internet to the industrial internet, and from smoothing the domestic circulation to cross-border e-commerce "going global," a large number of platform enterprises have grown into important forces connecting supply and demand, empowering the real economy, and cultivating new quality productive forces, playing an important role in stabilizing employment, expanding domestic demand, and promoting innovation.
The outline of the "15th Five-Year Plan" made arrangements for "creating a healthy and orderly development ecosystem" and proposed "improving a scientific and effective regulatory mechanism." "Promoting the innovation and healthy development of the platform economy and strengthening regulation of platform enterprises' data, algorithms, traffic, and rules" is an important part of this. In recent years, with the rapid development of the platform economy, some deep-seated problems have gradually emerged. A typical phenomenon is that some platform enterprises excessively pursue commercial interests and pay excessive attention to traffic and scale while neglecting development quality, leading to a race to the bottom in which competitors lower standards. On the surface, a race to the bottom leads to goods and services tending toward low quality and low prices, harming consumer rights and interests; at a deeper level, these problems erode the foundation of market trust and constrain the release of consumption potential. In this sense, it is necessary to take strong measures on the basis of an in-depth analysis of the causes behind this, and to improve the regulatory mechanism so as to promote platform enterprises in striving for excellence.
How to use high-efficiency governance to prompt platform enterprises to abandon "involution-style" competition and shift toward quality improvement, technological innovation, service optimization, and ecosystem co-construction, thereby achieving healthy development driven by premium quality and premium prices and by innovation, should be an important topic for promoting the high-quality development of the platform economy at present and for some time to come.
The distinctive characteristics and notable advantages of the platform economy are mainly reflected in its ability to break down information barriers and reduce matching costs, making transactions more convenient and markets more transparent. In the course of development, rapidly expanding platform enterprises face both the problem of poor transmission of market information and the trouble of uncoordinated and insufficient constraints and incentives in governance, all of which easily lead to "involution-style" competition. From the perspective of the micro-mechanisms of the market economy, online markets contain massive amounts of goods and related information, and effective quality information may be severely diluted, while practices such as click farming, fake reviews, and algorithmic manipulation will further create information pollution. Consumers find it difficult to judge quality the way they do in offline shopping through intuitive experience, and they rely heavily on indicators such as price and sales volume that are easy to observe but not closely related to the true information about goods and services when making decisions. The intensification of information asymmetry will push the market into the "lemon market" condition in economics, in which consumers find it difficult to judge the true quality of goods and are only willing to pay according to average quality, causing high-quality supply to gradually exit and eroding the foundation of market trust.
From the perspective of macroeconomic governance, the central government generally builds an effective regulatory framework by issuing special laws and regulations, but local governments, as the main bodies implementing regulation, also need to bear relatively specific multidimensional objectives and tasks such as economic growth, tax revenue and employment, and safety regulation. Platform enterprises are mostly cross-regional enterprises with light assets and easy mobility, and their place of registration, servers, and tax contributions can be flexibly allocated, thus making them scarce resources that localities compete to attract. This is also an important reason why local protection, market segmentation, and "involution-style" competition have persisted despite repeated prohibitions for some time. To solve this series of difficult problems, it is necessary to strengthen high-efficiency governance with systematic governance thinking and with the approach of addressing both symptoms and root causes.
Achieving high-efficiency governance in the field of the platform economy cannot simply be equated with "strong regulation"; in essence, it is the all-round optimization of rule supply, enforcement mechanisms, innovation support, and so on. In terms of governance orientation, it is necessary to uphold both development and regulation, and to unify vitality and order, achieving both "letting go" and "managing well." Ultimately, an important goal of improving governance effectiveness is to eliminate information asymmetry, reduce institutional transaction costs, curb "involution-style" competition, and create a stable, fair, transparent, and predictable institutional environment with lower institutional costs, higher regulatory efficiency, and stronger governance synergy.
The key to using high-efficiency governance to promote the "race to excellence" development of the platform economy lies in further comprehensively deepening reform and running reform requirements through every link and the entire process of high-efficiency governance. With cross-domain coordination and clear rights and responsibilities as the orientation, the governance structure should be optimized; through means such as digital empowerment, the level of governance should be improved; and ultimately this should be reflected in an overall leap in governance effectiveness. Specifically, efforts can be made in the following aspects.
First, improve the effectiveness of rules. Only when rules are clear and rights and responsibilities are well defined can the market and industry form stable expectations. It is necessary to accelerate the improvement of foundational institutions in the field of the platform economy, clearly define the boundaries of responsibility and the bottom line of competition for platform enterprises, and promote the embedding of compliance requirements into the entire process of enterprise operations. The focus should be on cracking down on practices such as click farming and false advertising, accurately conveying quality signals to the market, enabling enterprises' investment in quality to be transformed into reputation assets that consumers can identify and trust, and strengthening positive incentives for premium quality and premium prices.
Second, improve enforcement effectiveness. The vitality of a system lies in its enforcement. It is necessary to deeply advance the construction of a unified national market, strengthen coordination in cross-regional law enforcement, prevent local protection and policy arbitrage, and guide localities to value not only reasonable quantitative economic growth but also effective qualitative improvement. It is also necessary to further improve the tax distribution mechanism so that it fits the characteristics of the platform economy, resolve the problem of mismatched rights and responsibilities at the source, and avoid the phenomenon in which "whoever strictly regulates loses out."
Third, improve technological effectiveness. The platform economy has features such as massive, real-time, and cross-domain transactions, and traditional regulatory methods are already unable to adapt to new circumstances. It is necessary to promote compatibility between regulatory capacity and the iterative development of platform technology, realize the shift from passive response to proactive early warning, and improve the penetration and precision of regulation over problems such as abnormal transactions, fake reviews, and quality risks. On the premise of ensuring data security and regulatory independence, regulatory agencies should be encouraged to carry out compliance technology cooperation with platform enterprises, use technological means to compress the space for violations, and reduce the compliance costs of platform enterprises.
Fourth, improve innovation effectiveness. Achieving high-efficiency governance requires using governance innovation to guide platform enterprises away from low-level traffic competition and price competition toward high-level quality competition and value competition. On the premise of compliance with laws and regulations, platform enterprises should be encouraged to leverage their advantages in data, technology, and scenarios to empower small and medium-sized merchants in differentiated and quality-oriented competition, promote the synchronous iteration of governance methods and platform technology systems, use innovation to drive the "race to excellence," and use the "race to excellence" to force innovation in turn, forming a virtuous cycle for the high-quality development of the platform economy.
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