The Marginal-Mainstream Transition of Esports in China

Prior research on esports and the market transition from marginal to mainstream has been centred on market-driven economies. How esports transition over time in state-led markets has been overlooked. Taking China as an example of a state-led market, we invoked governmentality to explore the roles of the state and its mechanisms of mobilising its agencies to deploy bureaucratic, administrative, and legal interventions to different actors to navigate esports transition at both industrial and macro-levels. Drawing on multisource databases, we collected 2,775 pages of textual data documenting how esports evolves between 2002 and 2023 and utilise a qualitative hermeneutic approach for data analysis. We theorised the marginal-mainstream transition of esports in China as a three-phase state-led governmentality practice: market demarcation, stabilisation, and invigoration. In each phase, we identified two aspects of the governmentality efforts to mobilise disciplinary, legal, and security apparatus with various strategic governmentality functions.