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Entrepreneurial labor: digital work and subjectivities in China’s new economy

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Entrepreneurial labor: digital work and subjectivities in China’s new economy

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Content i

ENTREPRENEURIAL LABOR
DIGITAL WORK AND SUBJECTIVITIES IN CHINA’S NEW ECONOMY

By

LIN ZHANG

USC Graduate School
PhD, Communications
University of Southern California
December 2017

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ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurial Labor portrays the proliferation of Internet-based self-employment
practices and micro-enterprises in post-2008 China. It examines the emerging digital
entrepreneurial labor practices in relation to the changing subjectivities and regime of
governance in China at a time of rapid social and technological transformations and high
economic uncertainty. Deploying the analytic of entrepreneurial labor, I depict, on one hand,
how entrepreneurs have become the new laborers—the normalization and romanticization of IT-
related flexible labor practices by Chinese young people faced with declining job security and
new self-employment opportunities opened up by economic restructuring in the aftermath of the
2008 financial crisis; I highlight, on the other, the culturally and historical specific labor
entrepreneurial self-making—the contentious process of crafting new subjectivities in
accordance with the demand of the new economy. I draw attention to how the expansion of
digital entrepreneurial labor in China is articulated to both the global neoliberal individualization
of work since the 1970s and its post-2008 acceleration with the rise of the platform economy,
and the processes of national restructuring and identity (class, gender, race, locale) construction
at this particular historical conjuncture in China and for Chinese in transnational space.
To capture the multifaceted and broad scope of digital entrepreneurship in China, I
conducted multi-sited ethnography (virtual and offline) and interviews between 2011 and 2016,
which allow me to observe closely the lived experience of three groups of Chinese digital
entrepreneurs who had become involved in the new economy in different ways. Specifically, I
tell three stories of Internet entrepreneurs who are differently positioned along the axes of class,
gender, and locale. They are young IT start-up entrepreneurs vying for venture capital backing in
Beijing’s Zhongguancun (Known as China’s Silicon Valley); peasant migrant workers who
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return to their home villages from the city to open family e-commerce businesses trading village-
produced handicrafts; and transnationally mobile, young middle-class Chinese women who make
a living by re-selling Western brands via social media.
I argue that the regime of digital entrepreneurial labor is being co-constructed by the state,
capital, and entrepreneurial workers as a solution to boosting China’s slowing economic growth,
facilitating economic and social restructuring and easing structural un (under) employment in the
aftermath of the global financial crisis. The deepening regime of entrepreneurial labor in post-
2008 China is a contested articulation of transformations in global capitalism, Chinese traditions
and the lived experience of Chinese people at this current historical moment when the global and
local, the residual and emerging are interacting in complex ways. Chinese entrepreneurs are
making their own subjectivities as they are remaking global digital capitalism. The expansion of
the entrepreneurial labor regime in the digital era has generated many contradictions, creating
new opportunities to make capitalism more livable while giving rise of new forms of precarity,
anxiety, and inequalities.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have accumulated many debts along the way of completing this dissertation. I am most
grateful to my advisor Sarah Banet-Weiser, who has always believed in me, offering
encouragement, emotional and intellectual support, while giving me the freedom to grow as a
young scholar. She is my role model. I also want to extend my thanks to Henry Jenkins, my
intellectual hero. I don’t know how I could have survived the past few years of conceptualizing
and writing this dissertation if not for his optimism, thoughtful and timely feedbacks, and faith in
my scholarly potential; To Stanley Rosen, for his humor and kindness. I have benefited
immensely from Stan’s knowledge about China and his gentle push for rigor. His quick
responses to my emails (even after midnight!) always helped me overcome my unnecessary
anxiety; To Taj Frazier, a wonderful career mentor and collaborator. I wouldn’t be where I am
today if not for the numerous conversations we had over the years about how to become a better
researcher and teacher, and for his generous offer to take me on as a research collaborator and
teaching assistant; And last but Not least, to Guobin Yang, for always coming to my aid when
most needed, and for the many opportunities that he offered me to expand my intellectual
horizon. My other mentors at USC, Larry Gross, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Manuel Castells,
Gene Cooper, Yu Hong, have also helped sharpen my idea, shaped the direction of this
dissertation, and contributed to my growth as a doctoral student and an intellectual.
I am also indebted to my informants and interviewees in China and around the world. I am
truly grateful to shushu and shinshin in Boxing who took me into their family and treated me like
their own child during my fieldwork in Wantou village. An Baozhong, Meng Lili, Jia Peixiao,
Liu Haizheng, and Li Shengxian were particularly helpful in showing me the life of e-commerce
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entrepreneurs in Chinese countryside. I would also like to thank my interviewees in
Zhongguancun and the women daigou entrepreneurs that I talked to in person, via phone, and
Skype over the years. I really appreciate their generosity in sharing their life stories, their dream,
ambition, and frustration with me. I hope that I have done a satisfactory job making sense and
retelling their stories in my work.
I also benefited greatly from the intellectual stimulation and advice offered by many people
to improve my work. It’s truly a pleasure to brainstorm research ideas with Wang Hongzhe, Wu
Jing, Meng Bingchun, Elaine Yuan, either in person or via WeChat. Hong Renyi is a great
dissertation buddy whose work is a major inspiration for this dissertation. Zhou Yongming,
Huang Yaning, Qian Linliang, Liu Xiaozhen, Liu Zongdi, Aram Sinnreich, Jack Qiu, Anthony
Fung, Ruoyun Bai, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Mary Gray, Aaron Trammell, Kelly Song,
Samantha Close, Meryl Alper have all contributed to this dissertation in their own ways.
I don’t know how I could have pulled through my PhD years without the companionship,
support, and love of my friends. I would like to thank Wang Wei, Yan bei, Zhang Chi, David
Jeong, James Lee, Samatha Close, Sun Yao, Yang Yue, Arlene Luck, Mina Park, Ren Ruqing,
Wang Xin, Huang Jin, Lv Li, Zhao Nan, Xam Chen, and Lvzhou Li for the joy of friendship.
However, I am most indebted to my parents, Zhang Junmiao and Lin Cuifeng, for their
unconditional love and faith in their daughter, to my in-laws, Wang Liduo and Yang Aihua, for
loving me like their own daughter, and to my husband Siyuan Wang, a talented intellectual and
an amazing human being, for the love, sacrifice, patience, inspiration, and comradeship.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Entrepreneurial Labor in China’s New Economy 1
Chapter 2: Middle-Class Work Imaginaries in Zhongguancun 40
Chapter 3: Rural E-commerce Entrepreneurs in Wantou Village 104
Chapter 4: Fashioning the Feminine Self Through Entrepreneurial Labor 178
Epilogue 228
References 232

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Chapter 1
Entrepreneurial Labor in China’s New Economy

The real business of entrepreneurs is the business of cultivating a better self.
创业者经营的不是生意，而是更好的自己
--Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba

The impulse driving both the entrepreneur and the artist is a restlessness to search out the new,
to rework nature, and to refashion consciousness.
--Daniel Bell

I saw business failures and successes, diversification, reconstitution, growth, contraction, illness,
childbirth, marriage, and divorce among the many changes over time. I learned that
entrepreneurialism is not about business per se; it has become a mode of labor and a way of life.
—Freeman, Carla.

My journey of writing this dissertation started in 2010 during a bus ride to visit my uncle’s
family in Northeast China’s Shandong province. People who had traveled to the Chinese
countryside would be familiar with the ubiquitous advertising and government slogans painted
on the roadside walls. One can take a glimpse of the history of rural China just by reading those
walls. In the socialist 50s and 60s when cold war politics trumped everything else, what we had
were messages like: “Get prepared for War”, and signed by Mao Zedong. In the 80s and 90s
when the economy, rather than politics, began to take centre stage in rural policy, we start to see
neoliberal slogans like “Get rich is glorious; stay poor is weak”. In the new millennium, as
peasants grew more affluent with favorable government policies and urban remittances, we
started to see an explosion in ads selling goods to peasants.
However, in the summer of 2010, as I rode through the countryside, I saw on the side of the
road painted on the walls something new and exciting for a someone who study new media
technologies. They were different versions of advertisement for Alibaba’s c2c e-commerce

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website Taobao.com targeting the rural market. Two of them really stood out to me. One says:
“Tired of life as a migrant worker? Why not come home and work on Taobao?” The other reads:
“One cup of coffee and an Internet cable; stay at home and become an e-commerce entrepreneur,
your millionaire dream will come true”. Well, who doesn’t want a job like that? To my total
surprise, my cousin, who used to work in a toy factory in South China, did exactly that. The first
thing he told me upon my arrival is that he had quit his old job three months ago to start an e-
commerce business at home with his wife. Together they sell hand braided small furniture and
home decorations online. And Wantou, the village that I passed by on my way with the e-
commerce wall advertising, was exactly where he went weekly to replenish his stock of
handicrafts.

Wall advertisement in Chinese countryside promoting the e-commerce platform Taobao
It turns out that Wantou is not an isolated phenomenon. Since I embarked on my fieldwork
for this project in 2010, I have met numerous Chinese small entrepreneurs from all walks of life
who ride on the new opportunities opened up by the rapid technological, cultural, and social
changes in the context of China’s restructuring following the 2008 global financial crisis. I argue
that the 2008 global crisis marks an important watershed in China’s post-socialist integration into
global capitalism. The sudden contraction in export heightened the Chinese government’s

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anxiety over the unsustainablity of the nation’s export-driven and labor-intensive economy.
Though the side effect of this developmental model, such as environment degradation,
contradictions between over-production and weak domestic consumption, and foreign
dependency, had been brewing for many years. The crisis also intensified the contradiction that
many Chinese workers had experienced between their desire for more autonomous, rewarding,
and creative work and lifestyle and China’s disadvantaged position in the international division
of labor. The latter often renders people dissatisfied with their labor conditions, be they peasant
workers working on electronics assembly lines or white-collar employees working under the
command of foreign bosses. Over the years, as I listened to the entrepreneurs’ stories, I was
always fascinated by the ways in which this post-2008 entrepreneurial movement and the
emerging new economy is intricately tied to the remaking of the Chinese selves at this new
historical conjuncture.
This dissertation is composed of the stories that I had collected between 2010 and 2017 as I
traveled back and forth between China and the United States. In this dissertation, I explore the
proliferation of Internet-based self-employment and startup businesses in post-2008 China. I
study these emerging phenomena in relation to the changing regime of labor, subjectivities and
governance in China. Specifically, I tell three stories of Internet entrepreneurs who are
differently positioned along the axes of class, gender, and locale. They are transnationally
mobile, young middle-class Chinese women who make a living by re-selling Western brands via
social media; young IT start-up entrepreneurs vying for venture capital backing in Beijing’s
Zhongguancun (Known as China’s Silicon Valley); and peasant migrant workers who return to
their home villages from the city to open family e-commerce businesses trading village-produced
handicrafts.

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Why Study Entrepreneurial Labor in China?
Why do we have to care about Internet businesses and digital labor in China? This is both
an empirical and theoretical question. Empirically, since China’s neoliberal reform in the 1980s,
after serving as the factory of the world for three decades, this export-driven low-tech cheap-
labor manufacturing model appears increasingly untenable. There has been a growing concern
over whether China, now the second largest economy in the world with 1/5 of its population, can
both maintain its current economic growth rate and successfully transition into a more
sustainable model of development. Digital technologies and Internet-based entrepreneurialism,
as I argue, play a pivotal role in this process of national restructuring and re-imagining.
Meanwhile, this renewed optimism over new technologies and the entrepreneurial model of work
pioneered by the Silicon Valley since the 1980s, is certainly not unique to China. In the
aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, this techno-utopianism 2.0 has swept around the
world as people seek to either rejuvenate capitalism or find its alternatives through technological
innovation.
While I was conducting the bulk of my fieldwork in 2015 and 2016, many things have
changed since my 2010 reunion with my cousin, which is not surprising given how the dot.com
world runs today. The Chinese economy has deteriorated since 2012, from what many
economists believe to be a long overdue structural reform. While China appeared as one of the
few bright spots in world economy immediately following the 2008 global crisis, by 2015 its
GDP dropped to a record low in decades. The new generation of leadership, which took power in
early 2013, responded with a do-or-die determination to restructure the economy and society. A
new industrial model, Internet+, that combines technological innovations with China’s existing

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strength in manufacturing and infrastructure building, was promoted. In a gesture reminiscent of
Mao’s mass movement during the years of the socialist planned economy, Premier Li Keqiang
launched a nationwide campaign in late 2014 endorsing “mass entrepreneurship and innovation”.
He called on individuals, governments, and businesses across the country to encourage bottom-
up innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors. As a result of these changes, during my fieldwork I
witnessed a massive number of people quitting their jobs to enter the brave new world of micro
entrepreneurship and self-employment. The majority of the new opportunities are related to the
Internet and digital technologies.
Theoretically, I build my dissertation around the analytics of “entrepreneurial labor”, which
is deployed as a pun to denote two layers of meaning. On one hand, I use this concept to describe
the proliferation of micro-enterprises and self-employment enabled by the so-called Web 2.0
revolution, and the normalization and even romanticization of such IT-related flexible labor
practices by Chinese young people faced with declining job security and new self-employment
opportunities opened up by economic restructuring in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial
crisis. It is part of the global trend towards the individualization of work, which has been put into
operation since the late 1970s, and become accelerated in the aftermath of the 2008 economic
crisis with the rise of digital platform economy (Srnicek, 2016). To quote the tech writer and
independent research Venkatesh, “entrepreneurs” have become “the new labor” in the latest
round of global tech boom (Rao, 2012). On the other hand, I want to highlight the culturally and
historically specific labor of entrepreneurial self-making—the process of crafting new
subjectivities in accordance with the demand of the new economy. In particular, I intend to draw
attention to how the expansion of digital entrepreneurial labor is articulated to both the global
neoliberal individualization of work since the 1970s and its post-2008 acceleration with the rise

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of the platform economy, and the processes of national restructuring and identity (class, gender,
race, locale) construction at this particular historical conjuncture in China and for Chinese in
transnational space.
I owe this double treatment of entrepreneurialism to sociologists Gina Neff, Elizabeth
Wissinger, and Sharon Zukin (2005) and the anthropologist of Caribbean Carla Freeman (2014).
Neff et.al. (2005) used the concept of “entrepreneurial labor” to document new flexible and risk-
taking labor practices among new media and fashion industry workers in the New York City.
However, they focused more on empirically documenting the entrepreneurial workers’ practices
than theorizing the concept. Freeman (2014), in her book on middle-class entrepreneurs in
Barbados, referred to entrepreneurialism as both a “new structural arrangements of work” and
“subtle new subjectivities in formation”, which are articulated to Barbadian cultural traditions
and labor history in shaping a distinctive expression of neoliberalism (p. 210-211). Like
Freeman, I want to emphasize the historically and culturally specific labor of the making of the
entrepreneurial selves. I believe that it is imperative to tease out the complicated ways in which
labor and entrepreneurship have become mutually transformative at a paradoxical time when
more people are dissociating themselves from ideas of labor and exploitation though economic
inequalities are deepening (Piketty, 2013).
More broadly, I will expand on four realms of literature while bringing them into
productive dialogue with each other. The first set concerns the production of subjectivities under
neoliberal capitalism, particularly how the formation of neoliberal subjectivities is articulated to
specific cultural and national contexts for differently positioned bodies (Brown, 2015; Foucault,
2008; Freeman, 2014; Lazzarato, 2014; Ong and Collier, 2005; Ong, 2007; Rofel, 2007; Rose,
1999; Song, 2009; Yan, 2010). These works have provided me with essential theoretical and

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methodological tools to tackle the question of how global structural transformations in capitalism
are mutually constitutive with the process of subject making. The second set of interdisciplinary
literature explores the often contradictory politics of technology-facilitated individualization of
work and changing practices of labor in contemporary cultural and digital industries (Banet-
Weiser, 2012; Banks, 2007; Benkler, 2006; Gregg, 2011; Heelas, 2002; Jenkins, Ford, and
Green, 2013; McRobbie, 2016; Neff, 2012; Ross, 2003; Sennett, 2011). However, with some
notable exceptions published recently (Lukacs, 2013; Zhang X., 2015; Zhang L., 2015), the
majority of the existing work on digital labor takes the middle-class Euro-American experience
as universal. Consequently, China is often imagined as a manufacturing powerhouse—a site
representing the very antithesis of Western immaterial, affective, and flexible labor (Wong,
2013). In reality, manufacturing’s central role in the Chinese economy is declining, and instead,
a new future is being envisioned where innovative and technological advanced production will
both coexist with and re-invent China’s manufacturing strength.
By focusing on China, this dissertation reveals how the Chinese experience informs us
about the emerging global regime of digital capitalist production. To do this, I draw from a third
set of literature on the mutual constitution between capitalism and Chinese culture and society,
especially those concerning labor/consumption and the construction of subjectivities (Huang,
1985; Gates, 1996; Lee, 2007; Pun, 2005; Pang, 2012; Yan, 2007). They help me situate the
recent rise of digital entrepreneurship and new labor practices in Chinese history and tradition.
Following this line of research, I am able to better conceptualize the historical continuities and
ruptures of Internet self-employment from earlier regimes of labor in traditional, socialist and
capitalist China, and to see how neoliberal ideals enter into negotiations with the historical
contingencies and cultural specificities of Chinese society. However, except a few recent work,

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Chinese labor studies has generally overlooked novel practices emerging in the country’s rapidly
expanding digital and cultural sector. So through an engagement with the digital, my work
contributes to new understanding of the changing practices of work in relation to identity
formation and sociopolitical governance in contemporary China. In addition, I also engage with
the growing body of works produced in the last two decades on Chinese Internet and new media
studies, asking particularly what kind of politics is constituted by new forms of digital work and
entrepreneurial subjectivities. Academic literature of the Chinese Internet has been dominated by
issues of government censorship and the digital technologies’ democratizing potential (Meng,
2010). My work goes beyond this dichotomy of democratization and censorship to investigate
the paradoxical ways in which digital technologies both disrupt and reinforce existing
inequalities created at the intersection of identities and localities.
By extending and bridging these different realms of work, I follow Chen’s (2010) call to
methodize Asia (China) rather than objectifying its experience, and I echo Zhang and Dirlik’s
(2000) efforts to think of the “conditions of Chineseness” as a generator and “significant
contributor” to the operations of contemporary neoliberal capitalism (p.4). I ask how does
technology-driven structural transformation of global capitalism intersect with local traditions in
shaping new labor practices, subjectivities, and lived experiences? How does this process interact
with people’s social positioning and identities such as class, gender, and locale? What kind of
politics is constituted by new forms of digital work in China beyond the dichotomy of censorship
and democratization? What does the Chinese experience inform us about the post-2008
transformation of global capitalism? I argue that digital entrepreneurial labor has emerged as a
structural and symbolic solution to post-socialist China’s unsustainable model of development,
made acute by the 2008 global financial crisis. The deepening regime of entrepreneurial labor in

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post-2008 China is an articulation of transformations in global capitalism, Chinese traditions and
the lived experience of Chinese people at this current historical moment when the global and
local, the residual and emerging are interacting in complex ways. Chinese entrepreneurs are
making their own subjectivities as they are remaking global digital capitalism. The expansion of
the entrepreneurial labor regime in the digital era has simultaneously opened up new
opportunities to make capitalism more livable, while giving rise of new forms of precarity,
anxiety, and inequalities.

Neoliberal Capitalism and Subjectivities
The figure of the entrepreneurial labor epitomizes the contemporary neoliberal moment. By
neoliberal, I am referring to a new set of political rationalities and technologies of governance
that value market exchange as “an ethic in itself” and champions a notion of individualistic
freedom based on equal opportunities of participation in market competition and consumption
(Ganti, 2014). The global mobility of neoliberalism paralleled the expansion of global
information capitalism in the past four decades, which had disrupted old distinctions between
work and leisure, labor and life, resistance and exploitation, culture and economy/society, and
global and local. These technology-facilitated transformations have posed serious challenges to
existing theories in social sciences and humanities conceptualized in contentious relations to the
modernist construction of separate domains (among culture, economy, society, polity etc)
(Grossberg, 2010; Zelizer, 2010). As a result, the modernist fracturing of social totality had
increasingly been called into question since the 1970s.
Meanwhile, I deploy the analytics of the “entrepreneurial labor” to capture the tensions
experienced by the different groups of Chinese workers documented in my dissertation (though

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most of whom don’t identify themselves as workers) at this particularly historical moment when
China has become more and more assertive in participating in and remaking global digital
capitalism. To quote Grossberg (2010), these are “contextually specific” stories told of “the
present as a struggle with, around, and over euro-modernity” (p. 73). As I am going to show,
stories written about the life and work experiences of digital platform based entrepreneurial
workers in non-Western world are still few and far between (at least in the English-speaking
academia). Before that, I intend to briefly situate my discussion on entrepreneurial labor in the
postwar debate on the deconstruction of “Western” modernity and the construction of “non-
Western” subjects under capitalism to show how the stories that I am going to tell build on,
disrupt, and contribute to the continuous scholarly endeavors.
Old Debates
Capitalist modernity makes subjects. The European modern subjects discover themselves
through their encounters with the “others” and via turning the non-Western cultures into objects
of comparison (Takeuchi, 2005). However, by participating in the Europe-led capitalist
modernization project, the non-Western people have also discovered and come to construct their
own subjectivities under the influence of their interactions with the West, as Fanon (1967)
argued that colonialism forces the colonized to ask the question “In reality, who am I?” (p. 200).
The internal divisions inherent to modernity reproduce themselves in the formation of non-
Western subjectivities, persisting in the postwar climate of anti-colonialism and post-
colonialism, which have resulted in a string of debates over the nature of non-Western subjects
under capitalism (Brook and Luong, 1997; Hefner, 1998).
Influenced by Weber’s cultural and moral accounts of capitalism, the Parsonian
structuralist use of culture quickly became the theoretical buttress behind the postwar

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modernization project, led by the US government to “convert” non-Western nations into
capitalism (Farquhar and Hevia, 1993). Emphasizing a set of “value orientations” (such as
individualism and rationalism) as pre-conditions for generating the “capitalist subjectivity”, the
modernization theory not only reinforced essentialized conceptions of non-Western cultures
(though recognizing the agency of those countries to “catch up” by adopting the “correct” value
systems), but also consolidated Western (American) cultural hegemony over Soviet-led
socialism in a Cold War environment (Brook and Luong, 1997: 2-4). While the modernization
theory dominated American social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, it met challenges from both
the left and right. Prominent among the criticism wielded from the left was the neo-Marxian
world system theories advanced by political economists like Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel
Wallerstein, who adopted a Marxian economic explanation to account for the “under-
development” of non-Western nations. Contrary to the modernization theorists’ cultural and
evolutionary model, they conceptualized the world as a capitalist system with core, periphery,
and semi-periphery locations in which resources were extracted from the poor regions to support
capitalist development and productivity at the centre (Wallerstein, 1979). While the world
system theory challenged modernization’s universalist tendency by arguing that the under-
developed non-Western regions were incorporated into the capitalist system in a different
manner and thus have their own distinct structures, it were also criticized for its economism and
reductionism (reducing complex social reproductions into economic exchange and social
struggles to transforming nations’ position in the world system) (Pieterse, 1988).
In parallel to the modernization vs. dependency debate, another tug-of-war between the so-
called substantivists and formalists was unfolding in the 1960s and 1970s, most prominently
among economic anthropologists over the nature of non-Western economy. Following Karl

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Polanyi, the substantivists emphasized the “embeddedness” of non-Western (also pre-modern
Western) economies in social relation such as religion and kinship network. Their position is best
represented by the concept of the “moral economy” (Thompson, 2002; Scott, 1976), which
stands in opposition to the belief of the formalists who, under the influence of neoclassic
economics, identified the model of rational and calculating economic person as universal in both
Western and non-Western modern societies (Huang, 1985; Wilk and Cliggett, 2009). The former
represented a much more complex model than the modernization theory in its accounts that
combined the social with the economic, but it risks romanticizing non-Western society while
overemphasizing the “disembeddedness” of modern western capitalism (Hefner, 1998). The
latter glossed over cultural and structural differences between different economies to valorize the
ethnocentric archetype of rational individual. However, both left untouched the assumption that
separates the economic, cultural, and social (Wilk and Cliggett, 2009).
Entering the 1980s, major global transformations had renewed and revitalized old debates.
One leading force behind the revival of interest in the culture and economy in non-Western
countries is the growing visibility and success of Asian nations in the global capitalist system
(Brook and Luong, 1997; Hefner, 1998). This represents both a continuity and a major shift from
the years immediately following the World War II when culture was invoked to account for the
incompatibility of Asia with capitalism. As a result of the triumph of capitalism in some Asian
countries, cultural traditions and historical experiences, such as Confucianism, strong state,
guanxi networks, and socialist egalitarianism, were summoned by Western and Chinese scholars
alike to explain what had made certain Asian nations particularly successful in promoting
capitalist development (Cui, 1994; Gan, 2007; Niehoff, 1987; Redding, 1990; Tai, 1989).
However, as Brook and Luong (1997) and Greenhalgh (1994) observed that some of these new

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culturalist accounts reduce cultures and traditions into ahistorical, static, and unchanging
residules. Intended or not, these discourses are not only (self)-orientalizing but also had the
effects of celebrating and perpetualizing the global domination of capitalism while downplaying
its enormous costs and reinforcing and endorsing existing inequalities (Greenhalgh, 1994; Karl,
2017). Meanwhile, to transcend these economic and cultural determinist accounts and their
tendency to perpetuate rather than disrupting the dichotomous modernist thinking, some neo-
Marxist and poststructuralist scholars offered more sophisticated analyses. The latter focus on
parsing the “deep interrelations” between culture and economy while treating both as dynamic,
historically situated, and constantly mutating forces and sites of power struggles (Banet-Weiser,
2012: 69; Brook and Luong, 1997; Grossberg, 2010).
New Conversations
My dissertation is a modest contribution to these ongoing efforts to document and present
stories about people’s lived experience under global digital capitalism at a time when modernist
binaries become increasingly untenable. I choose to focus on China and the Chinese people in
transnational space not only due to the nation’s growing global visibility and significance in
shaping capitalist modernity (not necessarily always towards positive directions), but also
because of my personal attachment. My personal attachment to a place where I grow up and the
family and friends there who share their excitement and struggle with me as all of us are living
through the tremendous transformations brought by digital capitalism. The latter has given us
new technologies like Skype, Facebook, Amazon, Weibo, WeChat and Taobao. What had come
with these technological innovations are not only the various life and work opportunities and
growing transnational interaction and mobility, but also new challenges and anxieties. In general,
I find some of the neo-Marxian and post-structuralist literature on neoliberal capitalism and the

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production of subjectivities most relevant to my efforts to map out, without falling into the trap
of binary construction, the new gendered, racialized, class and locale-based subjectivities
emerged in tandem with the rise of digital entrepreneurial labor.
Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge, governmentality and subjectivity, particularly his
1978-79 lectures on the birth of biopolitics (2008), is particularly useful for me in my
conceptualization of the entrepreneurial labor as an ideal subject of the contemporary global
digital capitalism. Unlike Marx who couched his critique of capitalism in the ideal of an
unalienated subject existing outside of capitalist relations or Weber who based his theorization of
western capitalist modernity on the imagined non-Western or pre-modern antithesis (be it the
lack of bureaucratization or the absence of Protestant ethic), Foucault refused to take for granted
the existence of an autonomous and self-determining subject, and instead he opted to start with
analyzing complex everyday “concrete practices” (Foucault, 2008: 3) so as to arrive at “the
different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (Foucault, 1982:
777).
For instance, Foucault treated neoliberalism not as a false ideology to be debunked, but a
particular form of governmentality constituted by new regimes of truth and is materialized
through the production of subjectivities. According to Foucault, neoliberalism is distinguished
from liberalism mainly by a shift in focus from that on exchange to competition. The theory of
human capital is an exemplary expression of neoliberal rationalities. To stay competitive in the
neoliberal society in which the logic of market predominates, individuals have to run themselves
like an enterprise, constantly calculating the risks and gains. Instead of identifying themselves as
worker, individuals are turned into entrepreneurs and investors who take the initiative to sustain
and improve their personal value as human capital through perpetual training in accordance to

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the demands of capricious and mobile capital (Read, 2009). The sites through which human
capital is accrued are not limited to education and training. In fact, every experience, from social
and generic backgrounds to physical and psychological characteristics, count. Under theses
conditions, individuals are forced to become increasingly speculative (Gregg, 2015; Lukacs,
2015). This new production of subjectivity both constitutes and is constitutive of new
organization of capitalist relations that had exonerated corporations and the state from their
responsibilities of providing stable employment and social welfare to people. As the logic of
competitive market seeps through different realms of society, the whole world is in fact, turned
into a “social factory” for production and reproduction under neoliberal capitalism (Lazzarato,
2004). Thus Foucault (2008) summarized in his analysis of neoliberalism: “Homo economicus is
an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.” (p. 226).
In building my own analytic of entrepreneurial labor, I draw inspiration from Foucault’s
analysis of neoliberalism and his approach to capitalism and the production of subjectivities. His
deconstruction of modernity and his focus on the historically and culturally specific process of
subjectivization urges me to problematize, rather than accept as “truth”, the binaries of culture
vs. economy and western vs. non-western. And instead to examine “the totality of discursive or
nondiscursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false, and constitutes
it as an object for thought” (Foucault, 1988: 257). So, in telling my stories about entrepreneurial
labor in China, I focus on how various forces, such as state-led financialization or individuals’
desire for freedom and creative expression, converged or competed to define the reality of what
constitutes desirable work and happy life in China at the current historical conjuncture. However,
Foucault was writing about Neoliberalism at a time when it was only a burgeoning regime and he
also chose to focus on the intra diversity in Euro-American societies, thus he had little to say

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about the unfolding of neoliberal capitalism in other parts of the world. This is where more
recent theorists of global neoliberalism and production of subjectivities become useful for my
own theorization of entrepreneurial labor.
The anthropologist Aihwa Ong (2003; 2006; 2007) considered neoliberalism as neither a
Euro-American phenomenon nor a unified and fixed set of practices. Instead she treated
neoliberalism as a globally mobile “migratory technology of governing that intersects with
situated sets of demands and circumstances” (Ong, 2007: 5) or, to cite Lisa Rofel (2007), as a
“global structure of sutured differences” (p. 17). Following Foucault, she acknowledged how a
global shift has taken place from a “focus on the production of goods to the production of
educated subjects” (p. 5). Nevertheless, she highlighted how the production of free and
entrepreneurial subjects co-exists with other forms of rationalities and thus can produce
unexpected configurations when being practiced on the ground. For instance, she emphasized the
“optimizing logic” of neoliberal governance deployed by local agents when they appropriate
competitive market principles to selectively include some segments of the national population or
regions while excluding others either out of exploitation or protection (Ong, 2006). She also
underlined the tensions and contradictions generated and experienced when individuals are
confronted by neoliberal regime of governing (Ong, 2003).
The concept of “global assemblage” well illustrates Ong’s treatment of neoliberalism as a
global regime. In their edited volume, Ong and Collier (2005) distinguished the “global forms”,
which are “limited or delimited by specific technical infrastructures, administrative apparatuses,
or value regimes, and not by vagaries of a social or cultural field”, from the “actual global”, or
“the global in the space of assemblage”, which they designated as “the product of multiple
determinations that are not reducible to a single logic”. As they explained:

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“The temporality of an assemblage is emergent. It does not always involve new forms, but forms what are
shifting, in formation, or at stake. As a composite concept, the term ‘global assemblage’ suggests inherent
tensions: global implies broadly encompassing, seamless, and mobile; assemblage implies heterogeneous,
contingent, unstable, partial, and situated.” (p. 11-12)
Lisa Rofel (2007) pushed this move to “de-Westernize” or “globalize” neoliberalism even
further. She reminded her readers that it was Latin Americans who initially popularized the use
of neoliberalism via their experiments with neoliberal policies. Focusing on China, she refused to
take the coherence of neoliberalism for granted, and instead, she asked after “its (neoliberalism)
historical and cultural creation.” (p.19). Replying on the analytic of “desiring China”, Rofel
treated neoliberalism as a national project to remake public culture in China. She argued that the
specificity of neoliberal practices in China lies partially in Chinese state and citizens’ efforts to
overcome their socialist past so that they can participate in the global capitalist order (p. 108). By
depicting a diverse set of practices, ranging from soap operas, legal cases, to dating practices, she
stitched together a complex picture of self-remaking and production of new subjectivities as
historical and local traditions interact with emerging and global. Most interestingly, she tried to
make more visible the unexpected outcomes, differences, frictions, and gaps in this seemingly
seamless process of neoliberal transformation by highlighting the “unexpected cultural struggles
over licit and illicit desires in China” (p. 200).
Rofel’s efforts to destablize and problematize neoliberalism and its subjectivization process
through concrete cultural and historical empirical work were echoed by other scholars as well.
For example, focusing on deconstructing and re-conceptualizing the “space-time” of modernity
at a neoliberal time, Grossberg (2010) urged intellectuals to see modernity as plural and the
problematic of modernity as a multiplicity. The analytical task, for him, is to look for the
“possibilities of contradictions among modernities” and to map “the lines of struggles,
contradictions, and transformations, as they are articulated to on another” in the “problematic of

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multiple modernities” (p. 93). Recognizing individuality as “the fundamental euro-modern way
of being in the world”, he nonetheless advises scholars to focus on how different “modalities of
individualization” are constructed by exploring empirically the various experiences and practices
of being modern. In a similar way, Laikwan Pang (2012), in her book on creativity and IPR
offenses in China, took piracy, copying, and counterfeiting as moments of cultural resistance
against neoliberal state-corporate’s efforts to instrumentalize creativity and to conceal the
inherent contradictions within late capitalism between forces of collectivilization and
proliferation and that of individualization and commotidization. Fighting against still prevalent
idea in scholarly communities that considered the study of non-Western cultures as case studies
and cultural examples to either support or refute “universal” theories, Pang deployed the
“particular” of China and Chinese IPR offenses to deconstruct and politicize “creativity”, and in
doing so, challenge the domination and hegemony of global neoliberalism (p. 23-24).
The stories I am going tell about entrepreneurial labors are informed by these scholarly
efforts to deconstruct, de-westernize, globalize, and re-construct neoliberalism as a particular
temporal-spatial formation of capitalist modernity. Following Ong, Collier, and Rofel who take
neoliberalism as an ongoing experimental project of national and self re-making in the space of
global encounters and assemblages, I treat entrepreneurial labor as a set of fluid and mobile
subjectivities and practices that are constantly being reworked as participants who are disparately
positioned culturally and geographically partake in the networked global new economy. As a
“global form”, the regime of entrepreneurial labor is defined by neoliberal ideals like flexibility,
individualization, and risk-taking. But as a “global assemblage”, it arose from the historical
contingencies and cultural specificities of the Chinese society as it has been integrated into the
global new economy and neoliberal world order since the late 1970s. By locating my site of

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analysis in the space of the “actual global”, I depict the heterogeneous and contentious formation
of entrepreneurial labor in China as it’s shaped by constant interaction and negotiation with
global neoliberal ideals.
Following Grossberg and Pang, I question the total domination of neoliberalism and
problematize its singularity. I rely on the experiences of the different groups of Chinese
entrepreneurial workers who are fighting and living at the forefront of neoliberal capitalism to
reveal its inherent multiplicities, contradictions, and gaps. In doing so, I hope to show how new
subjectivities are formed in relation to dialectical interplays between the global and local,
residual and emerging, hegemony and creative appropriations and subtle forms of resistance.
Now that I have established my theoretical positioning, I will proceed to map out the
contradictions immanent to the entrepreneurial labor regime through a “re-reading” of existing
literature on digital and cultural work before I discuss how the Chinese experiences further
complicate this debate.
The Contradictions of Entrepreneurial Labor
Since the late 1970s, the entrepreneurial labor regime began to gradually take over the post-
war Keynesian welfare society. It was initiated as a response to both transformations in capitalist
production—the rise of service industries and the knowledge economy with the displacement of
manufacturing jobs through overseas outsourcing—and the “cultural contradiction” emerged in
tandem with changes in capitalist production. The latter is what Bell (1976) described in the
American context as an apparent disjunction between a consumer society that nourishes hedonist
desires and instant self-gratification and an economic sphere that still demands the Puritan
ethnics of hard work and delayed gratification; and what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) referred
to as the conditions that finally gave rise to the “new spirit of capitalism” in their comparison of

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French managerial discourse between the 1970s and the 1990s. According to them, a new spirit
of capitalism emerged in the turbulent years of the 1970s as capital had incorporated “artistic
criticism” (launched against market domination, factory discipline, and massification of society,
for liberation of individual autonomy and authenticity) and disarmed “social criticism” (fighting
against “inequalities, misery, exploitation, and the selfishness of a world that stimulates
individualism rather than solidarity”) (p. 175).
The implementation of neoliberal entrepreneurial labor regime had on one hand
temporarily eased the cultural contradictions—appeasing middle class resistance against
capitalism by muddling the distinctions between work and leisure, labor and capital, culture and
economy. It had, on the other, partially addressed the structural contradictions of capitalist
accumulation through Post-Fordist organization of production such as flexibilization and
feminization of labor, networked production, and global subcontracting and outsourcing. For
proof of the success of the entrepreneurial regime in revitalizing capitalism, one need to look no
further than the dazzling growth of the “new economy” that relied on new information and
communication technologies (ICTs) and the cultural and creative industries in the 1990s, which
reached its apogee in 2000 before the bust of the dot.com bubble.
However, as a quintessential neoliberal product, the entrepreneurial labor regime is full of
contradictions. Critical views drew attention to the new forms of capitalist extraction of surplus
value, exploitation and inequalities that had accompanied the new regime of entrepreneurial
labor. Whereas optimistic evaluations emphasized the space opened up for alternative work
cultures that not only empower the individual but also revive the collective and the social.
Its contentious nature can be traced to its American genesis in the Cold War computer labs
funded by the military-industry complex where entrepreneurial, collaborative, interdisciplinary,

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and non-hierarchical labor practices were pioneered by an elite group of technical experts for
purposes of national defense and military expansion (Turner, 2010). As Barbrook and Cameron
(1996) sharply observed in their article unpacking the “California Ideology” that “the Americans
have always had state planning, only they call it the defense budget.” They also noted how the
1990s Silicon Valley tech boom had been facilitated by a bizarre marriage between the legacy of
New Left anti-corporate liberalism that idealized virtual communities as a new site of creative
expression and self-emancipation and a revival of the Right-wing conservatism that fused
economic liberalism with technological determinism to push forward a vision of anti-state
market fundamentalism.
Focusing on the history of hacking, Coleman and Golub (2008) revealed the heterogeneous
ways in which liberalism had been imagined and practiced within the hacker communities, which
debunked the myth of an uncontested libertarian tradition. Particularly interesting was their
account of hackers’ struggle with the tension between individualism and collectivism, which
they argued had opened a window into “long-standing liberal tension” between “positive and
negative freedom.” (p. 269). This tension between individualism and collectivism was echoed by
Hardt and Negri (2001), who deployed the concept of “social factory” to described the ways in
which post-fordist capital had expanded production beyond “factory walls” and labor beyond
“waged workers”, making it “increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction of any measure of the
working day and thus separate the time of production from the time of reproduction, or work
time from leisure time.” (pp. 402-403). For them, however, this “real subsumption” of capitalism
also breeds conditions for its own destruction, though the collective power of networked digital
workers, which Hardt and Negri referred to as the “multitude”, is concealed by neoliberalism’s
individualizing discourse (Read, 2008). Networked information and communication

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technologies, the very tool that global capital wields to control and exploit them, can by
appropriated by the multitude as “counter-Empire” weapons to achieve emancipation (Ong,
2006).
Based on her long-term observation of independent cultural workers in London, McRobbie
(2016) found the post-1980s emergence of new sites of individualized “New Labour” to be a
contradictory space. Entrepreneurship and freelance work are experienced by workers, especially
women and ethnic minorities seeking freedom from traditional domesticity or chasing the dream
of social mobility, as “an important source for self-actualization, even freedom and
independence” (p. 19). But it also epitomizes a new cultural sphere that “offers government
opportunities for a post-industrialized economy unfettered by the constraints and costs of
traditional employment” and where “capital finds novel ways of offloading its responsibility for
a workforce” (Ibid). McRobbie’s critique of individualization was shared by Gina Neff (2012) in
her study of the new work culture emerged during the height of the 1990s dot.com bubble. Based
on her interviews with what she called the “venture labor” in New York’s Silicon Alley, Neff
found that an entrepreneurial and speculative regime of labor was formed in tandem with a
culture encouraging the individualization of risk. As a consequence, individualized workers,
rather than the state of capital, came to bear the disproportionate brunt of risks resulted from
excessive financialization. Observing UK-based creative workers working for small and
medium-sized cultural companies, Banks (2007), on the other hand, described how “enhanced
information and communication structures” have provided more channels for individuals not
only to craft reflexive and “post-traditional” cultural identities that are critical of the state and
capital, and also to revitalize “deep rooted desires” for sociality and collective belonging and to

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“re-embed” themselves socially by inventing new forms of networked communities and ethical
social practices (p. 105-118).
The rise of the so-called Web 2.0 culture, social media, and the platform economy in the
past decade or so has invigorated the entrepreneurial labor regime, further blurring the distinction
between community-based DIY culture and gift economy and capitalist production and
reproduction. The career of the Web 2.0 rhetoric began in 2004 as “a marketing ploy to
differentiate a new crop of tech companies from their failed dot.com counterparts” (Marwick,
2013: 27). Popularized by Tim O’Reilly at the 2004 conference of the O’Reilly Media Group,
Web 2.0 emphasized the nature of the new generation of the web technologies as “platforms”
with connotations of a renewed sense of cyber political liberty and new opportunities for
innovation and business (Gillespie, 2010). Typical Web 2.0 semantics like “participation”,
“interactivity”, “user-generated content” (UGC), came to dominate people’s imagination in the
2000s about the Internet and were materialized through new web companies like Facebook,
Myspace, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and Flickr et.
On one hand, as practices of outsourcing, downsizing, and privatization had gained ground
in the workplace, part-time, freelance, contract-based employment patterns become the norm,
especially in the “cultural and creative” sectors where “portfolio careers” prevails (Gregg, 2011;
Ross, 2003). On the other, consumption practices, such as updating content on Facebook,
uploading videos to Youtube, participating in “customer experience” campaigns, are channeled
into profit-generating and thus “productive” labor while being touted as “creative” and identity
or “lifestyle” expressions (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Terranova, 2000). These new technology-
empowered DIY communities in which everyone is expected to be creative have indeed lowered
the threshold of entry to the art and cultural industries for amateurs and young professional

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aspirants while providing new channels and tools for cultural and identity expression (Jenkins et
al., 2013). In exchange, they are subject to the new economy’s norms of visibility, branding, and
publicity, and “willingly” accept the new labor contract of precarity, risk and flexibility as
“normal”, part of the “deal”, if not enmancipatory (Marwick, 2013; Neff, 2012).
In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, Silicon Valley tech world quickly re-
emerged as the brightest spot in the slump. Social media, such as Instagram and Snapchat,
replaced Web 2.0 as the new buzzword, which was soon supplemented by the sharing economy
and crowd sourcing, epitomized in new tech “unicorns” like Airbnb, Uber, Kickstarter, and 99
Design etc. (Marwick, 2013; Schor, 2014). Covering a growing number of activities used to be
performed by full-time employees, this new batch of start-ups are transforming the landscape of
work around the world at a time of high unemployment, formal employment decline, and wage
stagnation. However, multi-billion dollar businesses founded on the concept of space,
transportation, and labor sharing also speak to renewed desire for communities, sociability,
mutual help at a time of heightened uncertainty. Experts and regulators, still trying to come to
grip with these changes, came up with new labels such as the “gig economy”, the “on-demand
economy”, or the “uberization of work”, to predict a future of employment replaced by micro
businesses and small or self-employed entrepreneurs (Rao, 2012; Schor, 2014).
In the past few years, the world of start-up entrepreneurs and IT employment are becoming
increasingly institutionalized and normalized. High-tech startups that had made their fortune in
the previous two decades transformed into monopoly capital, making it increasingly difficult for
entrepreneurs of today to replicate their start-up-to-IPO story. The growing dominance of p2p
service platforms, on the other hand, are contributing to the rapid rise of a “new category of
work” that “isn’t full-time employment but is not running your own business either” (Manjoo,

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2015). This proliferation of entrepreneurial labor practices generated mixed feelings as people
revel in the newly-gained autonomy and flexibility over their life and work, while facing more
insecurity, precariousness and (self)-exploitation.
These tensions between collectivism and individualism, mutual sharing and commercial
utilitarianism, empowerment and exploitation that informed scholarly work on the politics of
entrepreneurial labor in the Euro-American cultures are to certain extent made more poignant in
the Chinese context. As I will show, since the late 1970s, the post-Mao China was integrated into
this neoliberal global order mainly as a manufacturer—a site of cheap labor and exporter of
cheap products. With some success, China has been struggling in the past few decades to move
up the global value chain, trying to reinvent the economy to boost innovation and domestic
consumption. The 2008 global financial crisis rendered this export-dependent and investment-
driven model of development increasing untenable. Thus, the expansion of the entrepreneurial
labor regime in China is articulated to an uneven state-led “compressed modernization” process
in which neoliberal privatization took place without a firmly-established “liberalism” and where
a “party-state managed individualization” occurred without establishing a Western liberalist
“individualism” (Ong and Zhang, 2008; Yan, 2010). Consequently, as I will show, the Chinese
case makes more palpable the contentious nature of the entrepreneurial subjectivities as shaped
by the complex interaction of the residual and emerging, and the social, political and cultural.
Entrepreneurial Labor in China
The entrepreneurial labor regime expanded in China paralleling the post-socialist market
reform and trends towards individualization. Not only did it emerge out of a different historical
trajectory, its post-socialist unfolding has also been shaped by the constant interaction between
local traditions and necessities and global influences and transformations. I do not want to

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essentialize Chinese traditions nor is it my intention to treat local and historical characteristics as
unchanging. My approach to entrepreneurial labor and neoliberal capitalism in China is more
close to the Chinese Republican economic philosopher and translator Wang Yanan’s treatment of
capitalism when it was introduced to China in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
century. In a recently
published book by the historian Rebecca Karl (2017) who excavated Wang’s prescient ideas,
Wang cautioned non-Western scholars against the dual-tendency of claiming “capitalist
exceptionalism” or “metaphysical universalism”, and instead he treated “the economic” as “a
philosophy of human behavior” that “should retain and be based in a dynamic relation to
everyday materiality” (Kindle Locations 133-135). Following Wang Yanan, I want to present in
this dissertation how “residual elements” of Chinese tradition are being “reconstructed” by
global neoliberal capitalism as much as how “they (residual elements) constantly act as a series
of constraints upon” (and I would add innovations upon) “the elements of the capitalist economy,
either by contesting or adapting to them” (Ibid, Kindle Locations 2590). So in the final part of
this introduction, I will situate the entrepreneurial labor regime in both Chinese historical
traditions and the reality of contemporary Chinese society as I briefly introduce my three case
studies. In particular, I want to highlight the “embeddedness” of individualization in China,
which I argue has shaped and is also constituted by the culturally and historically specific
subjectivities of entrepreneurial labor in China.
Prior to China’s forced integration into the world colonial capitalist system in the 19
th

century, the imperial China had largely remained an agrarian society characterized by state-
dominated family-based mode of economic production. The bourgeois-advocated and state-
championed economic liberalism that had set Europe and later the US on a capitalist track of
world expansion never took hold in imperial China, though burgeoning market economy and

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commercial culture can be traced back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279) (Lin, 2013). For
instance, Hill Gates (1996) distinguished China’s late imperial economy prior to the invasion of
Western colonial capitalist power as driven by the interaction between petty capitalism—
kinship-based organization of agricultural and non-agricultural production led by agnatic males
that utilized free or underpaid labor of female, elderly, and children/teenage labor—and the
tributary mode of production—the extraction of surplus value by the imperial state and officials
through nonmarket mechanism such as political and military means. A direct consequence of
China’s divergence from the Western liberalist model of capitalism is the greater embeddedness
of Chinese economy and workers the state-dominated and family-based society, which many
argued had also contributed to its “under-development” (Huang, 1985, Hung, 2015; Pomeranz,
2000).
Compared to Gates’ neo-Marxian analysis, the more “culture-centric” accounts also
substantiated the relational characteristics of traditional Chinese individuals. For instance, Fei
(1948) argued that the traditional Chinese personhood was firmly embedded into the network of
family or lineage. Living under the “ancestors’ shadow”, the Chinese individual in traditional
society was always relational (Hsu, 1948; Yan, 2010). In the absence of a Western protestant
ethic, the Chinese work ethic was historically defined mainly by Confucian familial values like
patriarchy, filial piety, and loyalty to family (Redding, 1990; Sun and Lei, 2017). Stevan Harrell
(1985) described this traditional Chinese work ethic as “familial entrepreneurialism”, and
concluded that the “Chinese will work hard when they see possible long-term benefits, in terms
of improved material conditions and/or security, for a group with which they identify” (p. 217).
Hung (2015) identified the powerful and obtrusive imperial state as the main reason for the lack
of a strong bourgeois entrepreneurial class in China. According to him, the Qing government

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operated under the “Confucianist conviction of benevolent rule and paternalistic protection of the
weak”, which inhibited the growth of capitalist class in China. As he explained:
“Taking into consideration that the Confucianist state viewed merchants and other commoners as children
who deserved equal grace from the state as a metaphorical patriarch, state protection of the poor from the
excess of merchants’ profiteering activities was tantamount to the paternalist protection of a younger
sibling from a bullying older one. In light of the insecurity that the contentious lower class caused the
mercantile elite and the lack of political protection against this insecurity, the entrepreneurial elite’s
propensity to transform themselves into gentry or state elite over generations becomes more
comprehensible.” (p. 31)
As we will see in my case studies of entrepreneurial labor, family production and strong state
intervention, and values associated with these traditions, such as pragmatism, defensiveness
against insecurity, personalism or guanxi, still persist till today in China as residual cultural
influences in shaping new labor subjectivities (Nonini, 2008; Redding, 1990). Reflecting back,
these factors that had constituted the “under-development” of capitalism and the failure of
bourgeois revolutionary movements in modern Chinese history, such as imperialism, the weak
capitalist entrepreneur class, the once-powerful but declining state, the huge pool of poor and
surplus rural labor and semi-proletarianization of peasant laborers, had ironically made socialism
more appealing than in the more industrialized West (Meisner, 1999). Among other things, they
drove China into an alternative route of socialist modernization and industrialization in the latter
half of the 20
th
century.
If the greater embeddedness of economy in society and politics had generated the
seemingly paradoxical “revolutionary advantages of backwardness” (Meisner, 1999), a primary
challenge faced by the nascent Communist regime was to construct a sinicized “socialist
economy” to effectively industrialize a “backward” nation while searching for an alternative to
liberal colonial capitalism. The Chinese socialists had opted for a state-commanded regime of
centralized planning and internal accumulation based on an urban-rural dual structure. Entering

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the socialist decades (1949-1978), the primary unit of labor organization became state-led
collectives, be it the urban work units (danwei) or rural communes. In a planned economy
without a national market, these collectives were not only workplaces, but also “all-
encompassing system of socialist redistribution and political control” (p.3). The socialist party-
state, in its pursuit of an alternative modernization project through state socialism and
nationalism, has disembedded the individuals from the pre-modern family-individual axis while
simultaneously re-embedding them into a new state-individual axis mediated by the collectives.
This double move had resulted in a “partial and collective type of individualization” (Yan, 2010;
Sun and Lei, 2017).
In the city, the tension between development and equality was tackled by establishing a
“socialist social contract” (Lee, 2007). The “iron bowl of rice”, which guarantees the urban
worker life-long employment and benefits, and the “soft budget constraint”, which ensures
government “bailout” of under-performing economic units (Wang, 2008). However, the urban
work regime was also characterized by intra-class and gender inequalities in which the male
permanent worker in state-owned enterprises became the superior socialist subject at the expense
of the female, collective unit, and non-permanent workers (Lee, 2007). The rising privileges of
government bureaucrats also posed a challenge to socialist equality by enacting a new system of
hierarchy based on political, rather than economic power (Meisner, 1986).
In the countryside, land reform abolished landlordism, and later communes and rural-urban
registration system were constructed to more effectively organize rural production. On the one
hand, these policies had ensured the efficient extraction of agricultural surplus for urban
industrialization. Indeed, the swift industrialization of the city and the welfare enjoyed by urban
workers were mainly subsidized by a “relatively high state grain tax and high quotas of grain

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which peasants were forced to sell to government stores at low state-fixed prices” (Ibid, 114). On
the other, although the rural economy stagnated, the commune system, playing the dual functions
of the economic and social units, provided the peasants with better welfare services and social
securities, such as health care and educational opportunities that combine both study and work
(Meisner, 1986; Wang, 2008).
With mixed success, the Chinese Communist party had tried to instill a new work ethic
among the populace based on a mixture of socialist and nationalist ideologies, such as
egalitarianism, asceticism, self-sacrifice, and national self-reliance. In reality, traditional work
ethic and practices, instead of being effaced, had been reformulated and blended with new
socialist and nationalist ideologies in service of a party-state-led modernization project (Walder,
1988). As I will elaborate in chapter two with the case of Zhongguancun, the Maoist socialist
modernization path is distinct from both the Western capitalist and the Soviet socialist models of
modernity with its anti-bureaucratic and nationalist emphasis. Though the state had liberated
individuals from pre-modern institutions, it had also recast them into socialist persons committed
to the “greater cause” of state-championed modernization (Kleinman et al., 2011; Yan, 2010).
Therefore, the Chinese socialist individual should be distinguished from the modern Western
rights-bearing liberal subject as that “the individual remains a means to the end of
modernization” (Ibid). If the pre-modern Chinese mainly worked for their family, the socialist
Chinese citizens were encouraged to devote their labor first and foremost to the nation’s socialist
modernization cause. However, individual competition over job assignments was intense in the
socialist years despite the ideological emphasis on collectivity. Though political and moral
criteria often trumped technical expertise in evaluating job candidates, which only reinforced the

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state’s monopoly over individuals’ life chances in a planned economy without a labor market
(Shirk, 1982).
To restore its legitimacy following a decade’s turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the
Chinese party-state initiated the reform and opening up policy in the late 1970s, which had set
China on a state capitalist track. China’s gradual re-integration into the global capitalist system
in the past four decades can be divided into several different stages but what we have witnessed
in general is a simultaneous expansion of the private sector, growing social disparities that have
accompanied rapid capitalist expansion, and the sustained domination of the Chinese party-state
in both politics and economy as the state continuously adjusts its governance to changing
domestic and international environment (Nonini, 2008; Yan, 2010). Urban work units and rural
communes faded out with the gradual privatization of housing, education, and medical care
systems. This state-led market reform had resulted in a “truncated institutionalized
individualization” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2010). With the dismantling of the socialist
social safety nets, individuals were granted greater autonomy in pursuing freedom in the
expanding market realm, mainly in terms of new entrepreneurial businesses and employment
opportunities and consumption and lifestyle choices, as long as they pose no threat to the
regime’s political power (Ong and Zhang, 2008). However, as I am going to show, the post-
socialist individualization process has also been highly uneven along the lines of gender, class
and locale.
We first began to see the post-reform entrepreneurial self in the countryside in the late
1970s and early 1980s with the return of family farming and the flourish of township and village
enterprises (TVEs). As encapsulated by the slogan of “leaving the land, not the village (Litu
bulixiang), the diversification of agricultural production and rapid rural industrialization in the

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1980s had effectively eased the oversupply of peasant labor, improved rural income and living
conditions, while curbing the large inflow of unemployed (underemployed) agricultural laborers
into the city (Huang, 2008). This return to family-based organization of labor in the countryside,
as I will elaborate in chapter three with the case of the e-commerce village Wantou, had initiated
the trend towards family-based individualization. In Wantou, the 1980s and early 1990s
witnessed the revival of traditional handicraft businesses and home-based gendered weaving
labor with the emergence of handicraft-export TVEs. The industry became privatized since the
mid-1990s while Wantou, like most villages in China, had seen a large exodus of male peasants
to the cities to become migrant workers while most women remained at home as outsourced
weavers for new private companies. All these have set a foundation for the rise of handicraft e-
commerce in the late 2000s.
Urban reform lagged behind till the later years of the 1980s. But it was not until 1992 did
the neoliberal reform begin to unfold rapidly as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), trying to
overcome its legitimacy crisis in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen event, made an important
policy decision to strengthen political control while further liberalizing the economy (Wang,
2003). Prominent among the early urban entrepreneurs who braved the storm of reform were the
first generation of post-socialist IT entrepreneurs researchers and professors from socialist state
research institutions and universities who had decided to “Xiahai” (literally meaning “jumping
into the sea of commerce”) and establish their own or join non-state IT firms. As I will describe
in more detail in chapter two with the case of Beijing’s famous Zhongguancun high-tech zone,
the post-reform private IT industry was built on the socialist defense-driven military-academic
complex and has maintained intricate relationships with various levels of governmental agencies.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when these IT firms were founded, the majority of those

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researcher-cum-entrepreneurs were still affiliated or connected to their work units (danwei). But
they were given considerable space for autonomy and self-management. Many wore a “red hat”
and were initially established as profit-earning spin-offs of their state-owned work units that
were often mired in stagnation due to the post-Mao rollback of state funding (Zhou, 2007).
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s till the 2008 global financial crisis, an export-driven
model of development that takes advantage of China’s large pool of well-educated workers
prevailed. However, the contradiction between an increasingly individualized workforce and
China’s disadvantaged position in the international division of labor as mainly a manufacturer
rather than an innovator begun to manifest. Since the turn of the new millennium, the state’s
promotion of the cultural and ICT industries and the growing anxiety over China’s “lack of
creativity” have only intensified the contradiction. For a growing number of Chinese young
people, work was no longer associated with participation in the socialist revolutionary cause nor
do they work mainly to support family members, rather, mobility, autonomy, self-development,
and personal fulfillment, along with utilitarian concerns such as salary and welfare, became
increasingly important factors of consideration in job search (Hanser, 2002).
This emergence of new labor subjectivities that prioritize the cultural and personal
meanings that work offered resembled Heelas’ (2002) “self-work ethic” in which people treat
work as “opportunities for ‘inner’ or psychological identity exploration and cultivation” (p. 83).
Though more common among well-educated urban youth and the nation’s rapidly expanding
middle class, this subjective turn in labor was also observed among the younger generation of
peasants, peasant workers and urban working class young people (Pun 2005). For example,
ethnography of young migrant workers show that their main motivation for leaving the
countryside is not economic hardship, but rather the desire to “see the outside world and to have

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the freedom and choices for making a life of their own” (Kleinman et al., 2011:4). Kleinman et
al.’s metaphor of the “divided self” well captures the hybrid and contested Chinese personhood
emerged out of the post-Mao reform. It is, first and foremost, an “enterprising self” that feels
responsible for the self and takes initiatives to reinvent the self to adapt to the constantly
changing market demands (du Guy, 2004; Rose, 1989). It is also a “desiring self”, whose
aspirations, needs, and longings bespoke the formation of a new affective post-socialist
entrepreneur of the self as distinguished from the revolutionary and self-sacrificing socialist
subject defined by his/her proper “class consciousness” (Rofel, 2007: 6).
However, as Yan (2010) reminds us, these emerging subjectivities “must be understood in
the context of China’s quest for modernity” and “cannot be separated from the defining power of
the state” (p. 505). As we will see, most visibly in Zhongguancun, that the state-encouraged
nationalism still have considerable purchase among young entrepreneurial workers, serving as an
important source of identification for those who are cosmopolitan and well-informed (Hoffman,
2010; Zhou, 2005). Apart from nationalism, public-minded civic consciousness, sense of justice,
and anti-authoritarian activism also fuel the collective quest for communities both online and in
the physical world (Rolandsen, 2008; Yang, 2009). Meanwhile, family persists as an important
unit of labor organization and site of identification, re-embbeding individualized post-socialist
subjects into new support systems. As we will see in Wantou, the social, cultural, and material
function of family is central to the life of peasants and peasant workers who are often
disadvantaged by the rural-urban divide and thus have to turn to family for emotional and
financial support. These subjectivities, as I will show in Chapter four with the case of social
media based women luxury resellers, are also highly gendered, dividing women along the lines
of class, generation, and locale. The different waves of feminization of labor in post-socialist

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China generated paradoxical consequences for Chinese women, opening up new opportunities
for employment and entrepreneurship for some and excluding others, while subjecting them to
the competing forces of individualization and re-traditionalization.
The contradiction between Chinese workers’ desire for more rewarding and personally
fulfilling work and China’s belated structural transformation was made more acute by the 2008
global crisis, which converged with the post-2008 rise of 3/4G mobile technologies and
platform-based social media and sharing economy, and the Chinese new Xi-Li leadership’s
determination to restructure the Chinese economy and society. The result is a proliferation of
digital micro businesses and entrepreneurial labor practices among Chinese of various socio-
economic backgrounds. This post-2008 proliferation of entrepreneurial labor both rides on and
further constitutes the culturally and historically specific processes of individualization and
formation of new forms of hybrid subjectivities in China. Far from an uncontested and unified
process, the making of the Chinese entrepreneurial selves with the expansion of the
entrepreneurial regime is not only full of contentions and contradictions, but is also gender, class,
and locale specific.
Each of the following chapters tell a different story about entrepreneurial labor in post-
2008 China, however, I will do so by situating each group of entrepreneurial workers in their
specific locale and different historical trajectories that they had taken to arrive at the present
moment. Together, these stories present urban, rural, and transnational perspectives, representing
respectively the experiences of middle-class urban young people, peasants and peasant workers,
and transnationally mobile middle-class young women.
Chapter 2, “Middle-Class Work Imaginaries in Zhongguancun,” depicts the new
entrepreneurial work imaginaries observed among young IT entrepreneurs in Beijing’s

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Zhongguancun High-Tech Zone of Beijing’s Haidian District, known internationally as China’s
Silicon Valley. While Zhongguancun has been serving as the mecca for Chinese IT entrepreneurs
from across the country and around the world, the region witnessed a new wave of IT
entrepreneurial gold rush following the 2008 global crisis. In 2015 and 2016, I spent four months
observing and collecting stories told by entrepreneurs in several café-style coworking spaces on
the newly-constructed and government-funded “Inno Way” while living in a chain hostel (a
startup itself) for young entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun. I witnessed, along with these new
entrepreneurial spaces, emerging labor subjectivities that are both similar but also different from
what I had observed and read about American start-up entrepreneurs in places like Silicon Valley
and Silicon Alley.
I first trace the individualization of work in Zhongguancun by chronicling the different
generations of “entrepreneurs” in the region from the danwei (work unit) based red scientists and
engineers in the socialist years, the PC traders and makers on the “street of the electronics” in the
1980s and 1990s, to the venture-backed Internet entrepreneurs of the new millennium. Then I
describe how the new work imaginaries, emerged at the particular post-2008 conjuncture of
China’s economic and social restructuring and global transformations in labor organization, both
continue and rupture from the previous generations. Specifically, I show how entrepreneurial
workers’ desire for individualized self-exploratory work and their investor mentality to labor
coexist with a longing for new forms of sociality, which are articulated to the state’s strategic
appropriation of socialist grassroots mobilization rhetoric and the persistence of techno-
nationalist identifications among the entrepreneurs. The formation of new hybrid entrepreneurial
subjectivities reflects the contentious and unstable alliance between politics, commerce, and
culture under state-led financialization and digitalization.

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Chapter 3, “Rural E-commerce Entrepreneurs in Wantou Village,” examines the work and
life experiences of e-commerce entrepreneurs in Chinese countryside, focusing on Wantou
village in Northeast China’s Shandong province. Between 2013 and 2015, I visited the village
for three times and in 2015 I lived in the home of a village entrepreneur for three months. As one
of the 1311 “Taobao Villages” in China, Wantou boasts thousands’ years of tradition of
handicraft weaving—a practice that was revived by the recent boom in e-commerce
entrepreneurship. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, a bleak urban labor market drove a large
number of migrant workers back to the village. Meanwhile, shrinking handicraft export and
growing demand from domestic consumers online had propelled the digitalization of handicraft
businesses in Wantou. Not only did the migrant returnees find alternative self-employment by
opening their own handicraft businesses on e-commerce platforms like Taobao, a few urban-born
entrepreneurs also moved to the village for business opportunities.
I will first situate the family-based rural e-commerce entrepreneurial labor in the history of
family-oriented individualization in rural China, and how family e-commerce emerged in the
post-2008 context as a solution to China’s rural-urban unequal development. Then I describe the
co-construction of Wantou as a national model e-commerce village by governments, the e-
commerce giant Alibaba, and entrepreneurs. I will focus particularly on the entrepreneurs and
handicraft weavers’ labor experiences as they had been integrated into the networked regime of
accumulation. I argue that instead of erasing the materiality and collective characteristic of labor
and bridging the rural-urban divide, the digital entrepreneurial labor regime has intensified the
contradictions between manual and mental, individualized and collective, and rural and urban.
The integration of Chinese countryside into global digital capitalism has simultaneously opened

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up new opportunities to make capitalism more livable, while giving rise to new forms of
precarity, anxiety, and inequalities.
Chapter 4, “Fashioning the Feminine Self Through Entrepreneurial Labor,” delves into the
world of the recently emerged Internet-based micro-business opportunities for women, focusing
particularly on transnationally mobile middle-class Chinese women who resell Western luxury
products via social media and e-commerce sites. This niche market was created around the mid-
2000s, took off following the 2008 crisis, and soared after China became the world’s largest
luxury market in 2011. I read these new gendered work practices and subjectivities in relation to
the debate on women’s labor and the public-private split under capitalism. Then I show how
Chinese women’s “incomplete individualization”, their greater “embeddedness” and “lack of
autonomy from the state and family, problematizes the debate.
Based on online ethnography and interviews with women entrepreneurs, I argue that
Internet-based luxury reselling as a gendered digital entrepreneurial labor practice had emerged
as a cultural, economic, and technological “fix” to the contradictions that these middle-class
young women experience. Caught between individualization and retraditionalization, they are
subjected to the demands of competing gender regimes in post-socialist China. These class-
specific responses to the tensions inherent to China’s Post-Socialist modernity allows some
women more choices, autonomy, flexibility, and mobility through the strategic performance of
gendered identities and networks. But such freedom is often already contained by the biopolitical
governmentality of both digital capitalism and the patriarchal Chinese state, which divide women
based on class, race, and nationality, render employment precarious and atomized, and encourage
consumer citizenship.

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By now, I hope that I had made clear what I mean by entrepreneurial labor and the kind of
cultural work I want to accomplish by building my dissertation around the concept, in addition to
presenting a roadmap for what’s ahead of us. As storytellers, we scholars are quintessential
entrepreneurial labor who, despite of our intellectual agency, struggles, and resistance, share the
same ground under neoliberal capitalism with the Chinese entrepreneurial workers that I’ve
covered in my dissertation. As Grossberg (2010) said that “telling better stories of the
conjuncture will take serious time and even more serious labor”, which will “require us to
reinvent ourselves as intellectuals and scholars, to change our intellectual practices and to
produce new kinds of collective and collaborative scholar-subjects” (p. 290). The journey of
writing this dissertation had taken me to unexpected places, exposed me to new ideas produced
by academics and non-academics, and generated new friendships and alliances. I consider what I
will present in the following pages co-created stories formed through inter-subjective
relationships established with my informants and through hard entrepreneurial labor.

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Chapter 2
Middle-Class Work Imaginaries In Zhongguancun
In September 2011, the American tech entrepreneur and media pundit Vivek Wadhwa
published an article in The Washington Post titled “What we really need to fear about China”. In
the article, he dismissed the rising volume of Chinese academic papers as “largely irrelevant or
are plagiarized” and the growing number of patents filed by China as “tollbooths that the country
is erecting to tax foreign companies that come to China”. Instead, he praised the entrepreneurial
spirit that he had observed among China’s younger generation and the vibrant IT start-up scene
in China as the “real threat” to American domination. In particular, he named the Garage Café, a
café-style startup incubator located at the heart of Beijing’s high-tech district Zhongguancun, as
an exemplary site of this new entrepreneurial ideal.
However, by taking a snapshot of the post-2008 IT entrepreneurial boom in Zhongguancun
from a Silicon Valley perspective, Wadhwa had missed or neglected some important stories.
While he celebrated the Garage Café’s embrace of the Silicon-Valley style startup-investment
pairing mechanism, he said little about the state-led financialization and digitalization policies in
the past decade that had given rise to sites like the Garage Café, and nothing about
Zhongguancun’s history as the nation’s most important science and technology (S&T) base
dating back to the socialist years. Wadhwa was right when he observed that Chinese middle-
class young people today are no longer excited about “the idea of working for a stodgy state
enterprise, an autocratic government, or what they deemed to be an opportunistic foreign
multinational”, and that they are still worried about the government wanting to take control or
take a share of their business’s success. But what he didn’t see were some of the young
entrepreneurs’ equally strong identification with the state’s techno-nationalist ambition and

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others’ eagerness to ride on the government’s politics in promoting IT entrepreneurship. If
anything, the Chinese entrepreneurs’ ambivalent attitude towards the government— the co-
existence of mistrust and desire to be co-opted by state power— is deeply seated in the nation’s
Confucian tradition.
This chapter tells one story about the post-2008 proliferation of entrepreneurial labor in
China from the perspective of urban middle-class IT entrepreneurs in Beijing’s Zhongguancun
district, known internationally as China’s Silicon Valley. I will situate three emerging
entrepreneurial work imaginaries observed among early-stage IT entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun
in the historical evolution of IT labor in the region and the post-2008 state-championed
acceleration of financialization and digitalization in China. In doing so, I intend to fill in some of
the missing parts of Wadhwa’s story by highlighting what Trouillot (2003) referred to as the
local particulars hidden by the global sameness. That is, I describe how the global process of
accelerated individualization of labor in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis is articulated to
the culturally and historically specific experience of middle-class IT entrepreneurial workers in
urban China.
From the danwei (work unit) based red scientists and engineers in the socialist years, the
PC traders and makers on the “street of the electronics” in the 1980s and 1990s, to the venture-
backed Internet entrepreneurs of the new millennium, Entrepreneurial IT workers in
Zhongguancun have always been at the forefront of socialist movements and post-socialist
neoliberal reforms, serving as trailblazers of the individualization and flexibilization of labor
regime in China since the 1980s. However, this state-led post-socialist individualization of labor,
co-created by the interaction of the global and local, residual and emerging forces, took its own
trajectory.

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The post-2008 proliferation of IT entrepreneurial labor both continues and ruptures from the
earlier regimes of labor. It is a result of the interplay between the post-2008 technology-
facilitated further dismantling of traditional employment on a global scale and the ongoing
economic and social restructuring in China. The emerging middle-class work imaginaries rose as
a response to the post-crisis need to re-legitimize and rejuvenate capitalism. They mobilize
residual discourses, such as the socialist grassroots mobilization rhetoric and techno-nationalism,
to energize the Chinese middle-class’s post-recession search for more autonomous and
rewarding work, financial security and freedom, as well as a more fair and democratic
workplaces/communities. Specifically, the Zhongguancun entrepreneurial workers’ desire for
individualized self-exploratory work and their investor mentality to labor coexist with a longing
for new forms of sociality and their identification with the state’s techno-nationalist and reflexive
modernization projects.
I tell the story based on my reading of published histories about the Zhongguancun district,
a four-month participant observation conducted in two collective working spaces in
Zhongguancun and short visits paid to 12 other similar entrepreneurial spaces in Beijing, as well
as 45 formal and many more informal interviews collected during my stay in Beijing in 2015 and
2016. I will trace the changing work culture in Zhongguancun from the socialist work units to
venture startup by depicting three waves of IT entrepreneurship, underlining the historical
continuations and changes leading up to the post-2008 moment. Then I describe the new middle
class work imaginaries emerged in the past decade in Zhongguancun as co-produced by global
and local, residual and emerging forces.

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From Socialist Danwei to Venture Start-up
The expansion and deepening of the entrepreneurial and individualized labor practices in
Zhongguancun since the late 1970s has paralleled its transformation from a state-founded and
military-driven R&D base for science and technology since the 1950s to a high-tech cluster for
IT corporations and start-up companies comparable to the Silicon Valley. In this section, I will
briefly trace the flexibilization and individualization of IT work in post-socialist Zhongguancun
as shaped by the interplay between global neoliberal influences and changing local forces. My
purpose in introducing this history is first, to situate the post-2008 emergence of entrepreneurial
work imaginaries in the historical evolution of culturally-specific entrepreneurial labor
subjectivities in post-socialist China, and second, to highlight the constantly evolving and
persistent influence exerted by the nation-state on the changing regime of labor.
Red Scientists and Engineers in Socialist Danwei (1950s-late 1970s)
The career of Zhongguancun as China’s primary base for scientific and technological R&D
begun in the early years of the PRC. In the context of Cold War military competition, the
Chinese socialist state transformed this rural area on the outskirt of Beijing into its S&T
establishment by either setting up from the scratch or moving first-class research and educational
institutions into Zhongguancun. Prominent among them were the Chinese Academy of Sciences
(CAS), Beijing University and Tsinghua University. By the 1960s, Zhongguancun had become
“the largest and most concentrated base for research and education in the Far East” with 42
research institutes, 67 universities and at least 35 military R&D related institutions (Ling 2008:
9). It is home to many eminent red scientists and engineers behind Communist China’s proud
achievement in S&T, such as the nuclear weapon and long-range missile.

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Socialist China’s S&T development was mainly driven by two goals. On one hand, deeply
rooted in modern China’s humiliating experience of encountering Western and Japanese
conquerors, a strong techno-nationalist agenda linked technological advancement to national
security and economic development and emphasized technological self-reliance (Feigenbaum,
2003). On the other, the Maoist goal of striving for an egalitarian and classless society stood in
uneasy tension with this developmental techno-nationalism. Their negotiation led to a tug-of-war
within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) between the technocratic and mass mobilization
approaches to S&T (Wang, 2016). Throughout the socialist years, Zhongguancun scientists and
engineers were at the centre of the S&T development and the struggles between the different
visions for Chinese society. Oftentimes, they had to carefully navigate the risks and opportunities
presented by the struggles.
The techno-nationalist approach, following the Soviet model of industrialization and
bureaucratization, placed scientific and technological expertise at the centre of the techno-
nationalist project. As a result of the state’s techno-nationalist policies implemented in the 1950s
and early 1960s, many patriotic scientists and engineers trained abroad had returned to China to
become the leading members of the Zhongguancun scientific community. Young scientists and
engineers were also been hatched in the newly-established universities and research institutes
across the country, and some of the best came to work in Zhongguancun after graduation. Both
the overseas returnees and the locally-trained scientists and engineers were often nationalist who
identified strongly with the socialist motherland’s ambition to achieve technological
independence and to “catch up” with the developed countries (Wang, 2016). They were
integrated into a centrally planned economy via the urban danwei system—work units that
combined the productive function of labor organization with the reproductive function of

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providing housing, medical, welfare, and schooling for the offspring. Danwei also served as units
of political control on behalf of the CCP over its urban citizens, providing life-long job and
social security in exchange for political loyalty. Serving as the young socialist country’s much-
needed brain power, scientists and engineers in Zhongguancun, especially the overseas returnees,
were entitled to relatively high salary and generous welfare compared to the urban working
class
1
(Yang, 2009).
However, for Mao Zedong and his followers in the party, this rise of technocratic power in
China not only threatened the legitimacy of the Communist party as the “vanguard of the
proletariat” and the representative of working class and peasant interests, but also risked greater
dependence on Soviet assistance and its technocratic model of modernization. The Chinese-
Soviet split in the late 1950s only reinforced the growing division inside the party-state
leadership between the technocrats and the Maoists. The Maoist utopian striving for a classless
and egalitarian society led them to valorize grassroots ingenuity and the power of mass
participation against the perceived technocratic tendency within the party-state leadership and
among the intellectuals. Radical strategies were deployed through mass political campaigns,
notably the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977), to reduce
the power gap between the cadre-intellectuals and the worker-peasants. For instance,
intellectuals, including urban university professors and students, were forced to combine
intellectual and manual labor by opening factories inside the universities or participating in
factory or agricultural production. Peasants and workers, on the other hand, were encouraged to

1
For instance, according to the memoir of some old Zhongguancun scientists, the state constructed a “welfare
building” in the residential compound of CAS with a bookstore, activity centre, and a restaurant and bakery that
provided high quality and western style food to intellectuals in zhongguancun. During the great famine (1958-1961),
scientists ranked at the associate professor level or above were given special food stamps by the state to spend at the
restaurant and bakery (Yang, 2009).

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study in the universities, and to both collaborate with and challenge those sent-down “experts”
and come up with pragmatic innovations on the shop floor or in the field (Andreas, 2009).
Though many of the Zhongguancun scientists and engineers were directly involved in
strategic military research, only a small number of important strategic military weaponeers were
well protected by the moderate central party leaders during the Maoist mass movements. The
majority of Zhongguancun scientists and engineers were subjected to intense education, reform,
or even violence. The goal of Maoist mass movements were not only to equalize the social
structure but also to reform the soul by turning intellectuals, with all of their bourgeois capitalist
ideologies, into “red and expert” socialist persons (Andreas, 2009). The scientists and engineers
were goaded to give up their individualist, careerist, arrogant, and self-serving class ideologies
and transform themselves into patriotic, ultraistic, and self-sacrificing red experts—humbling
themselves to the profound wisdom and ingenuity of peasants and workers while unconditionally
subjecting the self to the great socialist cause of “serving the people” and “protecting the
socialist motherland against capitalist colonists”.
This uniquely Chinese path of socialist industrialization that combined state nationalism
with communist mass mobilization ideologies had shaped the life trajectories and subjectivities
of the red scientists and engineers in socialist Zhongguancun. While the socialist revolution has
liberated Chinese individuals from the Confucian kinship-based network, this state-led “partial
individualization” also re-embedded those scientists in the “redistributive system of the ‘socialist
big family’” through danwei, and subjected them to the grand vision of nationalist rejuvenation
through science and technology and the radical socialist class politics (Yan, 2009: 280). In spite
of the incessant political movements, some scientists and engineers, such as the rocket scientist
Qian Xuesen and the mathematician Hua Luogeng, emerged as representative “red and expert”

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figures. They managed to navigate the complex terrain of politics, minimizing political risks
while taking advantage of the opportunities offered to experiment with alternative approaches to
scientific and technological innovation (Schmalzer, 2016; Solomone, 2006; Wang, 2016).
Compared to their predecessors in the socialist danwei whose career and life trajectories
were shaped mainly by cold war state agenda and socialist politics, the scientist-turned IT
entrepreneurs of the early reform era were subjected to both state and market forces. This
complex intertwining of state and market logics constituted the new context in which the red
scientists and engineers who had braved the storm of revolution stampeded to “jump into the sea
of commerce” (Xiahai Jingshang).
Scientist-turned-IT Entrepreneurs on The Street of Electronics (1980s-mid1990s)
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Zhongguancun has transformed from a state-funded base for
military-driven research and higher education largely outside public purview into a well-
publicized national prototype of economic reform and IT innovation known for its famous
“Street of Electronics”. The latter refers to the many IT companies on the side of Baiyi Road in
Zhongguancun that were set up in the 1980s and early 1990s by scientists who had been
previously working in state universities and research institutes. A large number of these
companies emerged in response to Chinese institutions and consumers’ growing demand for
microcomputers, accessories and software in the 1980s and 1990s. Built on Zhongguancun’s
socialist R&D legacy, some of these early start-up companies, such as Lenovo and Sina, had
grown into China’s IT giants, setting Zhongguancun on track to become China’s Silicon Valley.
Zhongguancun IT entrepreneurs pioneered the individualization of knowledge work in post-
Mao China. Unlike many other “getihu”
2
on the margins of the command economy who were

2
Getihu: literally means individual household, a somewhat derogative label used to describe private entrepreneurs
in the 1980s.

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often forced into operating small businesses to make a living, IT entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun
willingly chose to brave the storm of reform despite the sacrifices made by giving up the prestige
and stability provided by their socialist danwei. A series of major shifts happened following the
death of Mao in 1976 had quickly transformed the subjectivities of Zhongguancun scientists.
After some intense political struggle within the CCP, Deng Xiaoping had finally secured the
supreme leadership as the general secretary of the party in 1978. On the party’s “Third Plenum”
held in the same year, Deng announced the victory of “practice” over ideologies, which put an
official end to Mao’s ideology of class politics and constant revolution (Feigenbaum, 2003). As
the relationship between China and the Western capitalist countries warmed in the 1970s, the
latter appeared increasingly like examples to be emulated rather than enemies. Recognizing the
socialist nation’s primary task as restoring people’s faith in the CCP leadership and an economy
devastated by the Cultural Revolution, Deng launched a new campaign for economic reform and
opening up that prioritized the development of export-oriented light industries to boost GDP,
ease unemployment, and improve the population’s living standard, while at the same time de-
militarizing the money-consuming heavy industries. The latter had in effect translated into
reduced state funding for research institutions and scientists in Zhongguancun.
At the same time, Deng also envisioned a new role for science and technology in China’s
economy by pushing forward his reform-era ruling ideology of the “four modernizations”
(industry, agriculture, national defense, and science-technology). In the 1978 National Science
Conference, Deng officially designated modern science and technology as “the most active and
decisive factor of the productive forces in the new society”, and elevated the social standing of
scientists and engineers by de-legitimizing the political stigma associated with their class status
while re-establishing scientists’ value based on their contribution to the nation’s economic

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growth and new developmental goals (Ke, 2012). As a result, the techno-nationalist ambition of
the post-socialist Chinese elites was re-energized by Silicon Valley style entrepreneurialism and
a state-sanctioned modernization discourse, both of which celebrated the marriage between free
market and technological triumphalism.

The Street of Electronics in Zhongguancun in the 1990s
The rise of the “Street of Electronics” in the 1980s and early 1990s represented a period of
negotiation between the old socialist and new market-driven capitalist vision of S&T. What has
come out of this negotiation is a hybrid model of development in which the state and market
forces had become thoroughly entangled. On one hand, frustrated by how socialist state-funded
research was delinked from market demand and practical application, the entrepreneurs had
embraced the value of Silicon Valley style entrepreneurialism as a counterforce against the
socialist command economy and the monopoly of state-owned enterprises. The idea of the “iron
rice bowl”, which used to denote the security and welfare provided by a socialist regime serving
the interests of the proletariat, took on the negative connotation of laziness, inefficiency, and lack
of ambition in reform-era Zhongguancun. Contrary to the socialist research institutes that

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subjected scientists to the political needs of the state, newly established IT companies in
Zhongguancun emphasized “human agency” and respect for “human capital”. This shift in
subjectivity from the socialist person to the market-based entrepreneur of the self paralleled the
post-socialist dismantling of the danwei system and the state’s welfare provision.
On the other hand, this disembedding of individuals from socialist institutions was both
gradual and incomplete as the state still played a highly important role in determining the
entrepreneurs’ life chances. So while Zhongguancun entrepreneurs engage strategically with
Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ideals and market principles to distinguish themselves and their
businesses from the state-owned danwei, their relationship with the old socialist system and the
state is ambivalent at best. The open criticism that the entrepreneurs directed at state
protectionism and government control did not prevent them from forming a symbiotic
relationship with reform-minded politicians in both the local and central governments to advance
their agenda (Yong, 1986). Almost all of the successful Zhongguancun IT companies were
spinoffs from state research institutes or universities. Their ownership status had been marked as
“collective” before they became privatized in the late 1990s. Many of their mother danwei
provided the initial start-up fund, technology sources, office space and facilities, human
resources, and political network and endorsement for these young companies during their early
stage of development. In the early years of the reform in the 1980s when resistance against
economic liberalization was still strong, many IT startups sank not only because of market
competition but also due to the owners’ lack of political savvy (Lu, 2000). Those who had
survived were often not only business smart but also politically shrewd and well connected.
The entrepreneurs also showed little reluctance in deploying the techno-nationalist rhetoric
to lobby the state for protection against foreign competition. Techno-nationalist outcry flared up

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in Zhongguancun in the mid-1990s as IT entrepreneurs lobbied the state to implement
protectionist policies against the “foreign invasion” of the Chinese IT industry. While some
companies fell behind in the new round of race and eventually went bankrupt, others survived
using both commercial and political strategies. Lenovo, for instance, launched a battle against
TNCs in mid-1990s under the banner of techno-nationalism. Under the government’s financial
and political support, the company combined its OEM capability with marketing experience
gained as a manufacturing contractor and domestic sales agent for AST. In 1997, Lenovo finally
defeated the “foreign invaders” and secured the crown of the no. 1 best-selling PC in the Chinese
market (Ling, 2005). During a 1998 meeting with the former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, Liu
Chuangzhi, the CEO of Lenovo commented that Zhongguancun entrepreneurs like him, unlike
their Silicon Valley counterparts, had to take both commercial and policy risks (Ling, 2005).
They had to learn how to dance with both the “foreign wolves”, TNCs that were competitors and
teachers (Zhou, 2008), and their local patrons, Chinese governments and politicians who often
favor state-owned ICT companies and treat Zhongguancun firms as their “stepson” (Ling, 2005).
As the first generation Zhongguancun entrepreneurs “smashed their iron rice bowl” and
stepped out of their socialist danwei to become entrepreneurs on the “Street of Electronics”, they
had entered a hybrid space where the logic of the state and market converged and where socialist
residuals co-existed with aspiration to integrate into global neoliberal capitalism. As pioneers of
the market reform, many Zhongguancun scientists and engineers became not only economic
entrepreneurs who had shaken off the socialist straitjacket and learned how to strive for
individual success, convert knowledge into money, and mange market risks; they were also
political entrepreneurs who knew how to take advantage of socialist legacy, cultivate political
ties, and turn political risks into opportunities. While nationalism meant championing a socialist

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path of industrialization and maintaining technological self-reliance in the Cold War context, in
the post-reform 1980s and 1990s, it became linked to entrepreneurs’ strategic engagement with
market principles and global capital to modernize and globalize the nation. With the millennium
drawing to a close and the dawn of the dot.com era, new networked technologies and the trend
towards global financialization will further liberate Chinese individuals from traditional
institutional bounds. Expanding opportunities for IT entrepreneurship articulated to new shifts in
work culture. The third generation of Zhongguancun entrepreneurs, most of them came of age
after the reform, and many were educated in the West or held strong ties with global venture
capital, entered the scene.
Start-Up Entrepreneurs, Venture Capital, and Science Park (1998-2008)
Most second-generation Zhongguancun entrepreneurs, unlike their predecessors, never
worked in the state-owned sector. Instead, the majority of them were either overseas returnees
who had received advanced education or/and had worked abroad, or China-based entrepreneurs
with overseas ties. If Silicon Valley only served as a vague alternative cultural imaginary for the
first generation Zhongguancun entrepreneurs, the second-generation was living the Silicon
Valley dream. The most successful of the Zhongguancun start-ups founded around the turn of the
century, such as Sohu, Sina, Netease, and Baidu, were backed by global venture capital
investment, and went IPO at NYSE or NASDAQ in the 2000s (Wu, 2009).
Compared to their forerunners, the transnational and independent identity of these IT
entrepreneurs and their businesses granted them more autonomy from the Chinese government.
Unfettered from the burdens of socialist ideologies while treating market competition as
opportunities for self-development, the second-generation Zhonguancun entrepreneurs were
leading a new millennium transformation in labor subjectivity that resembled a shift towards

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what Heela (2002) referred to as the “self-work ethic”. Specifically, with the expansion of the
Chinese middle class and the further privatization and diversification of the Chinese economy,
middle-class knowledge work in China started to become associated more and more with the
pursuit, realization, and expression of the “authentic self” (Hanser, 2011; Rofel, 2007).
One can get a glimpse of this shift by examining the media representation of Internet
entrepreneurs in the 2000s. The first generation Zhongguancun entrepreneurs, like Lenovo’s Liu
Chuanzhi, were often portrayed as nationalist scientists and engineers who had embraced the
market. For them, IT entrepreneur was both a more efficient and rational system to modernize
China and a means to personal empowerment that set them free from the bureaucracy of the
danwei and helped them better realize their human potential. However, media representation of
the second generation departed from this modernist ethos and instead took on a more
countercultural and personal flavor. They were either idiosyncratic IT heroes or visionary geeks
who were heavily influenced by Silicon Valley culture but found their calling in a rapidly
developing China. The techno-nationalist discourse of the early reform years has also evolved to
become more individualized and humanized.
Charles Zhang Chaoyang, the CEO of Sohu, was a typical example of the media-made IT
entrepreneur-heroes of the venture capital era. In one of the numerous accounts of Zhang’s life
story, his entrepreneurial path was equated to a process of personal transformation through which
he explored his personal identity and his life’s meaning. Zhang started out in Zhongguancun as
an undergraduate majoring in physics at Tsinghua University. A conscientious student who
dreamt about becoming the next Chen jingrun (a mathematician famous during the socialist era),
Zhang was represented as a typical young Chinese IT elite who lived to fulfill the expectations of
his family, the society and the nation. However, the decade that he spent as a PhD student at MIT

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had totally transformed him. A non-conformist at heart, Zhang turned rebellious almost
immediately upon his arrival in the US. Unlike many of his Chinese peers on campus, Zhang
never saved up, and instead squandered his money on a convertible, and roamed around in town
in his spare time wearing a pair of sunglasses, POLO Shirt, and a Ponytail (Lin, 2009). Zhang’s
sociable nature helped him get connected to the right circle and obtain angel capital funding from
the MIT tech gurus Edward Roberts and Nicholas Negroponte. Their endorsement turned out to
be essential to his company Sohu’s success in securing venture capital backing (Liu, Shi, & Wu,
2015).
However, the rebellious hero was also a patriot who finally found his life’s purpose in his
motherland. In 1996, Zhang returned to China not only to ride commercial opportunities, as he
spelt out in his first business proposal—“riding the waves of our times, one is the coming of age
of the information superhighway, another is the emergence of China as a global power”—but
also to find his cultural root and become re-embedded into his own cultural community. For
example, he explained to a journalist who interviewed him in the late 1990s that he “finally felt
complete” after his return to China, and that “one can be truly happy only when one is embedded
in his own culture” (Liu, Shi, & Wu, 2015: 33). The media story’s humanizing and personal
touch distinguished it from the rather lofty depiction of socialist scientists who had returned from
Western developed countries to China out of “strong patriotism” and “belief in socialist
ideologies”. The image of Zhang as a non-conformist countercultural hero—a product of
American liberalism and consumer culture—also departed from the modernist rational subject of
the first generation entrepreneurs.
Indeed, private entrepreneurs in general, and IT entrepreneurs in particular, gained more
recognition from the state in the 2000s. However, the state was also more proactive in setting

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limits to their political power (Yan, 2009). On one hand, the looming challenges presented by
China’s integration into the WTO catalyzed many new initiatives around the turn of the century
to promote domestic IT and creative industries (Keane, 2007; Wang, 2004). As a product of this
national policy shift, Zhongguancun was “rediscovered as a poster child of indigenous
technological innovation” (Zhou 2008: 78), and was upgraded in 1999 by the state council to a
national-level “Science Park” (Deng, 2002). Since the late 1990s, government had not only
poured money into Zhongguancun to improve and expand its infrastructure (Liu & Yang, 2013),
but also introduced new tax break policies and loosened control over the household registration
to allow private firms in Beijing to hire college students who are non-Beijing resident (Zhou,
2008). To attract more overseas returnees into Zhongguancun, many new incubators were
founded in the 2000s by local governments, research institutes, and universities to provide office
space/equipment, start-up grant, and business services to IT startups (Zhou, 2008).
Meanwhile, to maintain control over the private Internet companies, the state set up a
licensing system for Internet content providers (ICP) to ensure that only companies complying
with the government’s rules and regulations can operate in China (Hung, 2004). Under the
license, Internet businesses were not allowed to source news independently and it’s customary
for them to exercise “self-censorship” (Kalathil, 2003). As a direct response to the threats posed
by China’s impending WTO membership, the Chinese state also tightened its policy towards
offshore IPO. Since 2000, Chinese companies pursuing overseas IPO have to obtain a permit
from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). As a result of these new
regulations, IT entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun had no choice but to court government
regulators, comply with its regulations, while looking for creative ways to get around
restrictions.

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So in parallel to the emergence of a “self-work ethic” among the second generation
Zhongguancun entrepreneurs in which the pursuit of entrepreneurship became linked to the inner
search for self identity and life’s meaning, a new “clientelist-corporatist” relationship was also
formed between the central and local states and the entrepreneurs in the 2000s (Hung, 2004;
Pearson, 1997). What I want to trace with this genealogy of IT entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun is
a set of continuously evolving subjectivities vis-à-vis changing state-capital relationships that
both builds on and ruptures from previous generations. As the post-socialist reform expands
since the late 1970s, instead of a gradual retreat of state power, what we see is a deepening
intertwining of state and capital wherein political governance evolves, adapts to, and interacts
with changing market conditions and technological shifts.
Marketization, globalization, and the decline of state socialist welfare system have
gradually disembedded Chinese individuals from socialist institutions. Compared to the danwei-
based socialist scientists and engineers who were extolled to sacrifice their personal interest for
the service of the nation and the people, Internet entrepreneurs in the 2000s were more
individualistic and treated work mainly as a means for self-realization and personal exploration.
However, under a state-led individualization process, not only did the state still play a crucial
role in determining the life chances of the entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurs themselves also
maintained strong identification with the state’s techno-nationalist mission and emotional ties
with their Chinese cultural roots. This interlocking of political and commercial logic and the
convergence between residual and emerging forces are key to unpacking the post-2008
emergence of new work culture and entrepreneurial labor subjectivities in China.

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Entrepreneurial Labor and New Work Culture in Post-2008 Zhongguancun
Entering the second decade of the new millennium, Zhongguancun has pioneered the post-
2008 proliferation of entrepreneurial labor in China. Like other stories told in this dissertation,
this shift is both a continuity and a rupture from the previous waves of IT entrepreneurship in the
area. The 2008 global financial crisis had rendered increasingly untenable China’s old
developmental model driven by export-oriented manufacturing and fixed-asset investment. Three
decades into the post-socialist economic reform and globalization, China had departed a long
way from the Maoist ideals of egalitarianism and technological independence. In the aftermath of
the global crisis, the now world’s second largest economy was beset with problems (Hong, 2011;
Lin, 2013). Rampant structural unemployment/underemployment and declining GDP growth
caused by the collapse of the export engine, not to mention mounting environmental crises and
social tensions, were telling signs of an imbalanced economic structure (Hung, 2015).
The government’s 2009 megastimulus package, though temporarily eased economic
slowdown and unemployment pressure, only reinforced the structural imbalance as the majority
of the investment went into debt-financing fixed-capital assets and the expansion of traditional
industries already plagued by over-production (Hung, 2015). When the new Xi-Li leadership
took over in 2013, it had become painfully clear that nothing short of a comprehensive economic
and social reform can sustain the Communist Party’s ruling and restore the regime’s political
legitimacy. A new development model driven by consumption and innovation would be difficult
to achieve without a social reform to shake up the bureaucratic-capitalist elites’ vested interests
in the old export-oriented and investment-led sectors (Xing, 2012).
In contrast to the sluggish traditional industries, the ICT sector has quickly emerged as a
major engine behind China’s economic recovery. In 2008, China’s ICT sector seemed to be one

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of the few bright spots in an overall bleak recession-stricken economy, achieving a 12.5%
growth compared to the previous year, while contributing to 30% of the year’s export growth and
1/20 of its increase in newly-created urban jobs (Liu and Wang, 2010). The Chinese state,
determined to reduce the nation’s technological dependence on foreign MNCs, has pushed for a
delinking industrial strategy to create a China-led accumulation regime (Hong, 2017). Replying
on the state-owned telecommunication “commanding height” corporations, the Chinese state had
made some success in leapfrogging 3G/4G network buildup, which facilitated the rapid
digitalization of the Chinese society (Ibid). Chinese mobile Internet users, many of whom had
never or seldom used Internet on PCs, have increased from 117.6 million in 2008 to 695 million,
or 53.2% of China’s population in 2016 (Russell, 2017). The speedy expansion of the mobile
consumer market, coupled with the relatively low threshold of entry for mobile app developing,
has presented enormous new economic opportunities for Chinese IT entrepreneurs.
What paralleled the state-led mobile Internet technology revolution is another state-
commanded major leap forward in Chinese VC industries following the 2008 global crisis
(Zhang, 2017). The recession has forced many mainstream VC firms in the developed region to
seek new investment opportunities in emerging markets like China. Meanwhile, the ascendance
of domestic VC investment has surpassed the surging inflow of foreign VC funds in the past
decade. With the growing exuberance over new technologies, IT start-ups are increasingly
perceived as a safe haven for investors compared to traditional investment channels like stocks,
property or gold (Thomas, 2016). Behind this hot VC scene are not only the Chinese state’s
efforts to liberate the country’s financial sector, notable among which was the 2009 opening of
China’s Nasdaq-style ChiNext board in Shenzhen (Zhang, 2017), but also the state’s heavy
presence in domestic VC investment. According to Zero2IPO, in 2015 alone, the Chinese

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government raised about $32.2 billion venture capital money through tax revenues or state
backed loans to invest in start-up firms (Shen, 2016).
A leading site of the post-2008 entrepreneurial revolution, Zhongguancun has been at the
forefront of these state-led financialization and digitalization processes. Home to China’s first
batch of VC-backed Internet startups (Sina, Sohu, Netease) and the largest base of public listed
IT companies, Zhongguancun boasts an unusually high concentration of venture capital funds
and entrepreneur-turned angel investors. Since 2010, the number of new IT startups has grown in
leaps and bounds in Zhongguancun, increasing from 3,614 annually in 2010 to 24,607 in 2016
(Administrative Committee of Zhongguancun Science Park, 2016). In 2015, a total of 672, or
41% of the major investment institutions in the nation, were based in Zhongguancun.
Meanwhile, 2413, or 32.2% of the nation’s VC investment cases happened here, taking up 24.8%
of the total amount of fund invested across the country (Administrative Committee of
Zhongguancun Science Park, 2016).
IT entrepreneurial labor emerged in Zhongguancun as a response to this structural
transformation. With the decline of traditional industries and the state-led revolutions in
digitalization and financialization following the 2008 global recession, middle-class knowledge
workers, like their working-class counterparts, have to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurial
subjects in new industries. Starting one’s own IT business is no longer confined to elite and
technically skilled IT professionals. In parallel to this trend, new infrastructures like the Garage
Café—multi-functional co-working spaces that combine the various features of workspace
sharing with start-up incubating and angel investing—also begun to emerge in Zhongguancun to
both accommodate and propel the rise of entrepreneurial laborers.

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Compared to the previous generations, the third generation of Zhongguancun entrepreneurs
is not only larger in number but is also more diverse in background. While former employees of
existing IT corporations and overseas returnees constitute the most competitive group (Zhang,
2017), they have also been joined by college students and fresh college graduates of various
majors, and white-collar workers from both IT and non-IT industries (Yao, 2014). In my 2015-
2016 fieldwork in Zhongguancun, I also encountered many self-identified “grassroots IT
entrepreneurs” who are entrepreneurial former blue-collar and gray-collar workers or small-
business owners with no college degree. The new generation is also younger. In 2015, 24.7% of
Zhongguancun entrepreneurs were under 30, and 7% were under 25. And 19 out of the Forbes’
“30 Under 30 Asia List” of young leaders, inventors, and entrepreneurs were start-up
entrepreneurs based in Zhongguancun (Administrative Committee of Zhongguancu Science
Park, 2016; Wehbe, 2016).
On one hand, this post-2008 normalization of self-employment and flexible labor practices
has resulted in a deepening and expansion of the individualized “self-work ethics” already
prevalent in Zhongguancun in the 2000s. The new technological, financial, and policy shifts
following the 2008 global crisis have vastly expanded the space in which to experiment with new
millennium working imaginaries. Many of the informants that I talked to shared the vision of IT
entrepreneurship as offering a more flexible work and lifestyle, enhanced autonomy to pursue
individual passion, professional excellence and personal growth, and the possibility of quick
fortune and financial independence along with the exhilaration of risk-taking. In this sense, the
Chinese entrepreneurial workers are part and parcel of the global post-2008 rise of networked
flexible, individualized, and project-based freelance workforce.

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On the other hand, this intensified discourse of “romantic individualism” associated with
the post-2008 global resurgence of entrepreneurial and flexible labor has also become wedded to
long-held identification with the state’s techno-nationalist ambition and a version of
entrepreneurial flexibility and pragmatism inherited from generations of Chinese entrepreneurs
and IT workers operating under “non-liberal” state capitalism/socialism (Redding, 1990;
Streeter, 2015). Moreover, propelled by a desire to re-imagine global capitalism at a time when
the ethics and sustainability of the established system appear to be increasingly questionable, the
post-2008 proliferation of alternative work practices outside of established institution also
inspired civic-minded and socially-oriented entrepreneurship while rekindling age-old practices
of community-building and new forms of sociality in urban China for atomized entrepreneurial
workers.
Paradoxically, the accelerated individualization of work in post-2008 China has been
facilitated by an increasingly assertive and global-minded Chinese state that has repurposed
Maoist mass mobilization discourses to drive grassroots entrepreneurial enthusiasm (Merkel,
2015). This entrepreneurial revolution culminated in around 2014 after the state had put forward
a series of national policy campaigns, such as the “Internet Plus” and “Mass Entrepreneurship
and Innovation”, to mobilize the bottom-up energy of the citizens to participate in inventing new
industries and careers for themselves. Guided by these policies, governments of various levels
have promoted IT startup and digital entrepreneurship, in a grassroots mobilization style
reminiscent of the Maoist mass movement, as a fix to the country’s structural
unemployment/underemployment problems and growing inequalities and social tensions (Hong,
2017).

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In the remaining part of the chapter, I will closely examine three prominent post-2008
entrepreneurial work imaginaries emerged in Zhongguancun based on my participant observation
and interviews. I argue that these new imaginaries of good work and good life are hybrid and
contentious existence shaped by the complex interplay between political and commercial forces
and residual and emerging rationalities in post-2008 China. They are part of the global
reinvention of alternative modes of labor organization at a time when traditional models become
increasingly untenable (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Botsman and Rogers, 2011; Gandini,
2015; Gregg, 2015). Yet they should also be understood in the context of China’s state-led
economic and social restructuring and as a culture, nation, and historically specific process co-
created by different agents.

Zhongguancun “Inno Way”—a government-funded street of incubators

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Work as Self Exploration
A central theme of the new work imaginary is the post-2008 rise of a “new idealism” in
China (Zhang, 2015). It valorizes the non-utilitarian and self-exploratory purpose of work,
treating it as an autonomous process through which one searches for one’s life’s meaning and
constructs a personally unique life trajectory (Heela, 2002). Initially emerged in the late 1990s
among well-educated urban middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs following the
dismantling of the socialist danwei and the centralized job assignment system, this new labor
subjectivity gained momentum in the new millennium with the expansion of the Chinese middle
class and the further privatization and diversification of the Chinese economy (Hanser, 2011). As
we have discussed, transformations following the 2008 global crisis have re-energized this
individualized work ethic in China.
However, unlike in Euro-American countries where an affluent liberal society has been
established before the neoliberal retreat of the welfare state since the 1970s, contemporary China
has undergone a state-led individualization process under a highly-compressed modernization
since the 1949 (Kyung-sup 2010; Yan, 2010). As a result, not only is the Chinese individual less
autonomous from the state, the Chinese society is also more fractured and fragmented as
different social groups with competing demands vying for resources (Sun, 2003; Yang, 2009).
Specifically in the post-2008 context, a more assertive Chinese state has championed the
entrepreneurial movement under a nationalist banner of upgrading China’s positioning in the
international division of labor. It also deployed the socialist rhetoric of social justice and mass
participation to mobilize young people of different socio-economic backgrounds to participate in
the movement. Therefore, the middle-class entrepreneurs’ self-exploratory and inward search for
authenticity and meaning also articulates to a nationalist identification with the state’s mission of

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constructing a Chinese model of development as well as a socially-engaged civic consciousness
to improve the lives of disadvantaged social groups. As I will show, the interplay between the
internally and externally oriented exploration of the self, though certainly applicable to the
Western self-work ethic, is particularly true with the Chinese IT entrepreneurs that I interviewed
in Zhongguancun.
Autonomy from Big Institutions
Many of the Zhongguancun entrepreneurs that I talked to expressed a strong emotional
attachment to the entrepreneurial work and lifestyle. Being one’s own boss or joining a small
start-up company carries with it a sense of freedom and emancipation from the various
constraints imposed by the Chinese society. One of such constraints that entrepreneurs frequently
attacked was the Chinese education system. Some of my interviewees blamed the test score
driven Chinese education system as detrimental to individual creativity and self-actualization.
Jason, the forty-something former Microsoft employee and founder of the startup “Campus VC”,
turned his attack of the current Chinese educational system into a business. He told me that the
mission of Campus VC is to set Chinese college students free from a traditional education that
demands conformity, induces fear, and makes young people vulnerable (Personal Interview,
2016).
To accomplish this goal, Campus VC plans to select 10 college student investment
managers. These student investors will be responsible for peer screening and investing one
million RMB into 10 student startup companies. Jason believed that his business proffered a
much-needed alternative to the current Chinese higher education system by meeting the cultural
demands of today’s young college students, as he argued in an article posted on Campus VC’s
Wechat account:

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“Talking about the risk (of starting one’s own business), many of the young people today are kids born in the
90s in middle-class families. They are no longer worried about making a living. Instead what they seek is a
meaningful career. They are totally willing to devote their youth to launching a great career. I don’t think they
see this as risky.”

Then Jason went on to goad college students into “creating your own job” before he concluded
the article by quoting Jackson Brown: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed
by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” (Jason’s Wechat Friend Circle,
2016).
This Silicon Valley style countercultural sentiment against established educational
institutions was shared by many other interviewees. For example, Tao, the 30-year-old
entrepreneur and a graduate of Tsinghua University criticized both Beijing and Tsinghua
Universities, China’s top two higher education institutions, as “too bureaucratic”: “I think the
majority of my classmates do not know how to think independently. The Chinese educational
system is good at churning out competent employees who know how to take orders, but fails in
cultivating entrepreneurs” (Personal Interview, 2015). Having left his previously well-paying job
as an investment manager to launch a sport social media app in his late 20s, Tao still considers
himself too “conventional” when he compared his life trajectory to entrepreneurs who were
younger than him. Indeed, many of the younger entrepreneurs that I met who belong to the more
audacious post-90s generation referenced by Jason dismissed classroom-based college education
as boring, and a few had either quitted college or put their college degrees on hold to opt for
entrepreneurship.
In fact, faced with heavy unemployment pressure, the Chinese state has explicitly endorsed
this “rebellious” ideology against formal education. In 2016, more than 20 provincial
governments in China implemented the so-called “flexible enrollment” policy that allowed
college students to take from 2 to 8 years of leave of absence to work on their own businesses

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(Lv, 2016). This widespread cynicism towards higher education reflects a bleak reality of
structural unemployment and under-employment for college-educated young people in China
(Zhang, 2015). The two-decade marketization of the higher education system has vastly
expanded the number of college graduates. In 2017 alone, there were almost eight million
college graduates in China, which represented a 300,000 increase from the previous year (Li,
2016). However, relying heavily on export-driven manufacturing and state-invested
infrastructure building, the Chinese economy fails to generate enough high-skilled jobs to
accommodate the increasing number of college graduates (Tse and Esposito, 2014). This
structural imbalance has led many well-educated young people to take up unfulfilling low-skilled
jobs. In this context, it is not difficult to understand why the “new idealism” of self-exploration
and entrepreneurial work has resonated so strongly with well-educated young people.
Apart from formal education, big organizations, be it SOEs, TNCs, or large domestic
private companies, are also perceived by entrepreneurs as impediment to self-actualization and
personal autonomy. Published in 2006, Andrew Ross’s book Fast Boat to China was one of the
first book-length accounts about middle-class IT work in China in which he described the
prestige and flexibility of working for high-tech TNCs as middle-class employees in Southeast
China. Back then, TNCs like Microsoft and HP and big SOEs were considered top career choices
for China’s middle class IT professionals because the former offered the best salary and training
opportunities while the latter guaranteed job security and residential permit or Hukou to
employees. By 2016, much has changed as many of the best and brightest of China’s IT workers
chose to start their own businesses or to join domestic startup companies. IT entrepreneurship
came to represent the ideal work that offers both opportunities for personal growth and autonomy
and the promise of quick fortune.

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SOEs and government institutions, which used to attract some of the top graduates from
China’s elite universities, especially those with political ambition, are losing their best talents to
startup companies. Heng joined an energy corporation owned by the central government after
graduating from the prestigious Beijing University with a Master’s degree in physics. He spent
four years there as an engineer before leaving in 2014 to work on his own weather consultant
service firm. He shared his experience at the SOE with me:
“I was very motivated in my first year and became the most productive engineer in my team. At that time, I
still hoped to move up the bureaucratic ladder through hard work. But it soon dawned on me that I was being
naïve. As a state monopoly, we never had to worry about competition for customers. It was all guaranteed
since we were the only game in town. Therefore, there was no incentive to improve the quality of our service.
I learnt little new skills beyond my first year there, and I see little space for upward mobility in the near
future. Life was Zen but boring.” (Personal Interview, 2015).

Heng’s frustration with skilled work at SOE was shared by Lei, who recently graduated from
Tsinghua University with a PhD in automobile engineering. Lei co-founded an e-bike startup
with a classmate while he was still completing his PhD degree. He made the decision of starting
his own business after becoming disillusioned with finding a job in the state-owned automobile
industry following a summer internship:
“I went to work at 8 am, spent most of my morning playing with my computer, went for lunch, and took a
nap. By 5:30 pm, everyone had already gone home. I asked my supervisor to assign me some more work and
was told to read and summarize a few academic articles. I finished them in a few days and spent the rest of
the summer feeling extremely bored…My supervisor who was in his mid-40s was still just a section chief
(chu zhang). It is impossible for him to get promoted until his superior, a minister (bu zhang) in his late 40s
retires…By the end of my internship, I got totally disillusioned with working at automobile SOEs.” (Personal
Interview, 2016).

When I asked him whether he had considered working for a foreign automobile corporation, he
told me that many of his classmates went to work at automobile TNCs. Although the salary was
better than SOEs, the space for personal growth was also limited as the Chinese engineers had to
work under foreign chief engineers, and thus were offered less opportunity for creativity and
decision-making. For entrepreneurs like Heng and Lei, big corporations like SOEs and TNCs
subordinate the self to a higher authority and contain one’s capacity for creative expression. In

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comparison, startup companies offer them more “self-determining freedom” to search for, work
on, express, and realize the “authentic self” (Taylor, 1989). As Lei explained to me in our
interview that his generation does not value job stability as much as his parents’ does. For young
adults like him who are from urban middle-class families, short-term income becomes less of a
concern than, to quote him directly, “the extent to which I can realize my full potential at work.
Whether my contribution is appreciated? Is the whole thing that I am working on meaningful?”
(Personal Interview, 2016).
In addition to SOEs and TNCs, established IT companies like the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba,
and Tencent), though boasting a more democratic and individual-oriented corporate culture, have
also seen an exodus of employees to startup companies at the height of the latest round of
entrepreneurial movement in 2015. The most important reason, as Jiao, a former Tencent
employee explicated to me, is that as IT companies grow larger, their earlier “flat” management
culture gradually gives way to a KPI (Key Performance Indicator)-driven bureaucratic system. In
response to the challenges posed by an increasingly entrepreneurial work culture, large Internet
corporations like BAT have already started to reform their organization structure. For example,
new “internal incubation” systems were established that allow entrepreneurial workers ample
autonomy to develop new products and service features under the supervision and endorsement
of the mother companies. Instead of hiring more new employees, big IT firms prefer to either
purchase promising startups or outsource work to micro enterprises (many are startups
established by their former employees) (Zhang, S., 2015). This organizational flexibilization
strategies adopted by large IT corporations, through emerged in reaction to middle-class IT
workers’ desire for autonomy and self-fulfillment, have in effect further blurred the distinctions
between entrepreneurs and flexible laborers. My informants in Zhongguancun were well aware

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of this transformation. One of my more cynical informants Bing confided: “Sometimes I feel like
I am laboring for (dagong) big companies without the welfare and security that they provided for
their employees.”
Ambivalence towards Family
Compared to their dismissive attitudes towards formal education and big organizations, the
entrepreneurs’ feeling about traditional family values, perceived by many of my informants as
another constraint on entrepreneurial labor and personal autonomy, is more ambivalent. The
majority of entrepreneurs that I talked to in Zhongguancun had experienced resistance from their
family members regarding their career choices. Hui, the co-founder of Campus VC explained:
“The Chinese urban middle-class parents have a fixed idea of what a good life is for their
children, and starting one’s own business is always looked upon unfavorably until one proves to
them that one is able to make a decent and a stable income.” (Personal Interview, 2015).
However, despite some parents’ disapproval of their children’s entrepreneurial career path, many
are willing to offer material support in terms of financial investment or free housing and meals.
Here the Chinese parents’ mixed attitudes speak to the ironic persistence of traditional Chinese
value that treats family as an economic unit and a safeguard against economic risks at a time
when work becomes more individualized and self-exploratory for the younger generation
(Greenhalgh, 1989; Harrell, 1985). The media publicity and official endorsement of
entrepreneurship and self-employment, according to my interviewees, have also helped attenuate
their stigma. “At least my dad knows that I am working hard and making a contribution to
society,” Yue commented. Two years ago, she quitted her journalist job to work on a “time
auction” app. Her parents were upset with her decision to give up a reputable job at first.
However, they became more supportive of her career choice after they watched Yue and her

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business partner’s entrepreneurial story a few months ago on a Beijing television channel
(Personal Interview, 2015).
The emotional intensity and flexibility of entrepreneurial labor has also taken a toll on the
marriage and romantic relationship of some of my interviewees. “I don’t have a life, my work is
my life. I have to admit that I am more passionate about expanding the consumer base for my
app than settling down with my girlfriend,” confided Meng, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who had
recently secured a seed funding for his startup, “I feel bad about saying this, but I am trying to be
honest with you.” (Personal Interview, 2016). Carla Freeman (2014), who studied middle-class
entrepreneurs in the Caribbean country Barbados, observed that what distinguishes
entrepreneurial labor from traditional 9-to-5 job is “the nature of the labor” demanded by the
new economy where the traditional boundaries formulated between work and leisure “are
becoming not just more permeable but also more evidently saturated by an economy of emotion
that has become part of the labor process in and across these spheres.” (p. 134). The experience
of Meng and many of the Zhongguancun entrepreneurs that I interviewed echoes Freeman
(2014). The exhilaration that the entrepreneurs experienced from “pursuing their passion” and
the sense of empowerment felt by maintaining autonomy and “being their own boss” legitimize
self-exploitation and the excessive time and energies invested into work. Almost all of the
entrepreneurs that I encountered told me that they would never go back to their old job unless
there was no choice. A quote from Heng, a star entrepreneur who had left his highly-respected
engineering job at a SOE to launch a successful weather forecasting app well illustrates the
entrepreneurs’ affective investment in work. Comparing his entrepreneurial experience to drug
addiction, Heng described:
“The biggest change from my SOE work is emotional. It feels like I am riding a rollercoaster. For example,
last Monday, I felt desperate after reading the monthly financial report of my company. I thought we were on
the verge of failure. Things took a sudden turn on Wednesday when I attended a dinner party. I ran into this

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CEO of a company who was very interested in the service provided by my company and invited me to a
business meeting the next day. During the weekend he texted me saying that he wanted to sign a million-
dollar deal with me this week. I spent the whole Sunday afternoon envisioning how excited my partners and
employees will feel when they hear the good news and the new projects we could do using this money. You
see, what make this job exciting is not only the uncertainty but also your emotional investment.” (Personal
Interview, 2015).

When work is being recast as “an existential challenge”, the very distinction between work and
family life has been erased (Ross, 2003: 57). Heng, like many of my interviewees, derived such a
strong sense of self-actualization and fulfillment through entrepreneurial labor that work no
longer feels like work anymore, as Meng put it: “family life, rather than work, now feels like a
distraction and a burden” (Personal Interview, 2016). The demands that entrepreneurship placed
on one’s time and energy might explain why a large number of the entrepreneurs that I talked to
in Zhongguancun are single (or divorced) men or married men with stay-at-home wives.
While I met quite a few numbers of women who had joined startup companies as
employees, only a small percentage of Zhongguancun IT company founders were women. One
important reason for women’s under-representation in Zhongguancun, according to the Shan, a
female founder of an Internet financial platform, is “the social expectation that women should
put family first and career second.” (Personal Interview, 2016). The few women founders that I
interviewed were all graduated from elite universities and were highly self-driven and successful
in their areas of expertise. When I asked these women how they managed the familial
expectation, two common answers that I received were “ trying not to think about it” and
“turning gender disadvantage into advantage”.
For example, Shan, who stayed single into her mid-30s contended that in her industry
(finance), discriminations of all kinds existed—not just those based on gender, but also on race,
nationality, family background, and education credentials. Instead of being overly sensitive, she
tried to downplay her gender while just focusing on doing her job well (Personal Interview,
2016). Da Q is a former consultant who founded a dental appointment app in 2014. She was also

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a mother of a young daughter. She echoed Shan when she said: “I try not to think of my gender
as a problem. In fact, being a female, I don’t have the same financial pressure as my husband to
be the breadwinner of the family. So in this sense, being a female in Zhongguancun works in my
favor” (Personal Interview, 2016). It turned out that both Shan and Da Q had very good support
system. Shan acknowledged that her parents never treated her as a girl as other parents do while
Da Q and her husbands were both local Beijing residents with parents willing to take care of her
daughter during the week. The stories of the small number of female entrepreneurs that I met at
Zhongguancun further substantiate the ambivalent attitudes that entrepreneurs hold towards
family as an institution. Depending on their personal circumstances, familial ties might stand as
constraints for some while as support for others.
Nationalist Identification
While the individualization of work under neoliberalism was often associated with the
retreat of the welfare state as a redistributive agent in the Euro-American context (McRobbie,
2016; Neff, 2012), in China, as we have already seen, the state plays a key role in promoting
entrepreneurship and individualized labor as a new mechanism of social redistribution and a new
form of governance. As participants in the state-championed entrepreneurial movement, my
interviewees in Zhongguancun did not refrain from expressing their nationalist sentiments.
Echoing researchers like Hoffman (2010), Liu (2012), and Gries (2004) who observed that
entrepreneurial and enterprising individuals in China can also be nationalistic, I argue that
identification with the nation-state actually constitutes as an important dimension of the
contemporary Chinese middle-class young people’s exploration of the self through work.
Although nationalism has been a recurring theme in modern Chinese society, its post-2008
resurgence is articulated to new historical conditions.

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On one hand, as the world’s second largest economy, China has become increasingly
assertive following the 2008 economic crisis. Emerging discourses like “the Chinese model” and
the “Beijing consensus” feed on Beijing’s ambition to challenge the US-centric order of the
world (Hung, 2015). Though the slowdown of China’s GDP growth since 2013 has tempered
these discourses, optimism about China’s inevitable rise persists as the state-led economic
restructuring unfolds. On the other hand, the 2008 crisis has further convinced the party-state of
the unsustainablity of its neoliberal model of development. The CCP’s recent policies of “mass
entrepreneurship and innovation” and the earlier discourse of the “Chinese dream” bespeak the
Xi-Li leadership’s efforts to mobilize “grassroots” participation in the economy as a way to
redress social inequalities and appeal class conflicts (Dal Maso, 2015). In this sense, the
nationalist discourse in post-2008 China continues from that of the earlier two decades in which
the party-state “although obligating the individual to work for the modernization of China, also
obligates itself as the seemingly sole institutional probability for the achievement of Chinese
individuals’ pursuit of happiness and of the dream of modernity” (Yan, 2010: 510). However,
using policy tools like financialization and digitalization, the post-2008 party-state renews and
rejuvenates its paternalistic contract with the Chinese people by promoting IT entrepreneurship.
In this way, the party-state has aligned the younger generation’s pursuit for autonomy and
personal fulfillment with its economic and social restructuring project.
Dan’s story is typical of the nationalist entrepreneurs that I have encountered in
Zhongguancun. Born in the mid-1980s, Dan went to UC Davis in 2007 to pursue a PhD degree
in computer science after graduating from the famous Institute of Computing at CAS in
Zhongguancun. A series of events that happened in the first two years of his overseas graduate
study convinced him to quit PhD and return to China. As a patriot, he participated in the protest

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against what he considered as “China bashers” during the 2008 Olympic Torch Relay in San
Francisco. According to Dan, this experience exposed him to the “Western world’s prejudice”
against China, and after which he became disillusioned about American democracy. The 2008
financial crisis further dampened his enthusiasm about “American-style capitalism”. As he was
struggling with cultural shock and the “boredom and loneliness” felt as a “foreign student” on a
suburban campus, news about a robust post-crisis economy in China made him restless.
Coincidentally, he got in touch with a famous Chinese cryptologist from the Tsinghua
University who was giving a talk in California, and decided in 2009 to work as a PhD apprentice
in her lab while launching his own crypto-chip design and engineering company. Dan’s techno-
nationalist ambition was well encapsulated in the English name that he gave to his company:
“I named my company Serica because of the word’s rich symbolic history. It was the Latin word for “China”.
In its Greek linguistic root, Serica also refers to silk. By adopting this name, I hope my crypto-chip
technology designed and manufactured in China can be exported across the world like silk in ancient China.
China invented the technology of silk-making and had maintained monopoly over it for centuries until it was
stolen by foreigners. Although China is often accused of stealing and indigenizing foreign technologies
nowadays, I want to invent a technology that is not only uniquely Chinese but is also coveted by foreigners
like the Silk.” (Personal Interview, 2016).

Dan’s hard work and patriotism paid off. He was recruited by the government into the
“Thousand Talents Program”—a talent recruitment program established by the Chinese
government in the wake of the 2008 global crisis to attract highly skilled overseas Chinese
researchers and IT entrepreneurs back to China with a rich startup fund, good benefits and a high
salary. His chip design startup also received seed and Series-A investment from an investment
fund affiliated with the Tsinghua University. When I interviewed him in the winter of 2016, he
told me that he had just closed a business deal with the Ministry of Transportation to participate
in the design and manufacturing of China’s next generation crypo-chip card.
In line with recent research on Chinese nationalism (Gries, 2004; Zhou, 2005; Yang, 2016;
Wang, Wu & Li, 2016), Dan’s nationalist identification is both emotional and rational. The

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emotional aspect was revealed by his pride in China’s technological and cultural tradition and his
anger when he felt that his national pride was tarnished by “China-bashers”. Meanwhile, he also
acknowledged that the main reason behind his choice of returning to China was the
entrepreneurial opportunities at home. As a rational nationalist, he was also not reluctant to share
with me his criticism of the government’s role in building an Internet startup bubble and his
dissatisfaction towards the monopoly of SOEs over China’s chip industry. If anything, Dan and
some of my other informants shared with the earlier generations of Zhongguancun scientists and
entrepreneurs the nationalist sense of mission to “modernize” China through technology and
commerce. However, the self-sacrificial tenor of socialist nationalism has almost disappeared
from these young entrepreneurs’ narratives. Instead, their emotional and rational identification
with the nation, not only stands in no conflict with their pursuits of individual happiness and
success, but also constitutes an important source of meaning from which these entrepreneurs
draw to build up their personal identities. Here, the personal and national, and the rational and
emotional intertwine in complex ways.
Social Entrepreneurship
Apart from the persistence of nationalist identification, the exploratory turn in labor
subjectivities observed among Zhongguancun IT entrepreneurs is also informed by an emerging
socially-oriented civic awareness (Kleinman et al., 2011). Dempsey and Sanders (2010) defined
this “social entrepreneurship” as a combined “emphasis on individual initiative with a deeply
moral discourse of contributing to something greater than the self” (p. 441). My informants have,
to varying extents, referenced broader social concerns as motivations for their entrepreneurship.
Following the decline of the welfare state and the re-strengthening of the “third sector” of civil
society in Euro-American countries, social entrepreneurship has become increasingly prevalent

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since the 1990s (Amin, Cameron, and Hudson, 2003). Standing on the fringes of the state and the
market in China, this growing social consciousness has emerged as a response to the state-led
and market-driven individualization process in the Chinese society (Rolandsen, 2008). Full of
contradictions, this emerging socially-driven entrepreneurial labor subjectivity has grown out of
the relatively autonomous space opened up by state-led marketization, but it also purports to
offer an alternative to the profit-maximizing logic of the market and the monopoly of the state-
capital nexus. As well-educated middle-class citizens, many of my interviewees are well aware
of the “fractured” nature of the contemporary Chinese society in which divides such as that
between class, gender, geographical location have resulted in unequal access to opportunities and
distribution of wealth (Sun, 2003).
Many of my informants have referenced broader social concerns as motivations for their
entrepreneurship. For some, a clear social purpose informs their capitalist entrepreneurial pursuit.
Heng, the weather forecasting app start-up founder born in a small city on the southeast coast of
China, shared with me his experience of talking to fishermen in his hometown who had lost their
family members or friends due to inaccurate weather forecast. “The thought that my startup
might help save lives always spurs me on”, Heng told me 76ispositive76ally: “I had always
wanted to do something bigger than myself. I think this is my opportunity” (Personal Interview,
2015). For others, non-profit social goals actually overrode monetary incentives. Yang and his
rural ICT education startup is a good case in point. The rise and fall of his startup illustrate how
the younger generation of Chinese entrepreneurs’ exploration of the self is connected to a sense
of social calling as informed by the nation’s fragmented social reality, particularly on the
challenges that social entrepreneurs face in a society with a relatively weak civil society.

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Yang’s ICT-based rural education project is one of the most well-known and well-
publicized social enterprises in the past few years. Founded in 2011, the project’s mission is to
design and produce an interactive-learning tablet device for Chinese children in the countryside.
One reason for the project’s popularity is Yang’s “all star” startup team, which consisted of
graduates of and students at elite American and Chinese universities like Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, Beijing and Tsinghua. Yang, having received education from the elite Beijing No.4
middle school, the Eton College, and Harvard, decided to quit his high-paying job at a Boston-
based consultant firm to explore an alternative career in social entrepreneurship. Yang and his
team’s stellar education backgrounds and life trajectories have made them a media darling. At
the same time, the idealist and even utopian appeal of Yang’s social enterprise in a society eager
for ideal and change also makes an intriguing media story. Inspired by established American
techno social entrepreneurial examples like Nicholas Negroponte’s “One Laptop Per Child”, and
Salman Khan’s YouTube-based educational organization “Khan Academy”, Yang and his
partners, like generations’ of Chinese IT elites and entrepreneurs, wanted to borrow and
indigenize Western models to address some of China’s most pressing social issues such as rural-
urban divide and unequal access to educational resources.
For those young people, socially-driven IT entrepreneurship represented an alternative to
mainstream career choices of working either for capital or for the Chinese government. This
“new idealism” combines a search for personal meaning with a sense of social consciousness
beyond the pursuit of individual success, plus a heavy dose of techno utopianism. For example,
in one of the many journalistic accounts of Yang’s social startup, some of the team members
expressed their motivations of joining the project as “following my heart”, “a strong desire to
know more about ‘the other side’ of China”, “ try my best do something for others and our

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society, and to spread knowledge, hope, and a sense of gratitude”, or “searching for my passion
and what I really want to learn, rather than merely meeting my parents’ expectation of me”. One
of the entrepreneurs Cui commented:
“All of us understand that we are where we are today, not because we are better than our peers, but mostly
due to our access to better educational resources. I have a remote cousin who lives in a village in Shangxi,
what sets us apart is mainly the fact that and I was lucky enough to be born in the city whereas she was born
in a poor village.” (Chen, 2013).

These social entrepreneurs’ exploration of the self in connection to greater societal needs echoes
the post-2008 resurgence of the “ethnical dimension to cultural work” in Euro-American
countries (Banks, 2008; Dempsey and Sanders, 2010: Naudin, 2015: 129). However, this
socially-driven entrepreneurial work ethic is also situated in the specific historical condition of
post-2008 China and has emerged in response to the fracturing of the Chinese society where an
expanding middle-class’s post-material search for social meaning co-exists with the lower class’s
struggle to fulfill their unmet materialistic needs (Yang, 2009). The entrepreneurs’ commitment
to social justice and collective interest corroborates the argument that individualization of work
can also open up space for “alternative” cultural production. Being more autonomous from the
direct control of commercial and governmental forces, this new production model rejects “purely
capitalistic practices” in support of “non-instrumental moral values” (Banks, 2006: 465; Naudin,
2015: 133)
Nevertheless, although Yang and his team had come a long way in carrying out their social
experiment, their experience has substantiated the fact that it remains challenging to sustain non-
profit social enterprise without conforming to either the logics of the market or that of the state.
Relying on a startup fund donated by a Hong Kong businessman and the free labor of project
volunteers from all over the country, the team succeeded in designing, producing, and
distributing thousands of interactive educational tablets to several rural schools located in the

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under-developed Chinese hinterland. However, “the most challenging part is keeping the content
updated”, Yang told me during my 2016 phone interview with him: “we had to admit that we
were being too idealistic. It was just impossible to establish and sustain dedicated content
production and technical maintenance teams without a huge amount of capital investment.”
(Personal Interview, 2016). So after two years of dedication to their non-profit project, the team
decided to put it on hold and founded another for-profit startup specializing in producing
networked interactive educational content for urban middle-class kids. Yang perceived this as a
necessary compromise and a detour taken for the team to stay financially afloat. Their long-term
goal is to rely on the urban for-profit enterprise to both subsidize and produce content for the
rural non-profit project.
The eventual commercialization of Yang’s entrepreneurial social enterprise and the broader
media and public discussion about the rise and fall of the project have confirmed Dempsey and
Sanders’ (2010) observation in the American context that existing cultural narratives of social
entrepreneurship reinforces the domination of the market over the social. However, situated on
the fringes of the market and the state and emerged in direct response to the contradictions
generated by China’s post-socialist reform, the growing altruistic social consciousness observed
among young IT entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun reveals the hybrid and contentious nature of the
changing Chinese personhood (Kleinman et al., 2011). As I have shown based on Zhongguancun
entrepreneurs’ lived experience, the interplay between an emerging “cultural sensibility”
informed by the liberalist “expressive self” (Charles Taylor 1989, as cited by Coleman and
Golub, 2008) and the re-assertion of more socially-embedded values, such as the identification
with the nation, familism, and public-minded social consciousness, defines the hybrid
subjectivities of Zhongguancun IT entrepreneurs in post-2008 China.

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While the exploratory attitude towards work has justified and even made desirable the
individualization of risk and the flexibilization of labor, the very idea of what constitutes “job
security” is changing in China in the past decade as “financial independence” and “employability
security” have been replacing “employment security” to become the new ideal. Compared to the
new idealism of the self-exploratory work ethic, the investor mentality to work emerged as the
other, and the more pragmatic side of the individualization of work in post-2008 China.
Labor as (Self)-investment
On the eve of the 2016 Chinese Lunar New Year, Shuo, a 30-year-old entrepreneur that I
met during my stay at the Garage Café shared his “New Year Resolution” along with a picture
on his WeChat account (a popular Chinese social media app). The picture, titled “What life you
want?” illustrated two contrasting life trajectories. In the “conventional” scenario, a person
works from 22 and retires when he/she hits 65, after which he/she spends 13 years “enjoying life
or being hospitalized” before “passing away” at 78. This stands in contrast to the alternative
scenario depicted in which one works for 10 years and spends the remaining 46 years “enjoying
life”. Like many of his fellow entrepreneurs, Shuo believed that achieving financial
independence is the prerequisite for “doing what one likes” in life. “That’s why I decided to
become a venture start-up entrepreneur—this is the quickest way to become financially
independent, that is, if I am successful”, Shuo told me in our interview: “but before I make it, I
have to stay employable.”
Shuo secured his first “bucket of gold” from an e-commerce online ticketing business that
he started while he was still an undergraduate student in Beijing. After graduation, he spent two
years working as sales representatives at a publicly-listed Chinese Internet corporation to
“accumulate experience”. In the past five years, he launched two e-commerce-related startups,

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but none lasted more than a year. In-between these failed entrepreneurial attempts, Shuo kept
himself “employable” and worked for several small and big companies on short-term to “gather
experience in different industries”. When I met him in 2015, he was working for an online
finance startup as a CSO, or Chief Sales Officer while contemplating his next start-up. Shuo’s
career trajectory in the past decade might be atypical, but his mentality towards labor is very
common among young urban Chinese today. “Employability security”, the idea that it is
incumbent on the workers to maintain their own job security by accumulating the right skill set,
connections, and work experience while constantly re-inventing themselves in accordance to the
rapidly changing economy, has replaced “employment security” as the ideal labor subjectivity
(Kanter, 1993). Achieving “financial independent”—earning enough financial capital to buy one
out of work, often through selling or listing publicly one’s business or by cashing in one’s stock
options—has already become the new holy grail of work for young middle-class knowledge
workers in China today (Wang, 2015).
This “investor mentality towards work”, treating labor as either a financial investment or an
investment in improving one’s competitiveness on the job market, is the second dimension of the
post-2008 emergence of entrepreneurial labor in Zhongguancun introduced in this chapter (Neff,
2012). Compared to the self-exploratory work ethic, treating work as an investment is a more
utilitarian component of the new work imaginaries. However, it is also part and parcel of the
individualization of labor and risk that has been intensified in China following the 2008 global
crisis. Originated in the Silicon Valley since the late 1970s and became normalized in the US by
the 1990s dot.com boom, the calculating, self-responsible, and risk-loving investor-worker
emerged as a product of the technology-driven financilization of economy and labor (Neff, 2013;
Ross, 2003; Turner, 2006). As Ross observed based on his study of “No Collar” IT workers in

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New York City’s Silicon Alley: “Work was no longer something you performed for a fair wage;
it was an investment, an opportunity, an asset that you or someone else could leverage as a
means to boost a stock holding. Nor was achievement or security tied to work performance; it
was more likely determined by the story told by the daily stock indexes.” (p. 19).
A direct result of the state-led financialization and digitalization processes since the late
2000s, the proliferation of investor labor subjectivity in post-2008 Zhongguancun certainly
embodies a deepening of self-governing technologies and the culture of individualized risk:
entrepreneurial workers have willingly embraced risk-taking as self-actualization and enhanced
autonomy in fashioning a career and life biography of one’s own choosing. Consequently, the
government and companies have been further relieved of the responsibility of providing welfare
and job security to citizens. In this new culture of individualized risk, workers have no choice but
to be entrepreneurial and run the self as an enterprise (McNay, 2009). Nevertheless, the investor
subjectivity of Zhongguancun IT entrepreneurial labor is also informed by their culturally
specific experience as part of the expanding urban middle class in post-recession China and the
historical trajectory taken by generations of Zhongguancun entrepreneurs that had come before
them in Zhongguancun.
Traditionally, an “ethnic of entrepreneurship” defined by Harrell (1985) as “the investment
of one’s resources (land, labor, and/or capital) in a long-term quest to improve the material well-
being and security of some group to which one belongs and with which one identifies”, was
central to the Chinese economic ethic (p.216). This emphasis on labor and entrepreneurship as a
defense against perceived insecurity in traditional Chinese society and on the group-oriented,
rather than individualistic nature of the Chinese entrepreneurial ethic were echoed by others as
well (Hung, 2015; Redding, 1990). Hung (2015) in particular argued that the combined effects of

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a paternalistic imperial state and the sense of insecurity shared among Chinese businessmen in a
non-liberal society were the main reason why China became lagged behind in the 19
th
-century
capitalist race.
The socialist Chinese state delinked its economy from the global capitalist market and
instead pursued an alternative path of industrialization under the command of the socialist party-
state. Under the control and protection of the paternalistic socialist state, business
entrepreneurship was suppressed while selfless labor was celebrated and encouraged as
contributing to the grand nationalist and socialist cause. As we have seen with the history of
Zhongguancun, the danwei-based scientists and engineers were not suppose to take economic
risks since class and market had been nominally eliminated. However, to survive the turbulent
movements, they often have to bear enormous political risks. The most successful, as I have
shown, were often shrewd political entrepreneurs.
Since the 1980s, the dismantling of the danwei-based socialist welfare system and China’s
gradual integration into the world capitalist market facilitated the individualization of economic
risks. As trailblazers of the economic reform, Zhongguancun entrepreneurs braved both
economic and political risks. Adept at converting technical skills and political resources into
economic opportunities, the winners in Zhongguancun became early members of the post-reform
club for the financially independent in the 1990s. Since the late 1990s, riding on the global trend
towards financialization, more IT entrepreneurs with little political connection joined the club. In
addition to the new rich, the success of these domestic private companies and the penetration of
MNCs into China have also created an expanding group of middle class knowledge workers
throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

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The 2008 global financial crisis marked a watershed moment. In the aftermath of the crisis,
middle-class professionals in urban China have grown more aware of their precarious status.
China’s greater integration with the global capitalist system has rendered the country more
vulnerable to “transnational” and “externally-imposed” risks like the US-originated 2008 global
financial crisis. However, compared to their American counterpart, the Chinese middle-class has
to manage an extra set of “ deficiency risks” resulted from the “rush-to strategy” of China’s
“compressed” modernization, risks that had been made more salient by the global crisis (Beck
and Grande, 2010). Examples of “deficiency risks” include environmental crisis, food and
product quality problem, inconsistent governmental policies, corruption, and growing inequality
in access to welfare due to rapid privatization of public services.
In this context, the investor mentality has become a prevalent middle-class work imaginary
in post-2008 China. Achieving financial independence or constant self-improvement to keep or
enhance employability emerged as individualized solutions to culturally and historically specific
structural problems for the middle-class Chinese striving to maintain and improve their unstable
class status at a time of rapid economic change. Propelled by state-led financialization and
digitalization, venture-backed IT entrepreneurship has become the most prominent site in the
past decade where middle-class Chinese people seek both employability security and quick
fortune. The Chinese government has encouraged this individualized IT entrepreneurial labor as
not only a new engine of the Chinese economy but also a new market-driven mechanism of
wealth redistribution to help legitimize the paternalist ruling of the party-state. As a result, the
post-2008 proliferation of investor-worker subjectivity observed among Zhongguancun IT
entrepreneurs, though being part of the global trends towards financialization and the
individualization of risk, is also complicated by China’s “compressed modernity”, its positioning

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in the international division of labor, and the Chinese state’s often contradictory involvement in
both controlling and promoting the economy.
On one hand, the neoliberal investor mentality to work is articulated to the deep-seated
sense of defensiveness and insecurity among Zhongguancun entrepreneurs. One source of this
insecurity comes from Chinese entrepreneurs’ long-held mistrust of the government, as Redding
(1990) argued that the Chinese businessmen always maintain “an instinct for looking after
himself” (p. 127). Like many of my other interviewees, Meng told me that he quitted his old job
as a high-school Chinese teacher to start his own business because he wanted to realize financial
independence and take control of his own life. When I asked about his opinion of why Chinese
people always want to be their own boss, he replied without hesitation:
“Why be my own boss? You think you can trust the government to take care of you in your old age? Just this
morning on my taxi trip here, I heard this news that some elderly people in a southern city petitioned the
government to improve their pension. They were so frustrated after several failed attempts that they decided
to lie down on the city’s main road to protest. I don’t want to become them when I get old.” (Personal
Interview, 2016).

Meng’s lack of faith in the government’s welfare system was also echoed by Wei, a 40-
something developer of an artificial intelligence software. I asked him if he worried about issues
of medical care and pension as a self-employed person, he told me that he had been paying for
his own social security expenses but he wouldn’t really count on it to save his life because: “If
you get really sick, you can’t really rely on the state-provided medical care system. You have to
pay for most things out of your own pocket. Say if you get cancer and you don’t have enough
money for all those expensive treatment, what can you do? I actually feel more secure now that I
am working my ass off to make more money for myself and my family.” (Personal Interview,
2015). Meng and Wei’s defensiveness against the government’s perceived deficiency does not
necessarily make them “anti-government”. On the contrary, like most of my other informants,
they tend to adopt a more moderate point of view and accept the reality as a result of the

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complex interaction between China’s historical burden and current positioning in the
international division of labor. As well-educated middle-class, they are more concerned about
maintaining their social and geographical mobility through (self-)investment than reforming
China’s political system, as Meng explained: “Chinese middle class people’s dream is to make
money in China and live in the US.”
Apart from their mistrust of the government, Zhongguancun middle-class entrepreneurs’
insecurity also comes from China’s ongoing economic restructuring and the consequent
reshuffling of industries and labor skills. Staying employable in such a volatile labor market
means that workers have to be entrepreneurial. “The most efficient and effective way to learn
about a new industry is to throw yourself into it,” said Peter, the Garage Café’s new manager in
2016. A successful realtor, Peter left his million-yuan job to join the Garage Café after spending
more than a decade in the real estate industry. This was a bold move for Peter— not only does he
have little connection in the venture startup world, he also had to take an 80% pay cut. However,
Peter considered this temporary sacrifice necessary for his long-term career security and success:
“I was lucky in the sense that I spent my most productive years in the most profitable industry in China. But I
am convinced that the best days for the real estate industry are gone. The future belongs to IT and finance. It’s
better for me to make this move now than later. Three months into my new job, I have already learnt more
than what I could have in three years if I were to stay in real estate, not to mention the new friends that I have
made. This is a very promising and dynamic industry” (Personal Interview, 2016).

Like the majority of my other informants in Zhongguancun, Peter rejects “employment
security” in this economic environment as an equivalent to dead-end jobs, as Heng
commented: “If you feel too comfortable and secure in your current job, that means you are
not watching out for your self and you are not learning new skills. Nowadays nothing is really
secure.” Heng was, in fact, speaking from his own experience as a former accountant in a
foreign-invested manufacturing business in Guangdong province. Due to the contraction in
overseas demand, his company laid off almost half of its factory workers immediately

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following the 2008 crisis, and started to outsource a growing portion of its production to
Vietnam and Indonesia along with middle-level office work such as accounting in 2012. In
2013, Heng lost his job after working for the company for almost a decade. In the subsequent
years, he switched jobs three times but his salary and long-term career prospect pale compared
to his friends in the IT industry. So in the winter of 2015, having learnt about the Garage Café
on TV, he came to Zhongguancun to visit this “Startup Mecca”, hoping to find opportunities
to reinvent his life and career in the new industry.
Many of the people that I talked to at the Garage Café and other co-working spaces in
Zhongguancun are like Peter and Heng, who came to Zhongguancun out of the fear of being
left behind at a time of accelerated economic and technological transformations. The venture
startup industry offers not only the possibility of quick fortune—transcending one’s fate of
perpetual labor to join the ranks of capital owner and investor, but also the opportunity to
quickly update one’s skills and knowledge—improving one’s value as a commodity in the
competitive labor market. Most of my interviewees understood that the majority of startups
would fail. Only a handful could survive long enough to be bought by existing IT giants like
the BAT, and the chance of making it to the IPO stage is even slimmer. However, they also
agree that starting one’s own business or joining an early-stage startup company is the best
way of self-investment and a shortcut to stay competitive in a volatile labor market.
On the other hand, the Chinese middle-class entrepreneurial workers’ sense of insecurity
does not prevent them from identifying with the state’s “reflexive modernization” project to
boost economic growth and redress structural imbalances. If anything, policy inconsistencies
and the state’s heavy involvement in everyday economic life only make entrepreneurial
workers more eager to decipher and ride on the state’s politics. As we have seen with the

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history of Zhongguancun, the boundary between politics and commerce was rather blurred for
the first-generation entrepreneurs. The second-generation entrepreneurs might have started out
as “rebellious” IT heroes or geeks with no governmental affiliation, but keeping a foot in
politics is a common practice for those who are well-established (Kalathil, 2003). For
instance, Zhou Yunfan, the Stanford-educated founder of ChinaRen, having sold his first
company to Sohu in 2000 and listed his second startup Kongzhong on NASDAQ in 2004,
decided to enter politics and became the deputy director of Zhongguancun Science and
Technology Park in 2008. Later in 2015, he joined the state-owned Zhongguancun
Development Corporation as a general manager (Zhang, Wang, & Alon, 2011). Deng
Zhonghan, the Berkeley-educated founder and CEO of the NASDAQ-listed Vimicro, was
elected as the youngest member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a deputy to the
11
th
National People’s Congress a few years following his return to Zhongguancun in 1999.
The age-old practice of cultivating political ties, skills, and persona thus constitutes
another dimension of the investor-labor subjectivity in post-2008 China. It becomes melded to
the state’s new regime of governance that elevates the patriotic but self-responsible, political
savvy but financially and technically smart investor-entrepreneur as the ideal middle-class
subject of the new economy. For instance, one of the most successful startups that I had
encountered during my fieldwork was an e-bike business founded by a group of young
entrepreneurs graduated from the prestigious Tsinghua University. Within a year of its
establishment, the company had secured its series-A funding with a business valuation of 0.2
billion RMB. Lei, the 26-year-old co-founder told me that in addition to their technological
expertise and market savvy, the team also paid particular attention to government’s policies.
They knew that the government would come up with new initiatives to support environmental

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friendly transportation devices. They also knew that their blending of China’s existing
manufacturing capacity (bike making) with new technologies (their patented energy-saving
battery technology and mobile app) fits perfectly with the government’s “Internet plus” policy
announced in 2015. To garner political cache and media publicity prior to their series-B
financing, the startup also utilized political connections to volunteer as the “official
transportation device provider” for the state-sponsored high-profile “World Internet
Conference” in 2016. Their investment in politics soon paid off as the company succeeded in
garnering its series-B financing from several state-backed venture capital funds, bringing the
founders one step closer to financial independence.
While Lei and his team came from a long tradition of strategic alliance between
politicians and elite engineers and scientists in Zhonggauncun, the story of Mengde, a self-
claimed “grassroots” entrepreneur and the founder of an excavator sharing app, embodies a
new synergy between the party-state’s promotion of entrepreneurship and its residual
grassroots mobilization politics in Zhongguancun. Mengde grew up in a small village in
Southeast China and had dabbled in many trades, such as high school teacher, shoe seller,
excavator trader, before coming to Zhongguancun in 2013 for the IT gold rush. The “legend”
has it that Mengde spent almost a year sleeping in the lounge room of a public bathing house
at night and going to work in the Garage Café’s during the day to save money. His humble
background makes his success all the more inspiring to other grassroots IT entrepreneurs like
him. Earlier in 2014, the grassroots entrepreneur’s failed attempts at starting his own IT
businesses in Zhongguancun were featured in a documentary produced by China’s Central
Television (CCTV). Later that year, through the recommendation of Garage Café’s manager
Sudi, Mengde was invited to represent Zhongguancun grassroots entrepreneurs at a

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symposium in which he was given the opportunity to talk face-to-face with the Chinese vice
premier Liu Yandong. Not long after the event, Mengde obtained a seed funding for his
excavator-sharing app. When I asked him about his experience as a “grassroots entrepreneur”
in Zhongguancun, Mengde confided:
“I got lucky because my story went public. Maybe the government and the media needed a story like this to
give people hope. These publicities functioned as endorsement for me. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to
get funded. To bet honest, I don’t think that my case is typical of most grassroots entrepreneurs’ experience. I
was just the lucky few.” (Personal Interview, 2016).

Mengde’s conscious or unconscious construction of a “grassroots entrepreneur” persona
constitutes a form of self-investment in accordance to the need of state capitalism to maintain
the myth of IT entrepreneurship as a fair channel of social mobility for all Chinese citizens
regardless of their socioeconomic background. Gerrad (2014) highlighted the performative
aspect of constant learning as a self-work ethic, arguing that “to learn demonstrates social
participation” and that learning is “a performative demonstration of an effort to better oneself
and one’s social position” (p. 869). Both Mengde and Lei’s investment in building up political
cache and connections can be considered a type of performative labor of self-improvement
deployed to enhance one’s value as entrepreneurial subjects operating under the logic of state
capitalism. Although the involvement of the state in promoting IT entrepreneurship and
individualization of labor is not unique to China, the deep intertwining of the state and market
logics in determining the life chances of entrepreneurial workers and in shaping
entrepreneurial subjectivities sets Zhongguancun apart from the Silicon Valley.
The emerging investor labor subjectivity among Zhongguancun entrepreneurs is
certainly connected to the global neoliberal trends towards individualization and
financialization of work. However, it is also situated in the Chinese historical tradition and
contemporary social reality. Unlike the protestant merchants of the 18
th
and 19
th
century

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England who chose to invest surplus capital into industrial expansion, businessmen in late
imperial China used investment as a strategy of defense against the insecurity imposed by an
anti-commercial Confucian paternalistic state. As a result, instead of expanding production,
surplus capital was more often used to purchase fixed assets or to support the education of the
male offspring in pursuit of officialdom (Hung, 2015; Redding, 1990). This investor mentality
formed on the basis of Chinese businessmen’s ambivalent attitude to political power in an
illiberal social tradition persisted into post-2008 China, which becomes articulated to new
externally-imposed and internally-generated risks. Under new conditions of financialization,
digitalization, and individualization, work is increasingly looked upon from the investor’s
perspective. Global financial crisis facilitated and converged with national economic
restructuring, which have made it imperative for entrepreneurial workers to adapt their skill
sets and knowledge to the changing regime of value through constant learning and self-
improvement.
As two dimensions of the culturally and historically specific process of individualization of
labor in post-2008 China, the self-exploratory labor ethic and the investor mentality to work
illustrate the hybridity and tensions inherent to middle-class Chinese entrepreneurial self. The
Garage Café as a contested social space in Zhongguancun embodies materially the new form of
sociality and the process of social re-embedding at a time of accelerated individualization in
China, which constitutes the third and last middle-class work imaginary introduced in this
chapter.
New Communitarian Culture and Co-working Space
The hybrid subjectivities of entrepreneurial labor are best embodied in the new social
infrastructure emerged in the past decade in Zhongguancun. The story of the Garage Café and

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the Innoway well captures the co-creation of the new spaces and new forms of sociality by
multiple agents and the interaction of residual and emerging cultural forces. New social spaces
such as co-working spaces and co-living hostels for entrepreneurs emerged in the past few years
that both respond to and further facilitate new kinds of sociality among individualized
entrepreneurial worker. Garage café is the first and one of the best-known coworking spaces in
Zhongguancun. It was founded in 2011 on the second floor of a small hotel in the
“Zhongguancun Book City” by Su Di, the then 31-year-old former director of investment, along
with 10 “Angel Investors” (Ke, 2011; Wang, 2013). Su’s original intention was to create a low-
cost social space with low-threshold of entry for early stage start-up entrepreneurs to work
together, exchange ideas, support each other, and meet potential investors and team members.
Since its opening in April 2011, the café got so popular that it had attracted not only
numerous entrepreneurs, investors, and media coverage, but also the attention of both the
municipal and state politicians. In November 2011, the government officially recognized the
Garage Café as an “innovative incubator”, and thus formally incorporating it into its subsidy and
support system previously only reserved for state-owned incubators. The Beijing municipal
government also took seriously Sudi’s idea of transforming the “Haidian Book City” into a street
of incubators for early stage IT startups (Su, 2013). After two years’ planning, evacuation, and
renovation, the “Innoway”, a street consists of many café-style coworking space and incubators,
a government start-up service centre, and several investment firms and start-up media
companies, came into operation in the summer of 2014. In May 2015, the Chinese premier Li
Keqiang conducted a high-profile inspection tour of the Innoway as part of the nationwide
mobilization campaign for the government’s new national strategy of “mass entrepreneurship
and innovation” and “Internet Plus” announced in late 2014 (Hong, 2017; Tse, 2016). This event

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had turned the Innoway into an international poster child for the regime’s epochal economic
restructuring project.
The emergence of the Garage Café in Zhongguancun is a local response to the post-2008
rise of the global co-working movement (Waters-Lynch et al., 2016). The global co-working
movement purports to “magically” resolve the tension within networked individualization of
work. That is, the contradiction between workers’ desire for flexibility, autonomy, and creative
expression and the sense of loneliness and isolation felt is in some way reconciled by the idea of
“co-working” as “the physical reterritorialisation of ‘nomad’ working practices” (Gandini, 2015).
However, this happens at a time when “networking” has already become the new imperative and
one of the essential labor skills demanded by the new economy that blurs the very distinction
between work and leisure (McRobbie, 2016). In this sense, not merely a revival of
communitarianism among flexible workers in the wake of the global financial crisis, the co-
working movement is also the new phase of a longer history of the capitalist “channeling” of
“collective labor” into “monetary flows” (Terranova, 2000). The post-2008 co-working boom is
fueled not just by “the desire for community in the work environment, particularly among
millennials”, but also by the capitalist need of regeneration as both real estate investors and high-
tech venture capitalist found in co-working a lucrative new site for investment (Perez, 2016).
The rapid rise of the Garage Café between 2011 and 2014 and the subsequent dilemma that
it faces embodies the tension inherent to the “high-tech gift economy” and its culturally and
historically specific expression in post-2008 China (Barbrook, 2005). To reconcile the conflict
between “money-commodity and gift relations”, the founder Sudi tried to encourage in the
Garage Cafe values of communitarianim, sharing, and altruism while downplaying utilitarianism
and competition (Ibid). The name “Garage Café” itself speaks to such endeavor. A familiar

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media story runs like this: When Sudi was trying to come up with a name for his startup café, he
stumbled upon an article online which talked about how numerous IT startups in the United
States, such as Apple and Youtube, all started out from the founder’s garage. For Sudi, the
garage represents cultural values that “tolerate failure and grant individuals freedom to explore
their passion”, as he explained during our interview. These values are precisely what are missing
from the Chinese society today that has made Chinese people “less creative”. “Nowadays the
Chinese society is too utilitarian and fixated on short-term profits”, said Sudi (Personal
Interview, 2016). So by naming his business the “Garage Café”, Sudi wanted to build a
community that makes it less costly and risky for Chinese entrepreneurs to start their own
businesses (Dong, 2011). This story shows that what the Garage Café resists against is not
capitalism per se, but rather the current status of Chinese capitalism characterized by an
excessive focus on immediate profits. The cultural myth of Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism, in
this sense, served as an alternative source of imagination for entrepreneurs like Sudi. The Garage
Café’s mission is to construct an “alternative community” where entrepreneurs and other agents
involved in the industry can come together to experiment with a new vision of capitalism in
China that is more tolerant and less utilitarian.

The Garage Cafe

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In many ways, this ideal has been materialized through building a participatory model of
networked labor based on both tangible and intangible mutual support. For example, Zhaodong,
a serial entrepreneur and a one-time co-worker at the Garage Cafe who had just sold his first
startup in 2011 volunteered to organize an open-source technology team and was able to keep it
running for a couple of years. Consisted of programmers who were either co-workers or frequent
visitors, the team provided technical support to Garage Café startups at no cost (Su, 2013). In
addition, leveraging its brand name, the Café also collaborated with IT corporations to provide
exclusive perks for its members, such as free cloud server service offered by Alibaba, free
Microsoft Windows and Office software, free testing platform for android apps. But the most
attractive of all was the opportunity to meet face-to-face with angel investors and investment
managers. These benefits, according to Sudi, came from a virtuous circle co-created by the
whole community: big corporations were willing to provide service because they see the Garage
Café members as potential long-term customers; investors frequent the Garage Café because they
always encountered good projects there (Zhang, 2012).
Knowing that these tangible benefits offered by the Garage Café were attractive to
entrepreneurs, Sudi nevertheless emphasized the “intangible” and emotional support that co-
workers provided for each other. Unlike many other co-working spaces that I visited in Beijing
during my fieldwork, entrepreneurs at the Garage Café were more open to conversation with
each other and the visitors. They spent more time not only helping fellow co-workers refine and
improve on their ideas and business plans, but also socializing outside of the Garage Café. As
one long-time co-worker Shi told me that for him, the Garage Café “is not only a café or an
office, but an emotional and spiritual shelter” (Personal Interview, 2015). It was typical to see a
group of entrepreneurs gathering together over lunch or a cup of coffee/tea to follow up on each

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other’s projects, offering critiques and encouragement. As build-in mechanism to encourage
sharing and collective tinkering, the Garage Café also hosted daily “case show” and monthly
“demo day”—the former provided a platform for members to introduce their projects or share
progress to get feedbacks from the community, and the latter selected teams with relative mature
projects to pitch their business plans to a group of invited investors.
For many of my informants, the Garage Café pioneered a community-based and open-
access way of conducting businesses in China, which was considered to be more transparent and
fairer than the traditional Chinese business model that centered on personal connections
(guanxi). “The threshold of entry for business start-up is lower and the criteria that investors use
to evaluate projects are more transparent”, commented Wei, an interviewee who had already
secured his series-A funding: “I had learned so much about how to make it in the new economy
by talking to people and by participating in the open events organized by the Café”. This sense of
empowerment was echoed by Jun, a young game developer and a former Garage Café member
who had left in 2014 and moved into his own office with a bigger team. “Without the resources
that the Garage Café had provided me, with my humble background, I would never have the
courage to strike out on my own in my 20s. The Garage Café offered me so many things: low-
cost office, collaborators, training, emotional support, free media publicity and investment”
(Personal Interview, 2016). Seen in this light, the communitarian vision of capitalism co-
constructed by the Garage Café community shares similar traits with Eric Raymond’s version of
“open source software” (OSS) in which open source is portrayed as a superior development
model, and as Coleman and Golub (2008) put it: “not only the right thing to do”, but also “the
more efficient thing to do” (p. 262). Particularly for entrepreneurs at the Garage Café, this
communitarian model was envisioned as superior than the existing version of Chinese capital

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plagued by personalism, short-sighted utilitarianism, and lack of access for people with no
“background”.
However, as the Garage Café’s fame soared since 2012, more entrepreneurs came to visit
from all over the country, and many were interested in becoming a member, which had exceeded
the Garage Café’s capacity of accommodation. Meanwhile, similar co-working spaces started to
emerge in the Zhongguancun area, emulating the Garage Café’s model but were set out to be
more profit-oriented. All these factors had intensified competition for limited resources, which
started to pose threats to Sudi’s utopian vision of community, open access, and tolerance.
Holding fast to his belief, Sudi resisted against the pressure to more effectively monetize and
financialize the platform, as he stated in a 2013 open letter to the public:
“We will not open new branch, nor will we establish our own angel capital fund. We might just go with the
flow and stay simple. We stick to the “no-branch” principle because we want to perfect the Garage Café and
stay faithful to our founding philosophy, that is, to establish a gathering community for startups. We refuse to
follow the financialization model, because we want to retain the Garage Café’s pureness as a platform. We
don’t want people to worry about competition. Just think: if the Garage Café has invested in your competitor
and not you, would you still feel comfortable to share with you co-workers? We hope all entrepreneurs at the
Garage Café are friends.” (Su, 2013).

The Garage Café is not alone in its insistence on just “staying as a platform”. According to
Tarleton Gillespie (2010), this discursive move was echoed by prominent “digital
intermediaries” such as YouTube, which betrays their struggle to elide the tensions inherent to
their service: “between user-generated and commercially-produced content, between cultivating
community and serving up advertising, between intervening in the delivery of content and
remaining neutral” (p. 348). This tension between commerce and community is precisely what
the Garage Café has to navigate as an offline “platform” established according to the utopian
philosophy of the “high-tech gift economy”. What complicates the Garage Café’s case in
comparison to these mostly US-based commercial platforms is the involvement of the Chinese

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central and local governments, which turned out to be a double-edged sword for the Garage
Cafe.
Since its opening, the Garage Café has been riding the government’s economic
restructuring initiatives. Located at the heart of Zhongguancun, the Garage Café builds on the
region’s S&T legacy and has especially benefited from the post-2008 state-led digitalization and
financialization process. Su recalled in our interview that he noticed a quick increase in the
number of IT entrepreneurs and VC investors in Beijing since the late 2000s. As a director of
investment himself, he often found it quite time-consuming to travel around the traffic-congested
Beijing city to meet with potential investees. “It’s always a pain in the neck to find a quiet and
decent café to talk”, Sudi told me. And he picked Zhongguancun mainly because of the area’s
high concentration of IT companies and workers, angel investors, and investment institutions, as
well as the district government’s supportive policy towards IT entrepreneurship (Personal
Interview, 2016). Indeed, Sudi was right about political support. As it turned out, the Garage
Café’s goal of supporting early-stage entrepreneurs and connecting them to venture capital, and
its ethos of passionate work, mutual support, and open sharing jibed very well with the
government’s double logic as both a developmental capitalist state seeking to “upgrade” the
Chinese economy and ease unemployment pressure, and a paternalistic socialist state trying to
redress mounting inequalities and mobilize grassroots participation in the economy.
On the one hand, the Garage Café answered to the Beijing municipal government’s needs
to gentrify Zhongguancun in accordance to the state efforts to restructure the economy. As we
have already seen, the local government has huge financial stakes in boosting Zhongguancun’s
real estate value, which may or may not have anything to do with improving China’s innovation
capacity. Meanwhile, an important incentive behind the local government’s promotion of

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Zhongguancun’s high-tech innovation capacity is to attract central state policy support, which in
turn, will stimulate municipal and district economy by attracting more businesses to
Zhongguancun. This fiscal logic came into being in the late 1980s when Zhongguancun was
designated by the state as the first “High-Tech Experimental Zone”. It became dominant in the
late 1990s with the expansion of Zhongguancun into a state-level “Science Park”, and still served
as the driving force behind Zhongguancun’s post-2008 transformation despite the state’s
attempts to shift away from this old model of development centred on infrastructure investment.
It was in this context that the local government became interested in the “Garage Café
model”. The Haidian Book City— the street on which the Garage Café was based—was founded
by the government in 1992 as a “city cultural landmark”. It consisted of small and large
bookstores targeting the university and intellectual communities of the Zhongguancun area. By
the early 2010s, the majority of the stores on the street were squeezed out of business by the
country’s booming e-commerce industry. Therefore, Sudi’s suggestion of turning the Haidian
Book City into a street serving venture startups struck a deep chord with the local government as
the latter had been waiting for years for the right occasion to gentrify the street. In June 2014, the
government-invested Innoway was put into operation. Managed by Haizhi Kechuang, a joint
company between a real estate SOE and a private IT start-up investment firm partially owned the
Tsinghua University, the Innoway straddles commercial and political logic. It essentially had
realized the local government’s goal of gentrifying the Haidian Book City by replacing the
previously unprofitable bookstores with fashionable co-working space, incubators, and niche
media outlets serving the start-up industry.
On the other hand, the Garage Café’s vision of constructing a more communitarian, fair,
and tolerant model of economic development converged with the state’s new mass line campaign

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to promote “grassroots” entrepreneurship and innovation (Yang, 2015). As the premier Li
Keqiang said during his speech at the CCP’s annual meeting in 2015:
“Promoting entrepreneurship and innovation helps restructure the system of wealth redistribution and enhance
social justice. This also opens up space for young people, especially those from poor families to seek social
mobility. We promote mass entrepreneurship and innovation because we want more people to get rich while
fulfilling their life’s meaning (shixian rensheng jiazhi)” (Li, 2015).

Departing from the radical socialist ideology of egalitarianism, the post-2008 Chinese state has
instead blended its socialist mass mobilization legacy with a Silicon Valley style populist
entrepreneurial rhetoric. Anyone who knows the Chinese socialist history would not be
unfamiliar to the practice of model and hero emulating campaigns, as captured by the Maoist
slogan “Learn from Dazhai in agriculture and learn from Daqing in industry”. Since its opening
in 2011, many local and central government politicians, including Guo Shuqing, the former head
of China Securities Regulation Commission, and Guo Jinlong, the Communist Party Secretary of
Beijing, visited the Garage Café (Su, 2013). In China, these so-called “inspection tours”
(Zoufang) are often ridden with rich political meaning. The government had handpicked the
Garage Café, and later the Innoway as a model site for economic restructuring to be propagated
nationally.
The hype around the Innoway reached a climax in May 7, 2015 when the Premier Li paid a
personal visit to the street. The symbolism of Li’s tour, like that of Deng’s famous 1992
Southern Tour, was obvious. On that day, Li first spent a few hours at CAS, the “incubator” of
socialist scientists, celebrating its 60
th
Anniversary and talking to scientists about the importance
of basic research. Then he dropped by the Legend Star, an incubator affiliated to Lenovo, the
high-tech icon of China’s reform, before joining the enthusiastic crowd of photo-snapping
entrepreneurs on the Innoway—China’s future of state-championed and venture capital-backed
innovative IT businesses.

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To a certain extent, the government has assisted the Garage Café in realizing its goal. The
government’s political support functioned as validation for the Garage Café’s social significance
and boosted its national and international fame. Also, by incorporating the Garage Café into its
support and subsidy system, the government has heavily subsidized its rent and broadband
Internet subscription, which allows the Garage Cafe to stay financially afloat while maintaining
its socially-driven brand image (Personal Interview with Peter, Garage Café’s manager since
2016). From this perspective, government involvement helped the Garage Café to sustain its
“gift economy” character against financial pressure. However, the establishment of the
government-invested Innoway brought in more competition. These later-joined co-working
spaces and incubators on Innoway, while also enjoying government subsidy, are more profit-
oriented and less socially-embedded than the Garage Café.
For instance, the 3W café, another café-style co-working space founded by the young
former hedge fund manager Xu Dandan in 2014, adopted a financialized model from the very
beginning. By March 2016, it has already expanded into six sub-companies (a communications
agency, an incubator, a venture capital fund, and a job-hunting website Lagou.com) and
completed its series-C round of funding (Wu, 2016). In contrast to the Garage Café’s open-
access and sharing-oriented model, 3W is more meritocratic and profit-driven. Far from being
just a “platform”, the 3W café has a highly competitive screening system that selects promising
startups as “incubatees” and invests in only a small percentage of the teams after a six-month
“incubation period” (Personal Interview with Dachui, an investment manager at 3W, 2016). As a
result of these profit-driven practices, new co-working spaces like the 3W are able to attract
more “high-quality” startups and venture capital fund, which has drained the Garage Café of its
resources and significantly reduced its value to entrepreneurs and investors.

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Meanwhile, the Garage’s Café’s openness to the general public—visitors, media, and
researchers like me—though had contributed to its international fame, has also disrupted the
working environment of the café and transformed it into a mixed bag of co-working space,
government policy showcase site, information exchange centre for newbies, and hot tourist spot.
Far from being autonomous from the market and the state, the Garage Café struggled to maintain
its vision admix external influences. Conflicts arouse as the founding partners debated about the
future direction of the Garage Café, which finally led Sudi to quit his manager position in late
2014. When I interviewed Peter Zhang, the Garage Café’s new manager in 2016, he told me that
the shareholders were contemplating about ways to diversify and better monetize the brand.
Later that year, I heard news about the opening of Garage Café’s branch shops in several second-
tier Chinese cities (The Official Wechat Account of the Garage Cafe).
Conclusion
This Chapter unpacks the new entrepreneurial work imaginaries and hybrid labor
subjectivities emerging among middle-class IT entrepreneurs in Beijing’s Zhongguancun
High-Tech Park. While the booming entrepreneurial scene in Zhongguancun is part and parcel
of the post-2008 revival of techno-optimism driven by financialization and technological and
commercial innovations such as social media platforms, sharing economy, and 3G/4G mobile
technologies. It is also firmly situated in the institutional, political, and cultural legacy of
Zhongguancun’s history as a socialist military defense-driven research and development
centre and a state-endorsed high-tech zone in the post-reform years. Compared to the peasant
entrepreneurs and women transnational sellers that I am going to introduce in the later
chapters, the middle-class IT start-up entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun, despite their desires for

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personal autonomy and individualistic pursuits, have demonstrated a stronger identification
with the techno-nationalist goals of the Chinese party-state.
However, as I have shown, the new alliance between politics and commerce is not
without contradiction. The highly volatile policy environment and the financial risks
associated with start-up businesses only reinforced Chinese entrepreneurs and businessmen’s
long-held mistrust towards the government. The government’s role as both a financial investor
in the IT start-up industry and a policy maker promoting and regulating its development
generated ambivalent results. As it’s revealed by the rise and fall of the start-up co-working
space the Garage Café, political endorsement is often a double-edged sword. While some
entrepreneurs have learnt to successfully ride on policy trends to realize their ideals, the long-
term commercial sustainability of those handpicked “model” entrepreneurial businesses is
harder to predict, not mention that those models’ success is always difficult to replicate in a
different policy environment. Ultimately, Zhongguancun’s post-2008 story speaks to the
historical and site specificity of entrepreneurial subjectivities even when they are articulated
to broader global trends towards individualization.

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Chapter 3
Rural E-commerce Entrepreneurs in Wantou Village
On September 19, 2014, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba went public at the New
York Stock Exchange (NYSE). This biggest IPO ever in NYSE’s history culminated with 8 e-
commerce entrepreneurs, including a Chinese peasant entrepreneur and an American cherry
farmer, ringing the bell on behalf of Alibaba’s legendary CEO Jack Ma. By the end of the day,
Alibaba became one of the most valuable global IT companies and Jack Ma the richest man in
China. In May 2015, the peasant e-commerce entrepreneur Jia Peixiao recounted to me with both
pride and regret his “small adventure” at the American consulate in Shenyang right before
Alibaba’s NYSE IPO: “if they had approved my visa, I would have been standing on the podium
of NYSE as one of the bell ringers”. In between Alibaba’s NYC IPO and my visit to Jia
Peixiao’s village in Northeast China, in March 2014, the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced
in Beijing an action plan to encourage mass entrepreneurship and innovation and to promote the
digitalization of traditional industries, otherwise known as the “Internet Plus”. Both policy
initiatives had placed rural e-commerce and peasant digital entrepreneurship at the centre of
China’s epochal economic restructuring (State Council of China, 2015).
3

Through these interconnected events, we see how Chinese peasants, governments, and IT
corporations alike have come to re-imagine IT entrepreneurial labor, particularly rural-
ecommerce, as a solution to China’s rural-urban uneven development as well as the peasant and
countryside’s crucial role in China’s new economy. This chapter traces the emergence of IT
entrepreneurial labor in post-2008 rural China by telling the story of Jia Peixiao and his fellow
peasant entrepreneurs in Wantou village. Located in Shandong province of Northeast China,

3
Internet plus is a policy proposed by the Chinese premier Li Keqiang in his government work report on
March 5, 2015, aiming to digitalize traditional manufacturing and service industries.

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Wantou was crowned by Alibaba as one of the 20 Chinese Taobao villages in 2013. When I
visited the village in the summer of 2015, the majority of Wantou’s residents and some in the
adjacent villages were all involved in the e-commerce industry producing and selling hand-
braided small furniture pieces and household items, a traditional village craft with hundreds of
years of history. I lived in Wantou for three months with the family of a small handicraft factory
owner, and spent my day talking to village e-commerce entrepreneurs, handicraft weavers, local
government officials, and many other participants of this rural e-commerce community. The
boom of the e-commerce industry in Wantou since 2008 had revitalized local economy and
changed the life trajectories of villagers and a few number of city-born entrepreneurs who had
migrated to Wantou for the e-commerce gold rush. At the time of writing, the rural e-commerce
industry is expanding at a dazzling speed in China. According to a report released by
Aliresearch, the number of Taobao villages had grown from 20 in 2013 to 1311 by the end of
2016 (Aliresearch, 2016).
The phenomenal rise of Taobao villages had been celebrated as an alternative path of rural
development and a solution to China’s thorny “peasant problem” (Sannong wenti). Similarly, e-
commerce development and peasant techno-entrepreneurship had been extolled as holding the
key to unlock economic restructuring and a more democratic and sustainable form of capitalism
in China (Hu, Liu and Xi, 2013; Marino, 2014; Wang, Jiang and Ye, 2014). However, what such
euphoric discourse masks is the ongoing expansion of a new mechanism of surplus value
extraction that thrives on intersection of tradition and innovation and the formation of a new
corporate-state nexus in sanctioning a new flexible regime of labor and in creating new digital
monopolies.

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In this context, family-based rural e-commerce entrepreneurship emerged as a
technological and symbolic solution to China’s unsustainable model of development following
the 2008 global financial crisis. This chapter situates rural digital entrepreneurial labor in the
history of small peasant familial production and the evolution of family-oriented
individualization in Chinese countryside. Like other cases documented in this dissertation, rural
IT entrepreneurial labor is a locally specific response to global transformation, which
complicates the Western debate on cultural and digital labor. Specifically in rural China, the
juxtaposition of family-oriented individualization and the emerging regime of digital and cultural
work, instead of erasing the materiality and collective characteristic of labor and bridging the
rural-urban divide, has intensified the contradictions between manual and mental, individualized
and collective, and rural and urban. Rather than serving as an alternative to global neoliberal
capitalism, the emerging regime of digital entrepreneurial labor in rural China has
simultaneously opened up new opportunities to make capitalism more livable, while giving rise
to new forms of precarity, anxiety, and inequalities. A key question that I grapple with in this
chapter is how technology-driven structural transformation of global capitalism intersects with
local traditions in shaping hybrid forms of labor practices, subjectivities, and lived experiences?
In the following pages, I will first trace the trend towards family-oriented individualization
in rural China as formed in tandem with a culturally and historically specific trajectory of
modernization in China. Then I discuss how the new regime of IT entrepreneurial labor had
emerged riding on this trend with reference to the co-construction of Wantou as an e-commerce
village by governments, entrepreneurs, and Alibaba. After that, I move on to describe the
reinvention of family production by the e-commerce entrepreneurs in Wantou before I depict the
tensions emerged on both subjective and group levels when traditional village-based familial

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production is appropriated to be integrated into the regime of digital and cultural work.
Specifically I focus on three issues, namely the branding of rural identities, Shanzhai production,
and the tug-of-war between manual and mental labor.
IT Entrepreneurial Labor and Family Oriented Individualization in Rural China
The emergence of Internet-based entrepreneurial labor in post-2008 rural China can be
understood as a result of China’s state-led and family-driven individualization process in the past
century (Shim and Han, 2010; Yan, 2010). Multiple factors, including but not limited to the
compressed nature of China’s modernization process in which industrialization has paralleled
informationalization (Beck, 2010), the socialist state’s pursuit of alternative modernization and
the post-socialist state’s re-integration into the world’s capitalist market (Lin, 2013), and the
nation’s strong family-centered economic and cultural traditions and overpopulation (Hong,
2015; Huang, 1990; Gates, 1996), have interacted to shape this process of individualization. As a
consequence, unlike many industrialized nations of the world, Chinese peasants, though were
disembedded from traditional kinship-based village communities as individualized laborers, have
not been properly “re-embedded” into modern urban society (Yan, 2011). More than a decade
into the new millennium, the urban-rural divide remains entrenched. Caught in-between the city
and the countryside, a large number of Chinese peasants and peasant-workers stay semi-
proletarianized and are relegated to manual labor without equal access to social welfare
provisions enjoyed by the urban Chinese (Wen, 2001). These inequalities resulted from the lack
of proper social re-embedding mechanism has preserved and even reinforced the vitality of the
family as a privatized and alternative institution for individualized Chinese peasants. As I am
going to show, peasant IT entrepreneurial labor and rural e-commerce emerged as both a product

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of and a solution to these contradictions resulted from the incomplete and uneven process of
individualization in China.
The traditional Chinese society was kinship or lineage based. The Chinese sociologist Fei
Xiaotong, observing from a cultural and social perspective in the early 20
th
century,
differentiated the Chinese kinship-centred social structure from the Western organization-based
and individualistic modern society. He named the traditional Chinese way the “differential mode
of association” (Fei, 1948/1992: 60). At the centre of the Chinese moral universe is the self. The
Chinese builds its society by extending from the self to form families, lineage networks, and
friendship circles etc. Thus, the Chinese society is consisted of numerous self-centred webs with
kinship as their core. This is especially true in traditional agrarian society where geographical
mobility was limited throughout one’s lifespan. The economic anthropologist Hill Gates (1996),
echoing Fei from an economic perspective, termed the traditional family-based Chinese mode of
economic production as “petty capitalism”
4
. “Petty-capitalist households”, according to Gates,
“produce for their own use”, and “maintain non-capitalist exchanges with kin, friends, and fellow
villagers”. They are owned by the family, led by “men who ideally are agnatic kin”, and
“depends first, and heavily, on its own members for labor.” (p. 29). Village communal power,
controlled by rural elites and exercised through lineage network, mediated the relation between
the imperial state and the peasants (Yan, 2011). The persistence of this familial small-scale
agricultural and sideline (handicraft) production to a large extent defined the Chinese economy
well into the mid 20
th
century (Fei, 1992; Wen, 2001; 2004; Huang, 1985, 1990).
The triumph of the Communist Revolution in China in 1949 led the nation to pursue a
trajectory of socialist industrialization. To more quickly and effectively industrialize the nation,

4
Gates differentiated petty capitalism from the Chinese state-centred tributary mode of production and Western
industrial capitalism.

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the socialist state opted for the collectivization of small peasant farming and the rural family
handicraft industry (Eyferth, 2009; Unger, 2002). The state-implemented collectivization of rural
institutions and economic production and the socialist campaigns penetrated deeply into the
social fabric of the peasant society, replacing the kinship-based village communal power with a
multilayered socialist administrative system and a bureaucracy of cadres (Yan, 2011). Rural
collectivization generated paradoxical results for reorganizing the Chinese rural social structure.
On one hand, it liberated the family and individual from the “ancestor’s shadow” or the
traditional village lineage power and re-embedded them into the socialist individual-state
relationship (Hsu, 1948; Yan, 2010). On the other, peasants certainly benefited from the socialist
welfare system that provided them free education and health care, the economic hardship that
they experienced as a result of the deficiency in collective farming and the state’s urban-centric
policies during the socialist years had reinforced peasants’ reliance on the household for
economic and cultural support (Meisner, 1977; Nee, 1984).
This state-led partial and incomplete individualization of the rural society (Yan, 2011) and
the “peasant household individualism” (Nee, 1984) are a direct consequence of what Wen (2001)
termed as the “State Capitalist Primitive Accumulation”—strategies adopted by the socialist
state, such as the household registration system, the rural commune system, and state-
commanded grain production, to ensure the efficient extraction and transferring of agriculture
surplus value to support urban industrialization.
5
Despite the internal political struggles along the
continuum of development and egalitarianism and the socialist state’s intentions and rhetorics
suggesting otherwise, the gaps between rural and urban and manual and mental labor remained
entrenched if not enlarged during three decades of socialism (Huang, 2010; Meisner, 1977).

5
According to Wen (2001), unlike Western industrialized economies that had relied on colonialism as a means of
external primitive accumulation, China had no choice but to accumulate internally by collectivizing the inefficient
small peasant economy under the command of a strong Socialist state.

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In the 1980s, the post-Mao economic liberalization took off in the countryside with the
return of family-based small peasant farming under the household responsibility system.
Township and village enterprises (TVEs) thrived as the peasant familial entrepreneurialism
recently unleased by the economic reform met the legacy of the rural collectivization—the
Maoist commune and brigade enterprises. Rural reform in the 1980s diversified economy in the
countryside and absorbed a large amount of rural surplus labor, which had eased population
pressure, improved agriculture productivity, and greatly enhanced the standard of living in the
countryside (Huang, 1990; Huang, 2008). The restoration of household as the basic economic
unit and the redistribution of collective land and property based on the number of household
laborers awakened a sense of family-based individual rights. Rapid marketization and loosened
constraints on rural-to-urban mobility further motivated the entrepreneurial self and legitimized
the pursuit of personal and household interests.
However, this TVE-led rural industrialization model of “leaving the land but not the
village, entering the factory but not the city” (Gan, 1993) proved to be short-lived. Since the
early 1990s, following the 1989 Tiananmen event and Deng’s 1992 Southern tour, the state re-
prioritized large (especially costal) cities and adopted an export and foreign direct investment
(FDI) driven model of development. In contrast to the “golden decade” of the 1980s, the 1990s
witnessed the deterioration of the countryside. With the decline of TVEs and the growing
unprofitability of agricultural production, rural-urban chasm started to widen again (Day, 2013;
Huang, 2008). De-collectivization and political decentralization reduced investment in rural
public expenditure and left village and county level governments in revenue crisis. As
marketization deepened with China’s gradual re-integration into the global capitalist system,
many local officials grew increasingly corrupt and extractive, forming informal ties with private

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entrepreneurs and urban or overseas investors to seek personal gain at the expenses of the village
community. Heavy agricultural tax burden, rural poverty, and alternative urban employment
opportunities drove an unprecedented exodus of peasants into the cities.
Migration further individualized and disembbeded peasants from village communities and
familial ties. However, the household registration system stays entrenched, barring migrant
peasant workers from enjoying the same economic opportunities as urban residents (Unger,
2012). Peasant workers are treated as cheap laborers without entitlement to urban welfare and
social security benefits though their rural registration status entitled them to land ownership in
their home villages. Under the “rural-urban dual structure”, many peasants were caught in-
between a decaying rural society and an exploitative urban labor regime (Wen, 2004). This semi-
proletarianization of the Chinese peasants had subjected them to a partial and incomplete process
of individualization. The dismantling of traditional and socialist institutions had set Chinese
peasants “free” without properly re-embedding them into new social systems of care, security,
and protection. Atomized peasants and peasant workers, as a result, had no choice but to resort to
the privatized support provided by families and relatives, which intensified the
instrumentalization and commoditization of familial relations in rural China (Yan, 2011).
Since 2003, a series measures taken by the Hu-Wen leadership to redress regional and
rural-urban uneven development and social disparities had facilitated this trend towards family-
oriented individualization in rural China. Under the banner of “building a new socialist
countryside”, the government reduced rural taxes, increased agricultural subsidies, and invested
in building village infrastructure, education, and welfare systems (Unger, 2012). These actions,
along with the improvement in wages and benefits of the migrant laborers, have ameliorated the
well being of the peasantry. This policy shift was partially a result of the state’s efforts to

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restructure the economy. The existing export and FDI-driven economy had proven to be
increasingly unsustainable: the over reliance on cheap labor and low value-added manufacturing,
regional uneven development, and growing social inequalities have constrained domestic
consumption and the nation’s innovation capacity. These redistributive measures also reflected
the state’s intention to re-establish its legitimacy as a “socialist” regime and to placate the
growing discontentment resulted from escalating social tension.
However, these transformations had also heightened the cultural contradictions in China’s
existing model of export-oriented capitalism. While urban manual labor was embraced by
peasants in the 1990s the early 2000s, especially for the young and female, as freedom from rural
poverty and traditional social fetters, it is losing appeal for a more individualized younger
generation of peasants and peasant workers who are often better educated and more oriented
towards the pursuit of personal happiness than their parents. As the older generation ages, they
also find urban migrant work increasingly demanding and exploitative with little promise for
security and comfort in the old age (Pan and Koo, 2015). The 2008 global financial crisis only
made these contradictions more apparent. The sudden decline in consumer demand in the
developed countries had paralyzed China’s export-oriented economic sector, causing costal
factories to shed workers. The dismal job prospects in the cities, coupled with the central
government’s favorable rural policy, had led many migrant workers to return to the countryside.
These contradictions have resulted in a “structural labor shortage” where unemployment and
under-employment coexist with a large number of unfilled low-paying manual labor positions
(Hong, 2011). Although the Chinese GDP rebounded in 2009 due to the government’s 4-trillion
stimulus package, it again started to decline in 2010, which have intensified the anxieties over
China’s protracted economic restructuring. After four years of dwindling economic growth, the

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government finally announced in 2014 that, like the rest of the world, China had entered the so-
called post-crisis “new normal”—a prolonged situation in which rapid GDP growth typical of the
pre-2008 economy is now a bygone era (Areddy and Wei, 2015).
IT entrepreneurial labor, in this chapter as represented by family-based e-commerce self-
employment in the countryside, started to expand and proliferate in post-2008 rural China. As an
emerging economic practice co-constructed by the entrepreneurs, e-commerce corporations, and
different levels of governments, rural e-commerce entrepreneurship plays a paradoxical role. On
one hand, it rides on the trend of family-oriented individualization in the Chinese countryside,
and on the other, it is celebrated as a solution to the structural and cultural contradictions
inherent to the post-2008 Chinese capitalism that had given rise to the familial model of
individualization in the first place. Prominent among the latter are the contradictions between the
city and the countryside, between rural community and the individual, and between manual and
mental labor.
To be more specific, e-commerce both takes advantage of and re-energizes familial
division of labor in rural China as a more flexible, humane, creative, and autonomous regime of
work in comparison to existing urban employment opportunities accessible to peasants and
peasant workers. For the entrepreneurs, family-based e-commerce is both economically
rational—reducing business cost and rural unemployment and underemployment, and culturally
rational—offering freedom, flexibility, and choices. Rural IT entrepreneurial labor also aligns
with the Chinese state’s economic restructuring agenda—the promotion of the digital, service,
and cultural industries and the goal to redress regional and rural-urban uneven development
(Wang, 2001). For Chinese IT corporations, particularly the e-commerce monopoly Alibaba,
rural expansion is their latest strategic campaign to integrate peasants into their digital capitalist

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empire as both laborers and consumers. For all these participants in the new economy, rural IT
entrepreneurial labor carries the promise to transcend rural-urban divide, move China up the
value-added chain in the global division of labor (from agricultural and manufacturing to service
and cultural industries), while easing brewing tensions between the individual, family and
community as Chinese society grows increasing individualized. However, as I am going to argue
based on my ethnography in Wantou village, instead of erasing these divides, the proliferation of
rural IT entrepreneurial labor has in effect intensified their contradictions.
The Making of An E-Commerce Village: Entrepreneurs, Government, and Corporation
Wantou Handicraft Production: From Straw Shoes to E-commerce
The village of Wantou is located in the Yellow River Delta area of Northeast China under
the administration of Boxing County, Shandong Province. For thousands of years, surrounded by
marshes and rivers that are natural habitat for wild bulrush, Wantou and the adjacent 32 villages
in the Hubin Strip (meaning “along the river bank” in Chinese) boast a long history of making
handicrafts from wild bulrush.
6
In the self-sufficient small peasant economy, straw shoes, grass
fans and cushions were weaved mainly by women to stay warm in winter and keep cool in
summer. Limited amount of surplus commodities were bartered in village or town fairs and
occasionally were transported and sold by peddlers to other areas in North China.
7
The earliest
existing record of Boxing handicraft weaving can to traced to Guan Zi, the 7
th
century BCE
collection of political and philosophical texts attributed to the philosopher Guan Zhong, who also
served as the Prime Minister to Duke Huan of the Qi State. In the book, Guanzi advised the Duke
to protect the poor handicraft-weaving peasants living in the farm land deficient Northern Qi

6
Hubin means along the bank of the river. Since 2011, the Hubin Township (Xiang) was renamed Jinqiu
District Neighborhood (Jinqiu Jiedao)
7
I gathered this information from interviews with old peasant merchants in Boxing.

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area, where the modern day Wantou village is located, by forbidding people living in other areas
of the Qi state to enter the weaving trade (Rickett, 1985).
Small peasant entrepreneurialism converged with the centralized economic planning of
strong imperial states in shaping a stable local economic structure in Boxing County that
combined grain planting with handicraft production. With the expansion of modern commodity
economy in late Qing and Republican China came signs of industrialization of handicraft
production and the formation of a transnational capitalist trade and labor regime. According to
the old Boxing county annuals, in the 1920s before Japan’s invasion of the Chinese mainland,
straw shoes made by Boxing women were regularly exported to Japan (Shu, 1992). Short of
arable land (about 1 acre per person), handicraft export gradually became a supplement to grain
production in forming a mixed economy in the Hubin area, which was disrupted abruptly by
wars in the 1930s. During the heydays of pre-war handicraft production, artisans and traders in
the Boxing county area had even formed a local guild “Society of Willow Weaving Industry”
(Liuye she) to organize production (Yao, Liu, Men and Sun, 2011).

Location of Wantou Village

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Wantou Village, Hubin Strip, and Boxing County on Google Map
Following the founding of the People’s Republic in the 1950s, handicraft making was
resumed under the direct supervision of the state-owned provincial native produce import and
export bureau (Sheng tuchan jinchukou ju). The production scale was limited and was mainly
driven by export with the purpose of earning foreign exchange money to support urban
industrialization.
8
In 1965 a bulrush weaving factory was established in Wantou village, which
mainly functioned as an intermediary between the provincial export bureau and the village-based
weavers and product collectors. But it was soon closed when the Cultural Revolution began in
1966. Between 1966 and the early 1970s when the planned economy reached its pinnacle,
market-driven handicraft production was discouraged as “petty-bourgeois” and a distraction from
grain production. Villagers continued to weave for personal use at home after finishing a day’s
farm work on communal plots. It was only in the latter years of the Cultural Revolution decade
when collectivization and centralized control loosened up did the weaving industry begin to
recover. In 1974, the Boxing Handicraft Factory was founded as a brigade and commune
enterprise.

8
Interview with Sun Yingxi. Liuye she was revived with limited domestic production. (Yao, Liu, Men and Sun,
2011). P. 133

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Since the reform and opening up policy initiated in the late 1970s, township and village
enterprises (TVEs) mushroomed across the nation. The Boxing Handicraft Factory quickly
expanded its export production, and by 1977 it was broken up into two factories with the No. 2
Handicraft Factory (No. 2 hereafter) specializing in bulrush product weaving. In the TVE decade
of the 1980s, an industrial chain for weaving product export matured under the monopoly of the
No. 2. Along the Hubin Strip, women spent most of their off-farming time and agricultural slack
season weaving. They handed in products on a weekly basis to village-based product collection
sites operated by the No. 2. The products were then collected by the factory from those sites, and
were screened, packaged, and transported directly to the port city of Qingdao. From the Qingdao
port, the handicrafts were shipped overseas to more than twenty countries in Asia, Europe and
the United States. By the late 1980s, weaving as a sideline production had become a major
source both for improving peasant family income and for boosting county tax revenue in Boxing
(Shu, 1992).
The year 1989 and the Tiananmen event marked a watershed for handicraft producing
TVEs in Boxing. According to my interviews with the former workers and head of the No. 2,
profits began to shrink in the 1990s in spite of growing overseas demand. As marketization and
privatization deepen, many former factory workers, especially those with connections to foreign
importers, quitted to start their own private businesses. Market competition stimulated
production but also drove profits down, which caused the two collective handicraft factories to
go bankrupt in 1998. While people who were more adaptive to market economy became rich,
others were laid off and had to find alternative employment opportunities.

Building on handicraft
production chain established during the TVE era, private export businesses boomed between
2001 and 2006. Growing overseas and domestic demand for weaving products of all kinds

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expanded production and diversified designs. New private handicraft factories and retail shops
thrived in Boxing County, which kept the female weavers busy at home while many of their
husbands were forced to seek jobs in the cities. As farming became increasingly unprofitable
compared to other professions, a new labor structure was formed in the Hubin area in the first
few years of the new millennium: women stayed at home weaving and taking care of the family;
entrepreneurial men ran handicraft-related or other sideline businesses, while their less
enterprising counterpart work in Boxing or other cities, mainly as construction workers and
contractors.
The 2008 global economic crisis disrupted this order. Handicraft export suddenly shrank
due to contraction in overseas consumer demand, which rendered the private handicraft export
factories and retail businesses less profitable. Dismal urban job market had driven many migrant
workers back home, and some found alternative opportunities in selling handicrafts online. As
early as in 2002, business owners in Wantou had already started to use the Internet to sell
products. Business was sporadic in the early days, but began to pick up in 2006 with the
exponential growth of the Chinese Internet population and the growing popularity of online
shopping in China.
9
As a result, in 2008 when the export-driven offline economy was in
recession, the domestic-oriented online economy of e-commerce flourished as a low-cost
alternative market for consumption, trading and (self)-employment.
The Alibaba Empire and its Post-crisis Rural Expansion
The largest e-commerce website in China, Taobao.com was founded in 2003 by its
legendary CEO Jack Ma. The site is often described as a combination of Amazon, Ebay and
Paypal. In 2014, Taobao’s parent company the Alibaba Group launched the biggest IPO in US

9
Alibaba’s cxt.1688.com, a B2B service platform for small and medium sized companies to trade with domestic
and overseas buyers. When the C/B2C site Taobao.com was launched in 2003, some young people opened virtual
shops.

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history at the New York Stock Exchange. By March 2015, the company came to boast an annual
revenue of 76.2 billion RMB (approximately 12.29 billion USD) with 8.5 million active sellers
and 334 million active buyers (Alibaba Group). Taobao’s success lies mainly in its ability to
attract a large number of small-scale entrepreneurial sellers to participate in building the
platform: open shops, list products, attract consumers, and boost traffic. It’s not a coincidence
that in August 2008, when unemployment rate hit a new high in China following the global
economic crisis, Jack Ma announced that Taobao was finally able to break even from advertising
revenues.
Through strategically orchestrated media campaigns that touted the merits of “being one’s
own boss”, Taobao was successful in capitalizing on young people’s desire for individualized
entrepreneurial labor and their anxiety over unemployment by offering them the alternative
opportunity of self-employment. At the heart of Alibaba’s global digital empire is its socially
progressive brand image as both a patron of grassroots entrepreneurial dreams and a benevolent
employment provider. The power of this brand image is best captured by the motivational role of
Taobao’s CEO Jack Ma. Ma was mythologized as a Steve Job like figure of executive-rebel who
had made his way up from a humble English teacher to the CEO of one of the most successful
Internet companies in the world (Barboza, 2014; Gough & Stevenson, 2014). This widely-
circulated rags-to-riches story of “Chinese dream” has become a powerful inspiration for
millions of young Taobao entrepreneurs who want to emulate Ma’s success and secure their own
“first bucket of gold” on the Internet. For proof, one needs to look no further than how well self-
help books featuring Jack Ma and his wisdom sell, or how frequent posters of him come to
decorate the walls of e-commerce entrepreneurs’ offices. Jack Ma was quoted to have said “if

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people like me can succeed, then 80% of Chinese youngsters will be able to.” (Wang, Yuan, Yu,
Jiang and Gu, 2015).
By converting millions of people into its army of e-commerce entrepreneurs, Taobao
succeeded in absorbing not only a large amount of surplus labor but also the over-production
capacity of China’s export-oriented economy. In doing so, it has turned structural problems of
Chinese capitalism in the aftermath of the global crisis into s new site for rejuvenation. The
rapidly expanding group of online vendor entrepreneurs, some of whom had grown into big
firms with hundreds or even thousands of employees over the years but mostly stayed small,
constitute a new entrepreneurial class in China with shared interests, aspirations and concerns. A
2014 New York Times article, quoting Duncan Clark, the chairman of the Beijing-based
consulting firm BDA China, referred to this “Taobao Empire” as a “constituency” with Alibaba’s
CEO Jack Ma as its captain: “a politician with a small ‘p’” who “effectively represents millions
of people who now depend on Alibaba for their livelihood.” (Gough & Stevenson, 2014).
Alibaba has effectively leveraged its economic and political power to cultivate intimate ties with
both the central and local governments in China, which has cleared the decks for its further
expansion (Einhorn, 2014; Foley, 2015). In an interview with “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara
Logan, when asked about Alibaba’s relationship with the Chinese government, Jack Ma
explicitly stated: “they (Chinese politicians) care that I can stabilize the country. I told the
government, ‘if people have no jobs, you are in trouble—the government will be in trouble.’ My
job is to help more people have jobs.”
However, the often neglected side of the story are the emergence of new mechanism of
surplus value extraction that capitalizes on the entrepreneurs’ aspiration for more individualized,
autonomous, and fulfilling work, as well as the formation of a new corporate-state nexus in

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sanctioning this new flexible labor regime and in creating new digital monopolies. Compared to
the empowerment effect of Taobao, what is often lesser reported is the predicament of small
entrepreneurs in this expanding Empire. Alibaba’s brand image of techno-empowerment has
helped legitimize the (self)exploitation of is small entrepreneurs—the long hours, individualized
risks, low profits, and lack of labor welfare and protection. In promoting digital entrepreneurial
labor, the state has also withdrawn from its responsibility in providing the necessary protection
and care of its citizens. The volatility and boom and bust cycle of the new economy have only
exacerbated the precarious condition of the entrepreneurial workers.
In the face of a quickly saturating urban market, Alibaba launched its new “Taobao
Village” campaign in late 2010 to integrate the countryside and peasants into its digital capitalist
empire as both producers and consumers. Alibaba’s commercial ambition converged with the
Chinese state’s urgent need to restructure the economy and redress social inequality. Between
2011 and 2016, Alibaba had strategically formed alliances with various governmental agents to
advance its campaign. Aliresearch, an e-commerce research institute affiliated to and directly
serving the interests of the Alibaba Group, played an instrumental role in weaving together a web
of media, scholars, governmental agencies, and peasant entrepreneurs in manufacturing the
nationwide “Taobao Village Phenomenon”. For example, Aliresearch has collaborated with
prominent researchers from the state-owned Centre for Information Study to draft policy reports,
academic papers, and books touting the merits of developing rural e-commerce for building a
more “harmonious Chinese society”, endowing the Taobao Village phenomenon with the same
political significance that rural TVEs enjoyed two decades ago (Wang, 2014). In order to
outcompete its major commercial competitor the JD Group, Alibaba pushed forward a new
project titled “Thousands Counties and Ten Thousand Villages” (Qianxian Wancun)

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immediately following the company’s triumphant NYSE IPO in 2014. Though the project,
Alibaba has elicited both budgetary and administrative support of Chinese provincial
governments to build village-based Taobao products dispatch and experience centres.
The “Taobao Village” boom reached a climax in 2015 when the new Xi-Li leadership,
pressured by a slowdown in economic growth, launched a nationwide campaign to endorse
“mass entrepreneurship and innovation” and the development of “Internet +”—a new industrial
model the combines technological innovations with China’s existing strength in manufacturing
and infrastructure building. In November 2014, a few months before the release of the policy
initiatives, the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang paid a personal visit to one of the most well-known
e-commerce villages Qingyanliu in Zhejiang Province. The visit was part of a warming-up tour
that Li carried out to send out political signals for the new leadership’s economic restructuring
upcoming campaigns. In this new government-corporate facilitated entrepreneurial movement,
rural China, peasants, and peasant workers took centre stage.
It was in this context that the Wantou village was crowned as one of the 20 Taobao villages
in the country during the first “Taobao Village Summit” in 2013—an event co-hosted annually
by the Alibaba Group and a volunteering Chinese county government willing to foot the bill in
exchange for free media publicity and the opportunity to build up ties with Alibaba. To qualify
as an e-commerce village, 70% of the village residents have to be engaged in e-commerce
industries. By September 2014 when Alibaba had surpassed Facebook and General Motors to
secure the biggest stock sales on record during its high profile NASDAQ IPO, there were already
211 e-commerce villages like Wantou in China. In 2015, the number almost quadrupled within a
year to 780 nationwide (Aliresearch, 2015).

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Since Wantou was crowned a Taobao village in 2013, local county and municipal
governments has turned it into a “glory project” (Mianzi gongcheng) to showcase its
achievement in regenerating rural economy through promoting digital entrepreneurship. The
daily inflow of visitors from all over the country, often accompanied by local politicians, has not
only created a new line of business in political tourism, but also attracted government subsidies
of all sorts to build new and broader roads, plant flowers and trees along the side of the roads,
and renovate frequently-visited e-commerce office/shops on the main street. While my stay in
the village, a new e-commerce business cluster “Taobao City” was being hatched with
government-granted money, which is going to take up more of the already-shrinking farming
land in the village.
Although the Wantou village is home to the largest number of e-commerce entrepreneurs,
the 32 villages along the Hubin strip has all been incorporated into the industrial chain. Because
of its proximity to Boxing county, Wantou has occupied the upper echelon of the value chain of
online sales, while the other villages mainly specializing in the provision of raw materials and
handicraft production. With the return of migrant villagers and the inflow of outsiders who see
business potentials, the already densely populated village of Wantou has become even more
crowded. Houses on the main street of Wantou have quadrupled their rental price in the last five
years. Most of the houses have been rented out—either to e-commerce entrepreneurs in need of
more office and storage space or other related businesses, such as wholesale market for
handicraft products, graphic design firms, and delivery and shipping companies.
The Internet has linked family-based handicraft production to the networked global e-
commerce market, transforming Wantou and the adjacent villages into a competitive site for
digital entrepreneurship. As I have already shown, the success of Wantou as an e-commerce

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village has been built upon thousands of years’ tradition, which has also integrated villagers into
e-commerce’s flexible regime of accumulation. Here, tradition and innovation, rural handicraft
production and modern information economy have become thoroughly intertwined in reshaping
the tempo of work and life in the villages as peasants learn a different set of labor skills and
adjust village life in accordance to the imperatives of the new economy. In the remaining part of
this chapter, I will unpack the appeals and contradictions of entrepreneurial labor and how the
Internet-based family-driven individualization of work is articulated to changing subjectivities
and social relations in Wantou.
Networked Family Production
Fei Xiaotong (1948/1992) described traditional Chinese villages as “a society of
acquaintance”—a close-knit, if not isolated community formed on the basis of kinship
relationships in which almost everyone is connected to each other either through blood or
marriage. This family-based traditional Chinese personhood, in contrast to the Western
individualized subject emerged during the industrialization, is mutually constitutive with the
century-old rural economic structure of small peasant production, at the centre of which is the
familial division of labor. As I have already described, the compressed modernization process in
China in the past century, particularly the collectivization and post-reform rural-to-urban
migration in the Chinese countryside, have resulted in a trend towards family-oriented
individualization in which the family (especially the nuclear and stem family) still serves
important cultural and economic functions for individualized peasants and peasant workers. The
post-2008 proliferation of rural e-commerce and digital entrepreneurial labor has capitalized on
this familial individualization, leading to new forms of hybrid labor practices and subjectivities.

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Traditionally, due to a shortage of land in the Hubin area, familial production of food
crops, mainly wheat and corn, was supplemented by family-based female weaving as an
alternative source of income. Socialist collectivization of agriculture and its deterrence of
market-driven rural handicraft industrialization have displaced family production with state-
planned collective planting of grains. The post-socialist return of household production and
development of export-oriented TVEs have restored the family as a unit of labor organization
both in agriculture and in the handicraft industry. Since the 1990s, the widening rural-urban gap
had driven peasant workers out to the cities. Unlike villages in less-developed areas in China, the
dynamic development of township economy in Boxing county and the adjacent cities in the
Shandong province have kept most migrant workers from Hubin close to home. A large number
of migrant workers in Hubin work in nearby cities during the day or weekdays and return to the
villages at night or for weekends and holidays. The most well-to-do peasant families have even
purchased apartments in the Boxing county. By the time I visited the village in 2014, the
majority of families in villages along the Hubin strip had already contracted out their farmland to
specialized farming households since grain planting has become increasingly industrialized and
unprofitable compared to sideline businesses or urban jobs. The post-2008 rise of handicraft e-
commerce have re-energized family production, attracting not only village-born migrant workers
back home but also outsiders from the city to open small e-commerce businesses in Wantou.
The Return of the “Migrant Bird”
Flashing back to 2008, like many Taobao villages in the country, the e-commerce hype
really kicked off with the return of a few young and entrepreneurial urban migrants who “had
seen the world” (jianguo shimian) when they worked or went to schools in the cities, and thus are
more technically and commercially savvy. Rural e-commerce has provided alternative (self)-

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employment opportunities in the comfort of home for those who are increasingly dissatisfied
with serving as exploited and under-paid members of the “floating population” in the cities.
Huwei and Jia Peixiao were two of the “early birds”. Before moving his Taobao business
back to Wantou in 2007, the now 35-year-old Huwei and his wife Yunyun had been running a
small motorbike-repair workshop in Boxing County. At that time, they already started selling
Hubin handicrafts on Taobao in their spare time. It was after listening to a motivational speech
delivered by Jack Ma on the Internet that Huwei made up his mind to close his repair workshop
and become a full-time e-commerce entrepreneur. He compared the early days of Wantou e-
commerce to a “gold rush”, as he recalled: “It was really easy back then to sell products on
Taobao. You upload a picture and boom, orders started to come in. There were so few sellers
compared to the number of buyers.” (Personal Interview, 2015).
Inspired by Huwei’s success, many young villagers followed suit. By late 2008 when Jia
Peixiao and his wife Meng Lili returned to the village, there were already thirty-some Taobao
shops in the village. Peixiao and Lili met in the oil-producing city of Dongying in Northeast
China (Shandong Province) when Meng worked as an accountant and Jia a clerk in a hotel
affiliated to the state-owned oil company. Though both had earned associate degrees from
colleges, as rural residents without Dongying hukou, they could only work as temporary workers
(linshigong) and were barred from benefits enjoyed by permanent staff, like subsidized housing
and yearly bonus. Seeing no future in their low-paying temporary positions, the couple quitted
and tried their hands at several small businesses before Meng stumbled on Taobao. In 2006,
Meng started to sell books on Taobao after she had given birth to her first baby. “Life was really
tough for us”, Meng recalled her early experience as a Taobao shop owner:

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“At first the business was barely holding up. But I persisted because I had to stay at home and take care of
my daughter anyway. I spent a lot of time surfing Taobao’s online forum and reading through the
entrepreneurs’ success stories. They really gave me hope.”
Within a year, Meng’s online book business started to turn around. By the beginning of 2007, the
monthly profits generated by their online business more than doubled their old salaries
combined. With the experience gained selling books online, the couple returned to Jia’s home
village and opened a new Taobao shop specializing in braided handicrafts. The couple’s online
shop quickly emerged as one of the most successful in the village within a year. For one thing,
they are better educated and more business and political savvy than the majority of peasant e-
commerce entrepreneurs. For another, their parents, the grandpa, a PRC army veteran and the
grandma a skilled weaver, also joined them in helping with tasks like packaging and shipping of
products, cooking and child care, and collecting handicrafts from home-based women weavers.
My conversations with migrant returnees in the village informed me that the decision of
returning home is usually both an economically and culturally rational choice. From a business
point of view, family production in the countryside significantly reduces the cost of labor and
labor reproduction. Wantou’s thousands of years of tradition in handicraft making stands as an
unrivalled advantage that can hardly be replicated elsewhere. The government’s recent
investment in developing rural “hardware” infrastructure (building road and high-speed
broadband Internet network etc.) and “software” benefits (such as reducing rural taxes and
providing low-cost health care and social security benefits) serves as a basis for developing
village-based e-commerce. E-commerce’s flexible regime of accumulation has also unleashed
the advantages of small peasant production. Despite the growing availability of alternative labor
market in the county, some of the married women, the elderly and teenagers still prefer to stay in
the villages due to family responsibility, health issues, old age, or lifestyle preferences, etc, and
therefore can still be hired at lower cost, or no cost at all in the case of family production.

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Parental assistance, either in the form of productive labor, i.e. collecting, packaging, and
shipping products, or reproductive labor, i.e. cooking, child-rearing, and household chores, has
reduced the cost of labor reproduction. Family firm’s small size and flexible use of labor make it
more adaptable to the rapidly changing market and online business, not to mention the
countryside’s low real estate and living cost. This combination of the legacy of rural
industrialization, state investment, and residuals of small-peasant production on the periphery of
the capitalist market, has made peasant digital entrepreneurship and rural e-commerce
competitive.
For young people of rural origin who were often disadvantaged in the cities due to their
lack of financial, social and cultural capital, returning to the countryside to be an e-commerce
entrepreneur is indeed a shortcut to middle class status. Xianglan came to Wantou village in
2009 with her husband after graduating together from college. Since then, they had been running
two Taobao shops selling small furniture pieces made from rubber tree leaves. Upon graduation,
the couple spent a year working in the city. Xianglan interned at an elementary school as an
English teacher while her husband worked as a sales agent in an insurance company. She told me
that if they had stayed in the city, it would be difficult for them to earn enough to purchase a car
and an apartment. Now they have not only bought a car and built a new house, but are also
making as much as an urban middle class couple (more than 100,000RMB a year), not to
mention the cost of living is much lower in the countryside. “Unlike in the 1990s when people
could get rich quickly by working hard, nowadays you need your dad to go ahead (pindie de
shidai)”, Xianglan said, referring to the decreasing rate of inter-generational socio-economic
mobility in China: “as children of the peasant class, our fate is doomed if not for this (e-

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commerce). Compared to when we first came back, it’s not as easy to survive in the industry, but
we stick to it because it’s like the only choice for us.” (personal interview, 2015).
Apart from economic concerns, for migrant returnees, the decision of going back is also
cultural. Though many of the entrepreneurs that I interviewed liked the convenience and
excitement of modern city life, they still feel nostalgic for the “rural way of life” in which the
tempo is much slower and people are more socially connected to each other. The proximity of
Wantou village to Boxing county (5 minutes’ drive) has also attenuated the rural-urban
difference, which makes it possible for migrant returnees to enjoy the benefits of both worlds.
Social connectedness and family reunion are referred to by my informants as the primary
benefits of going back to the village. To reduce the cost of living, it was typical for migrants in
the city to leave their children behind to the grandparents. Even for those who commuted daily
between the village and the county for work, there was little quality time left to spend with their
family after a day’s tiring work. Meng Lili recalled with tears the memory of separating from her
now 9-year-old daughter when she and her husband had to travel between the city and
countryside weekly for work:
“We were too busy at that time so we had to leave my 2-year old daughter to my in-laws. She would cry
loudly every time I leave, so I always asked my mother-in-law to take her to the playground cause that
way she won’t see us leave. I still remember watching her playing on the swing from the back seat of our
motor-truck and thinking how upset she would get when she sees the empty room. Now that our family
settled down together and work under the same roof everyday, we feel busy but complete.” (personal
interview).
One year ago, Meng gave birth to her second daughter. I paid several visits to the office that
she rented on the side of the village’s main street, which is ten-minute walk from home but
closer to the delivery company stations and the road to Boxing county. During the day, she
and her husband divided their time between work and taking care of their children. It was
common for her to take a break from the computer to feed the baby or to help her older

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daughter with her homework. After finishing a day’s work, the four would go to her in-
laws’ house for dinner. Both Meng Lili and Jia Peixiao held a strong family value and felt
grateful that rural e-commerce allowed them to spend more time with their children and
parents.
The emphasis on the rural way of life is also echoed by another e-commerce
entrepreneur Yingchun (27). Owning both an apartment in the city and a house in Wantou,
Yingchun closed his small clothing store in Boxing county one year ago and returned to the
village with her wife to become a full-time e-commerce practitioner. He told me that he still
preferred to live in the village because he could take pleasure in the warmth of human
relation, comparing urban apartment living with rural family house, Yingchun said:
“There was little sense of community in city apartment buildings. People don’t even say hi to their
neighbors and just wall themselves up inside their ‘small concrete matchbox’. The village family house is
a more open structure. Though less frequent than before, but it’s still customary for friends and relatives to
drop by each other’s house to just catch up. I grew up in this kind of environment and I feel more
comfortable coming back to it.”
The returnee entrepreneurs were eager to share with me the benefits of village-based stay-
at-home work as it was still a widely held belief among the villagers that the best and brightest
will make it in the city, and only those who are less competitive come (back) to the countryside.
However, for the entrepreneurs who had made the passage back to the countryside, economic
and cultural elements had converged in making the village both a competitive and desirable site
for digital entrepreneurship.
Couple Shop vs. Family Shop
Except for a few larger shops, the majority of e-commerce businesses in Wantou
“employs” no one but their own immediate family members. The distinction between work and
life remains fuzzy as the century-old logic of small peasant economy meets e-commerce’s

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flexible regime of accumulation. The most typical structure is the couple shop (Fuqi dian),
which consists of the husband and the wife. Jia Chunjian (37) and his wife (35) run a couple
shop selling grass braided small furniture pieces such as coffee tables and stools. Before
becoming a full-time e-commerce business owner, the husband worked in Boxing county as a
contract-based construction worker, the most common type of employment for less-educated
male villagers in Wantou. The wife had been staying in the village farming and weaving while
giving birth to and taking care of their 10-year-old daughter.
When I visited their two-story family house/office at about 10 am in the morning of a
summer day, the couple were busy doing customer service on their computers. A three-wheeled
electric motor mini truck was parked in their small front yard—a cargo transportation vehicle
owned by almost all households with e-commerce business. The vehicle’s small size and
flexibility make it easy to roam the narrow alleys of the villages as e-commerce shop owners go
door-by-door to pick up braided products from home-based women weavers. As I stepped into
the living room, I was greeted by a socializing cluster on the left with a coffee stand, a set of
sofa, and a flat-screen TV set, and on the right a DIY photo studio equipped with a tripod, a
lighting umbrella, and new designs of handicrafts waiting to be photographed. A huge wedding
photo of the couple decorated the wall of the studio area. The rest of the living room was
remodeled into a small storage area for weaving products. Then I was led into the office space in
the other room on the first floor where there were two computers and a TV. The wife usually
takes care of customer service online and thus spends most of her time inside the office in front
of the two computers or on her mobile phone. The second floor was reserved for sleeping and
resting.

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For younger couples with healthy parents, a more typical business structure is the family
shop (Jiating zuofang). The family of An Baokang (31) belongs to this type. An Baokang’s
parents used to run a wholesale weaving workshop in the village, playing the role of a liaison
between village weavers and domestic or overseas companies. The son returned to the village in
2012 to bring his parents’ old business online. Prior to his return he had obtained a college
degree in graphic design and worked in a state-owned oil company as a technician for two years.
His wife Anqing (27) served as a jewelry stand shop assistant in a big shopping mall in Boxing
county before getting married and giving birth to their 3-year-old daughter. One of the most
successful e-commerce owners in the village, the family now runs two Taobao shops and one
Tmall shop. An Baokang served the role of the manager of the family business overseeing the
operation of the three shops. Anqing and her younger brother (18) were in charge of online sales.
Unlike the majority of businesses in the village, the family had annexed their online business
with the parents’ old cottage weaving factory in which they hired five on-site women weavers
(three were distant relatives) to work inside the family house/office/factory. So the fifty-
something-old father continued his old line of business overseeing the 5 on-site weavers
producing the family business’s specialty products and collecting products from stay-at-home
weavers living along the Hubin strip, while the mother were responsible for cooking, cleaning
the house, and helping the wife take care of the 3-year-old daughter.

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Jia Chunjian’s Family Office and Photo Studio
The Entry of the Outsider
The low cost of rural e-commerce also attracted some urban youngsters who felt
marginalized by urban competition. The few urban migrants that I met in Wantou were among
the most successful in the village. After graduating from a local college with an associate degree
in computer science, the then 30-year-old Liu Haizheng had dabbled in several small businesses.
He sold man’s clothing in a wholesale market and hawked roasted lamb on roadside. One day in
2007, he learned about Hubin and its braided handicrafts from a college friend. He immediately
opened a small brick-and-mortar store in his hometown Jinan, the capital city of Shandong
province. At first, he traveled to Wantou to purchase products every week. Soon after, he started
to sell online and realized that he could cut his cost in half if he moved to Wantou. So Haizheng
closed his shop in Jinan and relocated to the countryside. Many city people considered it a bold
move for an urban young person to migrate to the countryside, but Liu Haizheng thought
differently:
“I tried many different things in the city, but I finally realized that the chance of improving my living
standard is limited without money or personal connection (guanxi). My parents are old and retired workers
who won’t afford to buy me an apartment in Jinan. Without an apartment and a car, I worth little in the
marriage market. I had to face the reality and pursue a different trajectory if I want to change my fate.
Going to the countryside was the right thing at that time.” (Personal Interview, 2015).

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Once settled down in Wantou, Haizheng’s urban background, prior business experience, and
broader social connections gave him an advantage over most rural-born entrepreneurs. As his
business expanded, he invited his close friend and college dorm mate An Zheng on board to be
his business partner. Like Liu Haizheng, Zhang also felt stuck in his old job as a personal driver
for a government official in Jinan. Although the job was stable and offered good benefits, the
salary was so low that it would be impossible for him to afford an apartment in Jinan, not to
mention the frequent long-distance driving. After the birth of his son, the anxiety and feeling of
hopelessness only intensified. So An Zheng jumped on Liu Haizheng’s offer in 2012. Now the
two partners rotate their shifts in the countryside, which allows them to spend half of their time
in Jinan with family and friends. In order to better integrate into the lineage-based rural society,
Aizheng and Zheng had cultivated good relationships with the former head of the village, a
powerful and highly respected man who they identified as their “godfather”(Gan die). In reality,
they had rented the old man’s house as his office-dorm and thus had to live under his wings. This
was especially true when there was a conflict with a local villager; in that case the old man
would always bail him out by playing the role of a mediator and advisor.
As we have seen, the majority of e-commerce businesses in the village, like Peixiao and
Lili’s, are family-based. This familial division of labor takes advantage of rural surplus labor
reserve (such as the elderly and teenage children) and cheap or no-cost rental while providing a
more flexible and autonomous working environment for the entrepreneurs. Even outsiders like
Haizheng had to adapt to this regime by forming quasi-family relationships. Between 2008 and
2013, generally acknowledged as the golden days of Wantou handicraft e-commerce, more
young people like Jia peixiao and Liu Haizheng either returned or migrated from the cities to
settle down in Wantou to start their own businesses. While the majority are Wantou-born

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migrant workers with junior or senior high school diploma who had previously been engaged in
manual labor, a small percentage are college graduates who felt stuck or marginalized in the
cities.
The narrative of “digital empowerment” was a familiar trope whenever my informants
recalled their early encounter with e-commerce. In the golden days of Wantou e-commerce,
Alibaba’s Taobao platform had indeed lowered the threshold of e-commerce startup, provided
opportunities for young people of rural origin and some marginalized urban youth to achieve
upward social mobility quickly. Home-based small business also offered more freedom, choice,
and comfort compared to the urban jobs that were available to these entrepreneurs. By the end of
2013, according to the village head of Wantou, there were already about 500 Taobao shop
owners out of the 1500 households of the village, not to mention people involved in offshoot
industries such as transportation, weaving and raw material processing.
10
The new regime of
entrepreneurial labor in rural China rides on the prevailing trend of family-driven
individualization, making it possible for rural entrepreneurs to take advantage of familial
organization of labor while maintaining a large degree of freedom and autonomy at work.
However, the hybrid personhood shaped by family-driven individualization can also stand in
uneasy tension with public and communal interests, or the long-term prosperity of village e-
commerce handicraft industry. The class-based individualized creative, expressive, and
possessive personhood demanded by cultural and digital labor also requires a transformation of
bodies accustomed to rural, manual, and familial mode of production. These contradictions
between individualized family and the public, manual and mental labor, and rural and urban, I

10
Interview with Wantou’s village head An Jiangmin

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will show, are made more apparent when rural e-commerce entrepreneurs want to expand and
upgrade their industry to improve the value-added of their products.
The Contradictions of Rural Entrepreneurial Labor
On my first day in Wantou, I went to a village convenient store to get some daily
necessities. A piece of soft drink advertisement posted on the window of the store caught my
attention: a famous anchorwoman appears in the poster, holding a can of the branded soft drink
as she recommends the drink as “a wise choice for mental labor” (Naoli laodong mingzhi de
xuanze). The poster set me thinking about what mental labor meant for peasants. After all, there
is not much mental work to do in the countryside? Yet as my fieldwork proceeded, I began to
understand how much allure the so-called “immaterial labor”, or in Chinese “brain labor” (naoli
laodong) holds for Chinese peasants.

Village Convenient Store Advertisement

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Traditionally, Chinese peasants, except for the small group of landlord-gentry class who had
risen to the top echelon of rural society, had always been relegated to manual labor. In the
socialist years, despite the Maoist goal to eliminate the “three great differences”, the gap between
urban worker and rural peasant only widened due to the state’s policy of urban-centric
industrialization (Li, 2009). The reform-era’s pursuit of modernization and commoditization of
labor, especially its accentuation of “suzhi” (labor quality) discourse—an indigenous concept
inspired by the “human capital” theory (Zheng, 2014)—has essentially valorized the rural-urban
and mental-manual differences (Day, 2013). The common cultural perception is that people with
low suzhi are forced into perpetual manual labor. Peasants and migrant workers are called upon
by the state to improve their suzhi through education and training so that they can increase their
value as a laborer and a person.
For young people of rural origin, education is usually the most effective mean to break the
curse of perpetual manual labor, which explains why the parents that I met in the Wantou were
generally very invested in their children’s education. One of the most common conversational
topics among villagers was the annual national college entrance examination. Scoring well in the
exam and getting accepted by a high-ranking university is often a life-changing event for young
people born in the countryside. Yet only the cream of the crop can succeed in making this
passage. The majority of peasants who are unable to attend a reputable college, or who have
failed the entrance exam are often faced with diminished chances for labor and social mobility.
Manual labor and rural identity often go hand in hand with each other in signifying cultural and
economic backwardness in China due to the entrenched rural-urban gap in terms of income,
education, welfare, and the distribution of job and many other resources and opportunities.
Despite the state’s rural informationalization policy, peasants and peasant workers had been

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relatively marginalized from its post-2000 vision of promoting the creative and information
industries. So what rural e-commerce offers is a promise for peasants to participate in the cultural
and information capitalism as both laborers and consumers. For the peasant class, it’s not only a
chance to transcend their fate as manual laborers and low-rank employees, but also an
opportunity to become one’s own boss in the much-coveted digital economy.
The concept of immaterial labor is useful here in illustrating the appeal of digital labor to
Chinese peasants. Coined by the Italian Autonomist Marxists, it refers to the labor that “creates
immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship or an
emotional response” (Hardt and Negri, 2004, p. 108). The idea of immaterial labor has been
widely misunderstood and critiqued for having announced the disappearance of agricultural or
industrial labor. However, according to Hardt (1999), rather than dismissing the importance of
material and manual work in late capitalism, the concept of immaterial labor is deployed to
emphasize the hierarchical nature of labor in post-industrial society. Their intention is to show
how immaterial labor has “achieved the dominant position of the highest value” (p. 97) and its
ability to inform and influence “other forms of labor” and the “society as a whole” (p. 206).
However, Hardt and Negri have little to say about the new hierarchies and inequalities
shaped by the new regime of value and the struggles (based on class, gender, race, nationality
etc) against them as their writing focuses almost exclusive on the “deterritorialized” and
network-based immaterial labor. They have highlighted the contradictions inherent to the new
global constitution of “Empire” dominated by immaterial labor, most notably through the
concept of the “multitude”, as they argued that “the deterritorializing power of the multitude is
the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes
necessary its destruction” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p 61). Nevertheless, staying mostly on the

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level of abstract theorization and focusing most of their attention on the conditions of Western
late capitalism, Hardt and Negri didn’t offered much to those who are interested in seeing how
such immanent tensions are played out through concrete culturally and historically specific
experience of struggle. As I will show, Wantou’s integration into the regime of digital and
immaterial labor offers an opportunity to observe these tensions at work.
In contrast to the old regime of manual labor that prioritizes physical strength or adroitness,
the new regime of digital and cultural work centralizes the commoditization of “soft skills” like
aesthetic judgment, creativity, communication, and self-expression. The latter constitutes a new
mechanism of disciplining and differentiation that has heightened the tensions between the
traditional rural Chinese personhood and the new individualized rights-bearing possessive and
expressive subjectivities demanded by the new economy. This is not to say that cultural skills
were not important in farming or factory labor, nor does it dismiss the materiality of digital and
cultural labor. Rather, what I am emphasizing here is the emergence of a new regime of value
that opens up opportunities of upward mobility for some, while excluding and disadvantaging
others. As rural China transitions into e-commerce, the new regime of value of digital and
aesthetic capitalism demands a new set of skills that sometimes puts rural identity and locale at a
disadvantage, and at other times requires its strategic transformation.
Branding Rural Identities
The lucrative business of handicraft e-commerce had attracted an increasingly number of
entrepreneurs. As competition grew fierce, e-commerce shop owners could no longer rely solely
on cost reduction and price wars—the advantages proffered by familial production—to survive
and stay competitive in the business. I identified three common strategies—branding and self-
branding, improving customer service, and design innovation—deployed by sellers as they

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attempt to upgrade and expand their businesses. I will focus on branding/self-branding and
customer service in this section, and discuss product innovation in the next.
The traditional Chinese personhood, according to many anthropologists, socologists and
literary scholars of China, is grounded in the hierarchical Confucian moral universe and is
always defined in relation to one’s kinship network and native birthplace (Fei, 1992; Lee, 2006;
Potter & Potter, 1990). Compared to the prototype of Western modern emotivist self, which is
also the ideal subject of the contemporary digital and cultural capitalism, the traditional Chinese
self is less individualized, autonomous, cosmopolitan, and expressive of emotions (Lee, 2006).
Without falling into the trap of essentializing a set of unchanging Chinese characteristics, I agree
with these scholars to the extent that as a group, my peasant informants in Wantou were less
accustomed to the emotional labor of self-branding and online customer service. It was only
recently, especially with the rise of handicraft entrepreneurship (both offline and e-commerce) in
the past decade, that being articulate and expressive (hui shuohua) and creative (you xiangfa)
have joined, if not replaced being hard-working (neng gan) and honest (laoshi) as the most
desirable qualities when evaluating a person in Wantou.
In this sense, both branding/self-branding and customer service require some form of
strategic transformation or appropriation of the rural identity. On one hand, far from being
merely innate biological qualities, self-expression and creativity are often learnt cultural
practices that are, to a great extent, shaped by one’s life experiences such as family influence,
education, and work history. As I will show, city-born and peasant entrepreneurs who are either
better educated or had prior urban mental labor experience are usually more adept at branding
their businesses and conducting customer service compared to those village-born entrepreneurs
who had previously been serving as manual or low-level service workers. On the other hand,

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rural identities can also be capitalized to take advantage of the state-corporate endorsement of
rural entrepreneurship, and commoditized to appeal to the emerging urban middle-class’s
growing sense of consumer citizenship. The latter not only romanticizes rurality as a more
authentic state of being in contrast to urban life, but also advances socially-aware consumer
practices in support of rural development. In this sense, the new regime of immaterial labor
constitutes a new system of differentiation and governmentality. Not only does it reward those
who are more successful in reinventing the self in accordance with the imperatives of digital and
cultural capitalism, it also opens up space for strategic appropriation of rural identities in shaping
hybrid forms of new subjectivities. Now I will turn to two successfully stories of “branding rural
identities” and the village entrepreneurs’ experience of learning to conduct customer service to
show the new regime of labor at work in transforming rural identities.
Since there were so many e-commerce shops in Wantou and the adjacent area selling
similar designs of handicraft products online, branding becomes crucial for one’s products to
stand out and earn more profits. Jia Peixiao and Meng Lili’s business was deemed by many
villagers as one of the most successful in terms of branding. In crafting their Tmall brand “Mu
Nuan”, the couple referenced the discourse of grassroots empowerment through digital
entrepreneurship promoted by both Alibaba and the Chinese state.
11
In doing so, they combined
self-branding with the branding of their online business to construct a brand image of socially-
responsible young entrepreneurs returning from the city to the countryside to modernize and
digitalize traditional village handicraft culture. Years of experience of working in the city in
sales (Peixiao) and accounting (Lili) and that of operating small businesses (food stand,
bookstore etc) taught the couple to be more “business-minded” (you shangye tounao). After their

11
Tmall is Alibaba’s upgraded e-commerce platform. Compared to its original Taobao platform, Tmall has a
higher threshold of entry in terms of registration and maintenance fee.

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return to the village in 2008, they were the first in the village to register a trademark for their e-
commerce business in 2009 and also the first to upgrade from Taobao to Tmall in 2010. An
outgoing and sociable couple, they were also very good at dealing with journalists, e-commerce
companies and government officials. Ever since their entrepreneurial story was first featured on
the Shandong Provincial TV in 2013, the husband Peixiao had been turned into a “model peasant
entrepreneur” through the media publicity orchestrated by Alibaba and the central and local
governments. Not only does Jia regularly represent Wantou peasant entrepreneurs in front of the
media, the couple is also responsible for hosting visitors who come to the village from all over
the country with the hope of learning about and replicating Wantou’s success in e-commerce. In
April 2017, Peixiao accompanied Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma to attend the “E-Commerce Week” at
the United Nations’ Annual Conference on Trade and Development.
One can get a glimpse of the couple’s branding and self-branding strategy by browsing
through their online shop. As one clicks into the couple’s Tmall shop Mu nuan, one is greeted
with a “brand story” (pinpai gushi) linking their personal entrepreneurial stories to the familiar
trope of business social responsibility. Mu nuan’s business goal, according to their webpage, is
to “rejuvenate rural handicraft industry, help absorb rural surplus labor, and promote rural
economic development”. These brand narratives are juxtaposed with photos of award plates and
certificates, and those taking with journalists from Chinese and international media outlets and
politicians who had come to visit.
Together, these visual and discursive branding materials tell a coherent story about both
Mu Nuan and the peasant entrepreneurial couple. The story evokes trust and respect from
consumers searching for reliable sellers in a virtual shopping mall. By purchasing handicraft
products from Mu Nuan, the shoppers also derive the virtuous satisfaction of supporting a social

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cause and helping with those who are in need. Lili told me that some of her customers, after
reading about their stories and purchasing products from them, had become friends with the
family. For the couple, the business is not only a way to make a living, but also a cause and a
cultural platform to showcase the village’s handicraft cultural tradition and e-commerce’s
potential in bettering peasants’ life. Through the story, the couple’s personal identity as peasant
digital entrepreneurs became thoroughly intertwined with Mu Nuan’s brand image in giving
social and cultural meanings to their labor. Mu Nuan’s brand story, like many other similar
narratives about grassroots entrepreneurs on Alibaba’s platforms, also contributes to building the
e-commerce giant’s corporate image—an image that is aligned with the Chinese state’s ambition
in promoting economic and social restructuring through micro entrepreneurship.

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Compilation of Screen Shots of Jia Peixiao and Meng Lili’s Tmall Shop “Munuan”

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Compared to Mu Nuan’s emphasis on business social responsibility, Xiaoli and Xiaosong’s
Taobao shop “Jinqiu Yuan” targeted a specific segment of urban middle class consumers who
prefer decorative styles that are simple and natural. Growing up in a county neighboring Boxing,
Xiaoli and Xiaosong became friends at an after-school painting training class during junior high.
Their friendship developed later when they went to the same college in Jinan to study art and
design. Upon graduation, both found it hard to survive as artists and graphic designers. Xiaoli
worked as a sales associate in a company selling cooking utensils in Boxing while Xiaosong
went into the packaging business. Feeling bored and disappointed, the two left their jobs and
came to Wantou to start their own business in 2013.
Having spent his childhood years in the countryside before moving with his parents to a
small town, Xiaoli told me that he felt nostalgic for the rustic simplicity of village life—a
personal yet widely-shared sentiment among many contemporary Chinese urban dwellers. The
partner capitalized on this romantic sentiment of nostalgia to build their brand image. As former
art school students, they had a huge advantage over other entrepreneurs in graphic design and
photographing skills. Their urban experience and privilege also allowed them to think like an
urban consumer. By comparing his product picture with those typical of the majority of peasant
businesses in Wantou, it’s easy to see how skills of aesthetic judgment and branding are tied to
class and cultural identities. Xiaoli’s pictures, often taken inside his urban high-rise apartment,
are more refined and stylish, conveying a gentrified bucolic sentiment. This stands in contrast to
the unsophisticated and countrified product image created by most peasant entrepreneurs. When
I asked about their design techniques, Xiaoli explained:
“Catering to the taste of urban middle and upper-middle class consumers, we want our products to look
both more refined (Yangqi) and natural (Ziran). That is, to be distinguished from the peasants’ pictures,
which usually appear countrified (Tuqi) and unsophisticated. For instance, we prefer simple color, mild
lighting, and props like old fashioned tea sets, retro-style furniture, and hardwood floor to communicate a

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sense of Zen and naturalness. We will also throw in poetic narratives to evoke a feeling of serenity and
comfort. To be honest, they don’t even have to make sense. It’s all about emotion.” (Personal Interview,
2015).
Xiaoli and Xiaosong’s branding strategy successfully targeting a more affluent segment of the
handicraft consumer market online has allowed him to sell the same products at a higher price
than the majority of his competitors in Wantou. Unlike many other peasant entrepreneurs who,
like them, were late-comers to the industry with no financial backing, the duo had survived fierce
competition and secured a relative stable share of the market within a year.

Xiao Li’s product picture (left) in comparison with others in the village
Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argued that branding is as much about culture as it is about
economics— it’s the stories that we tell about who we are by weaving together signs and
symbols that are simultaneously cultural and commercial. In today’s China, these stories are

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often intricately linked to the formation of a highly individualized, commoditized, and
aestheticized middle-class subjecthood. This process of self-crafting requires not only a certain
level of cultural/linguistic literacy and technical competence (such as digital photography,
graphic processing and web design), but is also, as Lily Chumley (2011) described, “developed
through practices of self-narration and self-expression” and cultivated via exposure to art,
consumer culture, and cosmopolitan lifestyle (p. 178).
For example, Xiaoli is an avid sneaker collector—wearing branded retro sneakers is an
important way through which he expresses his cosmopolitan identity. He had once asked me to
mail a pair of rare retro Nike sneakers to him from the US. During one of my visits to his e-
commerce studio in Wantou, I spotted him multi-tasking— chatting with potential customers
online while surfing through websites of Western and Japanese fashion brands. He explained to
me that “window-shopping” online was actually an important part of his work routine to get
inspiration for his own business while keeping abreast with the latest international fashion trend.
While the entrepreneurs were adapting to the changing labor regime, they were also
experimenting with new cultural persona and new lifestyles. During my stay in Wantou, the Jia
family was building a new three-story family house. When I accompanied Lili to home
decoration stores in nearby counties, I noticed that she had been meticulous in documenting the
process of constructing and decorating the new house. Later I learnt that she was writing a
pictorial blog diary telling the story of a female peasant e-commerce entrepreneur’s home
makeover, which she also hoped to turn into an autobiographic book about her life and business.
She told me that the idea was suggested by one of her female journalist friends who believed that
her inspiring story as a woman migrant returnee and e-commerce entrepreneur would find a wide

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audience. In fact, she had cultivated good relationships with many journalists and visitors like me
who had become her “windows” to the world beyond the small village of Wantou.
The two village businesses introduced above deployed different branding strategies.
Whereas the Jia couple highlighted and capitalized on their rural identity and their life stories as
peasant returnee to ride on urban middle-class’s growing sense of consumer citizenship as well
as the state-corporate growing investment in the countryside, Xiaoli and his partner tactically
appropriated and transformed the rurality associated with their business and products into
symbols, signs, and sentiments that are appealing to niche urban middle class taste. However,
both succeeded by strategically transforming their rural identities according to market, and to a
lesser extent, political demand. Only a handful of entrepreneurs in Wantou actually have the
cultural and technological competence to add extra cultural value to their products through
successful branding. The successful few are either urban migrants like Xiaoli and Xiaosong, or
peasant entrepreneurs like the Jia couple who had received college education and/or worked in
information, cultural or business related industries in the city. “Shanzhai branding”—imitating
the web design and photography style of top sellers or blatantly stealing their product pictures—
had become a common practice in the village. I will return to the village shanzhai culture in the
section.
In addition to branding, customer service functions as another site through which the
distinction between rural and urban is sharpened and where the expansion of a new regime of
labor facilitates the transformation of rural identity. E-commerce customer service exemplifies
what Arlie Hochschild (1983) termed “emotional labor” in that shop owners have to produce
positive emotions in customers, such as trust, satisfaction, and pleasure, without meeting face-to-
face. Aliwangwang, the interactive instant chat application designed by Alibaba that allows

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customers to make inquiry and bargain with shop owners in real time, is widely believed as one
of the most distinctive features that had contributed to Taobao’s triumph over Ebay in its early
days. However, the emotional labor invested by small shop owners into customer service is
seldom accounted for in Alibaba’s numerous media publicity. Whereas in reality, affective
customer service constitutes a major avenue through which the e-commerce platform extracts
surplus value from the entrepreneurial labor of its sellers. For shop owners, skillful customer
service is key to improving conversion rate, customer satisfaction, and favorable ratings and
reviews. The accumulative effect of those factors will determine the shop’s credibility score and
search result ranking among similar products from different sellers listed on the platform.
As micro business owners, the majority of Taobao entrepreneurs have to play multiple
roles, being both one’s own boss and customer service agent. Because of this business structure,
Taobao entrepreneurs had pioneered a new culture of online customer service in China that is
more personable and emotionally invested, often blurring the boundaries between the public and
private, and the personal and professional. For instance, to deliver a personal touch in online
interaction, Taobao sellers had appropriated the term “qin”, the Chinese abbreviation for “dear”
(qin’ai de) and an expression usually used between romantic partners, to address their customers.
For peasant entrepreneurs, this style of interactive customer service posed both challenges and
opportunities for self-reinvention. The affective labor of e-commerce customer service is a
performance of an emotionally expressive self that some peasants found hard to summon.
Scholars of Chinese emotion generally agreed that the village-based traditional Chinese
emotional structure differs from that of the Western modern society (Kipnis, 1997; Kleinmans,
1991; Lee, 2007; Potters, 1990; Yan, 2003). The Potters (1990), for example, observed that
compared to the Western individualized society where the articulation of personal emotion and

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feeling plays a fundamental role in symbolizing and affirming human relationships, the rural
Chinese perceive the action of work and practical mutual assistance in life as the most important
symbolic medium of social solidarity. This sociocentric rather than individual-based
characteristic of the emotional structure of Chinese rural society was echoed by Kipnis (1997)
who concluded that Chinese ethics are “non-reprentational” in that the maintenance of guanxi
through mutual aid in work is emphasized as an “indirect” form of emotional expression rather
than the Western direct representation of personal emotions through language.
I agree with Yan (2003) that these dichotomous accounts run the risk of essentializing both
China and the West and that huge transformation had taken place in the emotional life of Chinese
peasants in the last century, which had rendered these conceptual tools less usefully in depicting
Chinese village societies today. However, my own experience of observing village entrepreneurs
conducting customer service online and on the phone informs me that they often had to make
extra efforts to strategically perform their identities depending on the context and purpose of
communication. For example, whenever my informants receive a customer inquiry call on the
phone while we were chatting in Boxing dialect, they would always try to switch into standard
mandarin to sound more professional by hiding their rural cultural identity. However, some
entrepreneurs would play up their rural identity to evoke understanding and sympathy in the
shoppers. For instance, Xianglan told me that she would usually tell the customers that she is
running a village family handicraft business, and hand-made products are not standardized
industrial goods that can be churned out quickly by machines. She said that this usually works
very well when customers complain about product quality or shipping delay. In addition, I also
noticed different patterns of emotion expression in Wanton along the lines of generation, gender,
and personal social backgrounds such as education and work history. These differences are

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directly correlated with the individual’s success in performing the emotional labor required by e-
commerce customer service. In general, better-educated young women with prior urban working
or education experience were considered best at customer service. On the contrary, older male
peasants often found customer service challenging.
The story of the Rui family well illustrates this point. The father of the family Lao Rui
owned a home-based handicraft factory employing 6 female weavers. A taciturn but industrious
man in his late 50s, Lao Rui used to be one of the most successful family business owners in the
village in the late 1990s and early 2000s when his family firm thrived on doing outsourced
weaving work for an American retailer. Five years ago when his son and daughter-in-law
returned to the village after finishing college education in a nearby city to start an e-commerce
shop, he had gradually transferred his business to the young couple. Now, he only played an
assisting role, helping the couple supervise the women weavers and package products to be
delivered. The daughter-in-law Xianglan, an articulate and out-going young woman in her early
thirties who had studied English in college, was in charge of customer service. In Lao Rui’s
words, Xianglan was “good at chatting” (hui liaotian), as he told me:
“Many of the young girls and wives in our village are very good at doing customer service. Unlike me,
they had seen the world (jianguo shimian), know what those city people want, and are better at
persuading them to purchase our products. I am not really interested in chatting online (zai wangshang
liaotian). Actually, I am not good at chatting at all and I don’t have the patience to banter with strangers
either” (personal interview, 2014).
Unlike her father-in-law, Xianglan enjoys talking to strangers online. Similar to Lili, e-
commerce customer service for Xianglan is not just work but also a channel to reach out to the
outside world. During my interview with Xianglan, she told me that she recently got to know a
Chinese American woman in Los Angeles who had purchased products from her shop in bulk.
She told me that they occasionally chatted in English and it helped her practice in a rural

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environment where few people knew how to speak English. In fact, they were talking about the
possibility of running a shop together on Ebay selling Wantou handicrafts. As I got to know her
better during my fieldwork, Xianglan confided in me that as an outsider who had married into
the village, she only hang out with a few young urban returnees like her, and she found village
life and the majority of the villagers rather boring:
“I feel there’s not much to say to them. Like my father-in-law—he is a nice person who works hard for the
family. But he doesn’t talk much and do not know how to have fun. Well, maybe he knows when he plays
Poker with those old guys like him.” (Personal Interview, 2014).
Instead, Xianglan and her husband tried to pursue a different lifestyle from Lao Rui and his wife.
They would travel once a month to nearby cities like Jinan and Qingdao to go shopping, watch
concerts and sports events, and meet with classmates from college. Xianglan was also very
interactive on social media as she frequently shared photos and messages about her life and
would comment on my WeChat friend circle postings.
In general, I have observed that the younger generation of peasants, especially the urban
returnees, and the urban-born entrepreneurs shared similar structural of emotion that was more
expressive, interactive, and cosmopolitan than the older and more rural informants that I met in
the village, which had made them more ideal subject for performing the emotional labor of
interactive customer service. However, it would be a mistake to romanticize rural e-commerce
customer service. It is first and foremost an emotionally demanding and time-consuming job that
requires the entrepreneurs to constantly stay interactive and responsive. “Taobao is a 12/7 job”,
said Yingchun who had just launched his Taobao shop 6 months ago after returning home from
college: “you have to be constantly responsive to the customers. That is the common expectation
now. Or they will rate you down after purchase.” (personal interview, 2015). In fact, during my
stay in the village, I was always surrounded by the familiar notification alerts of Aliwangwang.

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It’s quite common for my informants to stop frequently in the middle of our conversation to
answer customer inquires either on the phone or on computer, even during meal time.
As we have seen, the astheticized, communicative, and emotional labor of e-commerce is
mutually constitutive with a different set of subjectivities that not only demands transformation
of the traditional rural identities but also serves as a new mechanism of differentiation that
rewards some while leaving others behind. Some of the peasants (and the urban migrants), due to
the combined results of their education and previous working experience and personal
intelligence, ingenuity and hard work, have better adapted to the imperatives of the new
economy. However, many others who are often less-educated (junior or high school), more
provincial (never studied or worked outside Boxing county), and had mostly been previously
engaged in manual work (in factories or construction business) or low-level urban service jobs
(such as cashier or waiter/waitress), have found it difficult to acquire the necessary technological
skills, symbolic competence, and mindset to meet the demands of the new economy. I have
focused on e-commerce branding/self-branding and customer service to show how the new
economy has intensified the contradictions between the manual and mental labor, and between
the modern individualized self and the traditional rural personhood. Now I will turn to the
practice of product innovation to further illustrate these tensions on a group level.
Shanzhai Production
Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that is often roughly translated as “copycat culture”.
While all Shanzhai practices share the “desire to emulate or reproduce” the “original” (Wallis
and Qiu, 2012), what has made Shanzhai fascinating is its hybrid nature. In essence, Shanzhai
cultural practices and products are generated through the creative mixing of copying and
innovation based on mixed temporalities, namely the coupling of the ingenious Chinese and pre-

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modern with the modern or postmodern Western (think of the cottage industry of electronics
export-oriented production in South China and the Internet-based collective sharing practices in
defiance of the modern IPR regime). Riding on the hybrid culture of family-oriented
individualization, the e-commerce industry in Wantou is emblematic of Shanzhai as an economic
culture in which tradition and copying are mixed with innovation. Unlike prevailing scholarly
accounts of Shanzhai that either celebrated or condemned its anarchism (Hennessey, 2012; Yang,
2015), I argue, focusing on the practices of product innovation in Wantou, that Shanzhai
production has heightened the contradictions between the collective and individual, which had
contributed the rapid development of rural handicraft e-commerce in its early days, but also
poses constraints to its upgrade and expansion.
The history of the handicraft industry in Wantou challenges the myth of the individualized
model of innovation behind the global IPR regime. Traditionally, village handicraft-making
evolved replying on lineage-based village structure under a small peasant subsistence logic.
Since the majority of handicrafts were made not as commodities to be traded on the market but
were mainly for household use, new products—such as bulrush shoes and fish net—were created
to meet basic demands of rural everyday life. Weaving techniques were diffused within the
family and among relatives and were passed on generationally through the lineage network. New
designs and features were added in a similar way based on a collective model of innovation. The
individual-centred innovation system of the modern IPR regime was alien to traditional village
handicraft production, nor was it typical under the centrally-planned economy during the
socialist years and the early days of the reform when state-owned TVEs monopolized export-
oriented production. In those days, products were mainly manufactured based on samples
provided by foreign companies. Limited innovation happened within the “innovation unit” in the

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No.1 and No.2 Handicraft Factories. Usually made up of 5 to 6 better-educated and experienced
craft makers, the unit’s main responsibility was to come up with new designs that they thought
would meet the demand of the overseas companies. The newly designed samples would be
brought to the annual China Import and Export Fair, better known as the Canton Fair, where
some of the designs would get picked and ordered in bulk by foreign companies.
This history of village-based collective innovation and production and its industrialization
under state market monopoly served as the basis for the emergence of Shanzhai economy since
the mid-1990s. Following the collapse of the TVEs, private export production factories had
mushroomed on the basis of the former TVEs, with private family-managed small businesses
trying to outbid each other by offering new products and ever lower prices. Since the latter half
of the 2000s, the fast expansion of e-commerce in Wantou had opened a space for disruptive
innovation through Shanzhai, which is also mutually constitutive with the trend of family-driven
individualization. On one hand, e-commerce platform significantly lowered the threshold of
entry into the handicraft industry. The Internet also connected village-based entrepreneurs to the
outside world, which made it easy to access a limitless pool of product prototypes and reduced
the R&D cost for small family businesses. At the same time, different needs and preferences of
domestic consumers also required catering and inspired new designs. On the other hand, building
on the foundation of the village handicraft tradition and the export-oriented sub-contracting
industry, the initial development of Wantou as a Taobao village had benefited immensely from
the weak, if not absence of intellectual property laws in the Chinese countryside. The lineage-
based structure of the village collective innovation network, though had been weakened by
individualization, still persisted to contribute to the rapid diffusion of e-commerce production
and innovation.

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One of the most innovative e-commerce entrepreneurs in Wantou, Huwei explained to me
that there were mainly two types of innovation strategy in the village, both of which were based
on the logic of Shanzhai. The first type was achieved by modifying existing designs in response
to or to generate new customer demands. For example, one of the best-selling products in
Wantou was created by adding a handle to the traditional style bulrush futon. The second type of
innovation happened when the innovator “invented” a new line of products that had never
existed in Wantou. For instance, Huwei fathered the original design of the coffee table set whose
many different variations constitute one of the most popular lines of Wantou handicrafts sold
online. When I asked about what had inspired him, he recalled seeing a similar set on Ikea’s
website:
“The table and seats were made of wood and the shape of the table was slightly different. The moment I
saw it, I started to imagine in my mind what it would be like if I cover it with a layer of braided bulrush. I
wanted it to feel more comfie, so I asked the village carpenter to make a rounder wooden mold. Then I
took it to an experienced and dexterous weaver and explained to her my concept. She did exactly what I
wanted and returned the finished product to me in three days. It still looked kinda cheap, so I dyed the
thing dark brown, took a picture in my front yard, and put it online. By the end of the same day, I had
received ten orders. I really didn’t expect it to sell so well!” (personal interview, 2015).
As we can see, both types of production innovation strategies were based on the Shanzhai logic
of appropriation. What sets them apart were mainly two criteria—whether the new design is
substantially different from its object of imitation/inspiration so that the original cannot be easily
identified or traced; and whether the product designer has invested substantial resources and
efforts into creating the new products (the R&D process).
One can imagine that in a mature market protected by the IPR regime, designers and
businesses can deploy a set of branding, marketing, industrial, and legal strategies to ensure that
innovators get their rewards. While the close-knit community of rural society has helped new
designs of handicrafts to diffuse very quickly among weavers and e-commerce business owners,

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this open and collective production structure often discourages profit-driven innovation. Many
entrepreneurs shared the frustrating experience of having their personal designs stolen by other
sellers, yet they also confessed to me that they themselves had taken other sellers’ best-selling
designs. “That’s how peasant society runs,” as Peixiao explained, “I can’t keep my design away
from my cousin, and he had to tell his wife about it. Then his wife’s sister knows it too…and in
no time, you see my design listed in every online shop’s front page.” The openness and page
rank auction algorithm of the Taobao platform had only rendered Shanzhai production more
rampant. Not only can competitors easily monitor each other’s new products and sales trend
online, the capital-rich sellers can also purchase higher rankings for their Shanzhai products to
outcompete capital-short innovators. In fact, page rank auction is one of the major sources of
revenue for Alibaba. “People who spend the time and energy to design new products actually
suffer”, Xiaoli explained to me how Shanzhai culture had minimized profits earned through
innovation, dampened the entrepreneurs’ incentive to innovate, and thus curbed the further
development of the industry:
“People are constantly watching at each other’s shops. Once they notice a new product that sells well,
they will ask around, locate the weavers, and ask them to supply the same products. Alternatively, they
will take the product picture to their own weavers and have them copy the thing, sometimes modify a
little. Like changing the color of a futon’s decorative cloth or adding a cover to a storage bin. Then they
will label their Shanzhai products with the same keywords as the original online and sell at a much lower
price. Sometimes the profit margin is so small that they have to cut corners here and there. Why wasting
time designing and making new products when your efforts only enrich your competitors’ wallet?”
(Personal Intervew, 2016).
As a result, even the most innovative entrepreneurs were reluctant to pull more capital and
resources into R&D for fear that imitators will steal their ideas and profits. Rampant copying and
price wars in Wantou had led the e-commerce handicraft industry into a bottleneck. Through
examining the Shanzhai dilemma in Wantou, we come to see how the trend towards family-

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driven individualism had intensified the contradictions between the family-based individuals and
the village community. Although familial production and the persistence of lineage-based village
structure had lowered the cost of rural e-commerce and contributed the rapid expansion of the
industry in its early days, their limitations became more manifest when confronted with the
individualized desire to maximize personal interests and family firm profits.
The villagers believed that the culture of prioritizing family interests over that of the village
community was deep-rooted in the traditional family-centric subsistence logic characteristic of a
small peasant society (Xiaonong Shehui). The persistence of such logic had prevented many
rural family businesses from upgrading and expansion. The majority of the peasant entrepreneurs
were satisfied with making enough money to ensure a comfortable lifestyle, which made them
reluctant in pursuing technological upgrading, investing into R&D, and seeking collaboration
with other businesses. In his classic anthology of rural China Rural Reconstruction (Xiangtu
Chongjian), Fei Xiaotong (1993) observed that this small peasant cultural logic of “seeking
satisfaction in what you have” was formed in “an economy of scarcity” of pre-modern China in
tandem with the Confucian value system that submitted individual desires to the proper order of
a hierarchical society. The expansion of modern industry and technologies (such as the e-
commerce industry) into the countryside had disrupted the traditional village order and moral
universe, throwing peasants into a conundrum between the pursuit of personal (family) interest
maximization and the collective interests of the village community, as well as between the
modern entrepreneurial drive of business expansion and the small peasant logic of making do
with just enough (what is enough also became a question). This family-centric individualism,
according to many of my informants in Wantou, had been intensified in the past few years by the

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culture of digital entrepreneurship that celebrates individual achievement and technology-
enabled quick fortune, as An Baozhong, the head of the Village Communist Youth League put it:
“People become restless, they want to achieve overnight fortune. They are hoodwinked by all the media
stories to believe that e-commerce is a short-cut. Once they get in, they realized it’s not that simple. So
they try to bend the rules and seek advantage of loopholes”
These tensions between the individual and the collective were well illustrated by villagers’
recent efforts in organizing e-commerce handicraft cooperatives to counter Shanzhai production.
Villagers generally agreed that the most effective way to overcome the limitation of small
peasant handicraft production is to organize into a cooperative. The generous financial subsidy
provided by the Chinese state to promote rural cooperatives and e-commerce development added
more incentive to village collective organization efforts. However, the inability of village and
county governments in organizing family-based peasants into a collective to achieve communal
and public good, coupled with the strong desire of local “big capital” in traditional industries to
infiltrate into the e-commerce industry, had complicated these efforts. During my stay in the
village, two groups of people were simultaneously trying to organize cooperatives, but neither
was able to win the trust and support of the fellow entrepreneurs. In the eyes of the village
entrepreneurs, neither of the cooperative truly represented their interests.
The first cooperative “Boxing E-commerce Industry Association” was initiated by the
secretary of the village Communist Youth League An Baozhong with financial support from a
chain supermarket owner in Boxing county. An Baozhong, the 43-year-old army veteran, is not
only a family handicraft e-commerce business owner but also a bureaucratic entrepreneur who
had been playing the role of a liaison between the village e-commerce entrepreneurs and the
outside world (government, media, Alibaba etc.). He told me that for many years, he had been
serving the interests of the Wantou e-commerce industry at the expense of his own business.
Now being the secretary of the association had not only provided the necessary financial

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compensation for his labor but also legitimized his role as a bureaucratic entrepreneurial broker.
Boss Sun (Sun Laoban), the owner of the local chain supermarket company had recently felt the
imperative of moving into the e-commerce industry. One year ago, his company launched an e-
commerce platform—an online version of his supermarket business. His goal was to attract more
small businesses to open shops on his platform, ultimately turning his Internet business into a
Taobao-like e-commerce service platform serving the local residents in Boxing county (Personal
Interview, 2016).
Working in collaboration with each other, An Baozhong and Boss Sun launched the
association in June 2015 after several months’ efforts in obtaining official permissions and
informal endorsement from several county government departments. Those departments, such as
the Bureau of Small and Medium Enterprises (Zhongxiao qiye ju), the Bureau of Commerce
(Shangwu ju), and the Propaganda Department (Xuanchuan bu), had been vying with each other
for administrative power over the lucrative new industry of e-commerce. Up till December 2015,
the association had attracted more than 100 members. The entrepreneurs that I had talked to all
felt lukewarm about whether the association can bring any real positive change to Wantou’s e-
commerce industry. One of the entrepreneurs told me that he had joined the association “just to
see what’s going” since he “doesn’t have to pay a dime” (Personal Interview, 2015). After its
establishment in June, the association’s major activity had been organizing e-commerce “training
workshops” for people who want to get into the already saturated industry. In August, the
association also signed a contract with the local vocational school to co-run a new project with
the trendy title of “entrepreneur incubation base” (chuanye fuhua jidi). The incubation base,
according to An Baozhong, will eventually evolve into a for-profit e-commerce training school.
These activities were mainly carried out to curry favor with the local government in the hope of

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gaining financial subsidy or political and commercial opportunities to advance the influence of
Boss Sun’s e-commerce platform. Although An Baozhong told me that he had been planning to
organize member gatherings to hear about their needs, the entrepreneurs that I had talked to had
little faith in what the association could accomplish beyond serving the interests of its financiers
and the local official’s need to prove their political achievement (Zhengji).
The second cooperative “Bulrush and Wicker Weaving Association” was co-founded in
October 2015 by five Wantou e-commerce entrepreneurs and a real estate investor from Boxing
County. The latter had also partaken in building the government-subsidized “Taobao City” in
Wantou. One of the founders Jia Peixiao told me that their association was going to be a true
cooperative established by the handicraft business practitioners in Wantou to serve their own
interests. Thus it should be distinguished from the “Boxing E-commerce Industry Association”.
Their primary goal was to coordinate production process and business interests in the village to
overcome the problem of shanzhai and other forms of vicious competition. However, their goal
was easier said than done. In my December follow-up interviews with the founders, I was
informed that the association was struggling to stay afloat after they had run out of the initial
funding raised out of their own pockets. To sustain operation, the association also resorted to
organizing for-profit e-commerce training courses for beginners. One of the founders had
collaborated with Boxing County’s Association for the Handicapped to operate an e-commerce
internship program for people with disabilities. According to a village entrepreneur who had
participated in training the interns, this program was set up by the association with the purpose of
attracting government funding—a practice not so different from their competitor’s.
Like many agricultural cooperatives in China, neither of the two handicraft e-commerce
associations in Boxing was able to effectively mobilize village entrepreneurs to participate (Yan

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and Chen, 2013). Despite the good intentions of their organizers, both had so far remained empty
shells set up to mainly serve the needs of their organizers and the local rich and powerful. Many
of my informants believed that without the external assistance of a public-service oriented
government or NGO unhindered by vested economic interests, it would be extremely hard to
form and sustain a peasant cooperative truly serving the interests of the majority of village
producers. The difficulty of village entrepreneurs in moving beyond Shanzhai production reflects
the challenge faced by Chinese peasants to reconcile the tension between the individual and
collective in post-socialist rural China (He, 2013; Huang, 2015; Unger, 2012). Although the
Internet has connected family production to the big market, technology and market alone cannot
overcome the limitations of small peasant economy nor can they realize the effective
organization of family-based individuals for public and community interest.
The lack of organization and state protection had also rendered peasants vulnerable to the
monopoly of Alibaba. As the company became more powerful, the apparent contradiction
between Alibaba’s digital-empowerment discourse and the platform’s algorithm-enabled
centralization of power grew sharper. Inside the village, new forms of disparity and inequality
start to emerge contingent upon one’s capacity to adapt to the new regime of work. As I will
show, the hegemony of information economy and immaterial production has not only reinforced
the division between mental and manual labor, threatened the sustainability of handicraft
production in Wantou, but also led many peasants into a precarious state of permanent transience
between manual and digital work.
Manual Vs. Mental Labor
The expansion of e-commerce’s flexible regime of accumulation into the countryside had
created opportunities for peasants and peasant workers to become mental workers. However, the

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fickleness of the new economy and its valorization of digital and cultural labor skills had not
only subjected peasant entrepreneurs to new risks and uncertainties but also further marginalized
manual labor, especially that of handicraft weaving. Compared to the above-mentioned success
stories, a story more typical of the majority of the peasant entrepreneur’s experience is one of
being stuck in-between a more comfortable but increasingly demanding world of Internet-based
mental labor, and a tougher world of perpetual manual labor. As competition got fierce in recent
years due to first, Alibaba’s shift in business strategy, and second, the upsurge in the number of
self-employed digital entrepreneurs, the profits garnered from the business grew thinner and
more unpredictable. Many entrepreneurs had to go back to the cities for find alternative or
supplementary jobs. Others were trying to reinvent themselves by catching the next round of
business opportunities while dealing with the anxiety resulted from uncertainty. The cultural and
financial value placed on digital labor and Internet self-employment also threatened the
sustainability of the handicraft e-commerce industry in the village. Almost all of the women
weavers that I met during my fieldwork were 40 or above. Most of the younger women that I
talked to showed contempt for weaving labor, dismissing it as both physically demanding and
culturally inferior to digital labor and urban service work.
The boom-and-bust cycle of the dot.com business and the IPO-driven model of “expanding
user base and monetize” had subjected village-based entrepreneurs to the vagaries of the new
economy. Despite Alibaba’s sustained marketing efforts to expand its model of Taobao villages,
my informants generally believed that the best day for grassroots rural entrepreneurs had already
been gone. Ever since 2011, the threshold of entry for new businesses had been significantly
elevated. Starting from 2013, the majority of existing Taobao businesses in the Boxing area had

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witnessed a sharp decline, to cite the title of a news article on the Taobao Village Phenomenon,
“the winter of Taobao Village has come” (Yang, 2012).
Like many other platform-based web 2.0 businesses, Taobao strategically deployed the so-
called “free model” in its early days to attract users and consumers. Financed by venture capital
money, Taobao had been operating at a sustained net loss from 2003 to 2007. To build market
share and raise brand awareness, the platform charged no commission fee for opening shop and
listing products—a model that helped it to outcompete Ebay in 2006. My informants in Wantou
recalled that the year between 2006 and 2011 as the golden days of Taobao small sellers. The
low-threshold platform for e-commerce start-up stood as an alluring alternative to the grim urban
job market, which had drawn many peasants back to Wantou. During those days, it was very
easy for peasant entrepreneurs to make money on Taobao “as long as you know how to type,
upload photos, and send delivery packages” (Personal interview, 2015).
However, the early bird effects gradually faded out once Taobao had secured the dominant
market share. Since 2008, Taobao began to seek various ways to monetize the platform, such as
installing a search ranking bidding system and offering online payment service. The most
effective strategy was to partition the platform into two areas: a basic version that sticks to the
free model and a premium version with a service fee. A watershed moment came in June 2011
when Taobao’s premium service Tmall.com raised its threshold of entry and became
independent. Many considered this change to be Alibaba’s strategic move to prepare for its
impending IPO. Tmall charges a fixed sum deposit that runs from 50,000 to 150,000 yuan, a
service fee of 30,000 to 60,000 yuan, plus a commission fee in proportion to the shop’s sales
volume. These charges were beyond the means of an average peasant family in Wantou. Till the

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summer of 2015, less than 10 Taobao businesses out of the thousands in Wantou and the
adjacent villages were able to afford the upgrade.
To increase profit, Alibaba had revamped its platform algorithm to technically drive the
bulk of user search traffic to Tmall users. It also selectively promoted those Taobao businesses
that it deemed to have the potential of upgrading to Tmall. As a result, a major challenge faced
by all small Taobao shop owners is to attract traffic and improve conversion rate (converting
search traffic into real purchases made). However, with millions of businesses and numerous
listed products competing for consumer attention on the platform, owners of new shops with low
credibility score had no choice but to bid for higher listing rankings via Taobao’s marketing tool
“Express Train” (Zhi tong che). To survive the tough competition, it’s also customary for new
businesses to fake sales records to improve its credibility score and product listing rankings,
typically referred to as shuadan. The huge customer demand for shuadan had given rise to
numerous third-party platforms that specialize in providing various kinds of illicit services,
which run the gamut from faking customer ratings/comments to selling tracking numbers for
non-existent parcels to artificially boost sales volume.
While Alibaba marketed its platform as a low-cost opportunity to transform the lives of
grassroots sellers, in reality, more and more investment was needed to open and sustain a
profitable shop on Taobao. For example, one of my informants Fang Fang opened a Taobao
handicraft shop in the spring of 2015. As a late-comer, he had burnt more than 30,000 yuan on
advertising to stay visible on the platform, all within the first month of his business. According to
a set of statistics released in 2015 that 3 million out of the 9.5 million registered Taobao shops
were in fact inactive. Of the remaining 6.5 million active shops, only 10% managed to generate
enough revenue to cover overhead cost. This shows that only a tiny percent of entrepreneurs who

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invested into opening shops on Taobao were able to turn e-commerce into a stable full-time job.
(Reference). In Wantou, the fame that came with being a Taobao village only intensified
competition. Overly optimistic media publicity, often being produced as part of Alibaba’s public
relation move or local governments’ propaganda report, had attracted an excessive number of
people to claim a share of the market. By 2015 when I visited the village, a big proportion of
Taobao businesses were losing money while more people were lured into the industry by media
publicity.
For young peasants, what e-commerce offers is not simply an employment, but also a
promise for a better life, an alternative to the fate of perpetual manual work, and a much-needed
channel for social mobility. An Baozhong’s explanation of why e-commerce had become so
popular with young people in the village is worth quoting at length here:
“People who were born in the 1980s and 1990s are the major force of e-commerce entrepreneurs in the
village. Many of them are the ‘single child’ of their family. Some have even obtained college degrees. No
parent wants to see his or her children farm or do any kind of manual labor. They want them to work in
the office like a city person. But such a job is hard to secure for most peasants without a college degree.
Even for those who do have a college diploma, the jobs that they are able to get are usually poorly-paid
and insecure unless their parents have good connections in the city. So e-commerce self-employment
becomes a desirable alternative.”
However, as I have shown, following the digital gold rush in the early years of rural e-
commerce, Wantou e-commerce was bottlenecked by Shanzhai production while the media-
manufactured myth of easy and quick fortune was still drawing more people into the over-
saturated industry. The appeal of digital and cultural labor and the experience of being one’s own
boss, despite all its problems, had rendered peasant entrepreneurs who were struggling to make a
living doing e-commerce reluctant to return to their old jobs or to seek other manual labor
employment opportunities. Some were led into perpetual transience between manual and mental
work.

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Xiaolong’s story well illustrates some of the younger entrepreneurs’ precarious status. I
first met this 18-year-old at a training shop for e-commerce beginners. He struck me as smart and
rebellious. He went through the one-hour class wearing one earbud connected to his smartphone
while still scored highest in the end-of-class quiz. I later learnt through interview that Xiaolong’s
parents own a family-based carpentry workshop making foldable screens (pin feng). As the only
child of the family, Xiaolong had always been rebellious and spent most of his childhood time
playing Internet games in cybercafé. “I was my parents’ headache”, said Xiaolong: “they knew I
was no college material, so they sent me to the county vocational school when I was 15 to learn
electric welding.” Xiaotong hated vocational school and compared it to “a big nursery for kids
with no future”. From his perspective, vocational school students were only free or underpaid
intern labor for factories. He felt that he was wasting his youth and his parents’ money staying in
school. So he “escaped” from the dormitory one night and went to work at a steel plate factory in
a nearby town—all against his parents’ will.
Steel welding was a tough but well-paid job. Earning about 6,000RMB per month,
Xiaolong was actually earning more than what an average e-commerce entrepreneur could make
in a month. But he quickly became disappointed as the work was “boring, monotonous, and bad
for your health.” After learning that some male workers had become infertile due to exposure to
toxic chemicals in the factory, Xiaolong decided to quit the job. “Why e-commerce?” I asked
Xiaolong while he was slurping down a bowl of beef noodle during our interview at a local
restaurant, he replied:
“I saw some of my older relatives return to the village to become e-commerce entrepreneurs. Some of
them earned enough to buy a car or even to build a new house in a couple of years. All the media have
come in to report on this. So I began to search for peasant e-commerce entrepreneurs’ stories online and
there are so many who succeeded. I really respect Jack Ma. He understands Chinese youth better than our
parents and teachers do!” (Personal Interview, 2015).

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In May 2015, Xiaolong launched his Taobao shop with a 10 thousand yuan start-up fund
provided by his parents. After ten days, he sold his first Taobao deal, which earned him 100
yuan in profits. On the day that I left the village in early July, I talked to him in person for
the last time. While we chatted over lunch, he kept looking at the Aliwangwang app
installed on his smart phone, waiting for a potential customer to reply his message. The
initial enthusiasm about e-commerce was fading as stress and anxiety took over. I followed
up with Xiaolong during the Chinese New Year holiday in 2017 about his business. He told
me that he struggled for a few months, barely making enough money to cover the cost, not
mention to be able to support himself financially. Unwilling to return to the steel plate
factory, Xiaolong was thinking about joining one of his distant relatives in Shanghai who
was heading the customer service division at an established e-commerce company. His last
text message to me went: “I will figure out something once I am there. Get some experience
and see if there’s any good business opportunity.”
If Xiaolong’s experience exemplifies the disappointment of late-comers with little start-up
money who often found themselves come face-to-face with the harsh reality of an already
saturated market, Liling’s story typifies the predicament of many of the early bird entrepreneurs
whose businesses were sinking in an increasingly competitive environment. The 38-year-old
Liling had been working as a construction worker in Boxing County before he opened his
Taobao shop in late 2011 with all of his meager savings. His business did quite well in the first 6
months, so he quitted the construction job and became a full-time stay-at-home entrepreneur.
During our interview at his house, he recalled the “good old days”: “I remember in 2012, my
income tripled what I had earned as a construction worker in 2011. By the end of that year, I
bought my first car and was planning to renovate my old family house.” (Personal Interview,

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2015). Unfortunately, Liling’s business started to decline in early 2014. Out of desperation, he
resorted to Shuadan—the practice of faking transactions by purchasing services from a third-
party business. This last resort not only cost him 5000 yuan, but also his business. Taobao
discovered his illicit action and shut down his shop in March 2014. To make a living, Liling
went back to work for his old construction company, and only to quit after couple of months.
When I met him in July 2015, he had just borrowed enough money from family and friends to
open another online shop. I asked him why going back to the platform that had eaten up all his
savings, he explained:
“I just couldn’t stand doing construction work again. I am already adapted to the lifestyle of working with
computers and mobile phones, getting up late, and staying indoors when it’s too hot or cold outside. I
realized that construction work is no longer for me and e-commerce is the only option if I want to stick to
this kind of lifestyle.” (Ibid).
Xiaolong and Liling’s cases represent only two of the many instances that I heard in
Wantou where the peasants’ dream of being one’s own boss and upgrading from manual to
mental labor pales in front of over-competition. Instead, many are stuck in-between their
aspiration to become a digital entrepreneurial worker and the cruel reality of perpetual manual
labor. The cultural and financial value placed on digital labor and Internet self-employment has
further marginalized manual labor skills, especially that of handicraft making, which had already
begun to bite back at the local e-commerce industry.
Another challenge faced by Wantou e-commerce industry is the lack of women weavers.
The majority of professional weavers were women in the 40s or older living in villages along the
Hubin strip. Few of the younger women in their 20s or 30s were interested in stay-at-home
weaving work. I asked almost every young woman that I met in Hubin why they were no longer
attracted to weaving. I learnt that the main reason behind the generational shift in work
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self-employment and service industry jobs in Boxing County. Such opportunities had financially
and culturally devalued handicraft weaving skills. As the army of digital entrepreneur expanded,
the number of craft makers was actually shrinking. The shortage and aging of women weavers
had already begun to negatively impact the quality of weaving products sold online, which
threatens the long-term development of the e-commerce industry in Wantou.
For hundreds of years, the cross-generation transmission of feminine weaving skills in the
Hubin area has been ensured by the traditional gendered division of labor in which man farms
and woman weaves (Nangeng nvzhi). The modern industrialization of handicraft making,
especially the post-reform development of export-oriented putting-out industries, had solidified
this labor structure. The boom in handicraft export had improved women’s earning power along
with their status inside the family. Throughout the 1970s till the early 2000 when feminine
handicraft making was a major source of family income, weaving skill was an important
criterion to measure a young woman’s value in the marriage market. One typical question posed
by village matchmakers to the potential bride’s parents was about her weaving skill. Financial
independence had shaped Hubin women’s personality: they are generally considered to be bolder
and stronger (lihai) than women in neighboring counties who don’t weave (personal interview,
2015). Most of the women weavers in Hubin had never worked outside the villages, and quite a
few were illiterate.
Few of the younger women were willing to replicate their mother’s and grandmother’s
lifestyle. Like their male counterparts, most Hubin women born in the 1980s or later are the
single child or one of the two children in the family. Almost all have received more education
(junior middle school or above) than their mothers. It is customary for Hubin women to marry
Hubin men—a tradition that was loosened in the past couple of decades due to growing

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population mobility. Nowadays, women usually get married in their early twenties, and about
half would marry out of Hubin. Married women and teenage girls, except for those who have
gone to college or boarding schools in the cities, usually live in the villages with their husbands
or parents but commute daily to Boxing or other nearby counties for work.
With the emergence of alternative job market, material and cultural factors had intertwined
to devalue weaving skills. To begin with, Handicraft making is poorly paid. Remunerated on a
piece rate, an adroit female weaver has to work from dusk to dawn for 7 days a week to earn as
much as what an average e-commerce customer service girl or supermarket cashier can earn
(about 2500 yuan/month). The earnings from e-commerce fluctuate depends on the market, and
most women entrepreneurs are married and thus have to divide the revenue with their husbands
and sometimes in-laws. In 2015, the average monthly profits for Wantou e-commerce family
business was between 5000 to 6000 yuan, and some of the most successful could earn up to
50,000 yuan or more. As the number of women weavers dwindled in recent years, their income
had improved, but still not fast enough to outcompete the new (self-)employment opportunities.
Financial reasons aside, weaving is both monotonous and physically demanding. Sitting on
a stool, women weavers have to repeat again and again the same hand gestures and motions.
Most weavers specialize in producing a few types of standardized products. With the e-
commerce industry’s growing demand for products and the decreasing number of weavers, they
have to constantly work under time constraint. If anything, professional women weavers work
more like a human weaving machine than the romanticized image of rural craft maker
constructed by the entrepreneurs in their online branding stories. For instance, Xiaolan (31) told
me that she didn’t want to weave because it is “too arduous and physically strenuous.” Married
with a 5-year-old boy, she lived in Wantou with her husband and in-laws but went to Boxing

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County to work as a clothing shop assistant during the day. Xianglan’s 52-year-old mother, who
still weaved on a part-time basis while taking care of her grandson, was suffering from chronic
back pain and arthritis as a result of lifetime weaving (Personal Interview, 2015).
More importantly, younger women in Hubin no longer identified with the lifestyle
associated with stay-at-home weaving. Working from home, women weavers are confined to the
domestic sphere with little opportunity to expand her social circle and enjoy modern city life. In
contrast, both urban service industry jobs and e-commerce offer opportunities to meet and
communicate with new people either face-to-face or through the Internet. And both grant more
autonomy and mobility as the former requires regularly commute to the city while the latter,
especially with the ready availability of start phones, allows women to work at any place.
Another issue mentioned by my women informants was working condition. It is hard for women
weavers to keep the house or courtyard clean and tidy because they have to work with bulrush or
some other weaving materials. In comparison, most women in service industries work in clean
and air-conditioned malls, supermarkets, or restaurants whereas those responsible for online
customer service have the luxury of working from the comfort of their home, and thus had more
time and energy to clean up and decorate the family house. In fact, I noticed that young women
who worked online from home tended to spend more online, and a portion of the purchases went
to home decoration. One can get a sense of the generational cultural differences by contrasting
two quotes from my interview. Xiaocai, a 18-year-old girl who worked as a e-commerce
customer service assistant to her brother told me that girls of her age will never consider
becoming a weaver because:
“no one wants to work in a dark, humid and dirty room with grass and a bunch of older women. You can
stay in air-conditioned rooms and meet new people if you work in the malls or in supermarkets. E-
commerce is much better, it’s the job of the future. It’s better to get into the new media industry earlier
than later. Our lifestyle is different!” (Personal interview, 2015).

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This changing cultural perception about weaving labor was echoed by Manman, a 45-year-old
weaver: “young girls nowadays are very different from us. They want to live like those women
on TV shows. They like to dress fashionably and work in KFC, Enzone (a popular local high-end
mall), or with their computer.” (Personal Interview, 2015).

Women weavers at work

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Though both of female e-commerce entrepreneurs and women weavers work from home,
they led very different lifestyles and had drastically different perceptions of their labor. During
my entire fieldwork, I only came to know one woman weaver who was in her twenties. I met the
28-year-old Xiaodou in the village convenient store owned by her family. She usually spent the
day weaving in the store together with her mother and grandmother while taking care of the
sporadic business. Dressed in a pair of blue jeans and an old-fashioned red jacket, Xiaodou
looked very shy and was reluctant at the beginning to respond to my question of why weaving
was losing appeal to younger women. As our conversation proceeded, she began to loosen up
and confided:
“You will lose face if you tell people of your age that you weave at home to make a living. People would
think that you are lazy and incapable (you lan you meibenshi). I weave at home because I have to take
care of my 2-year-old baby daughter and our family store. Some young mothers like me whose husbands
are rich don’t even have to work. They just stay at home and do nothing! I am condemned by life (shou
shenghuo suopo).” (personal interview, 2015).
In contrast to Xiaodou, Anna, a female e-commerce entrepreneur of the same age as Xiaodou,
led a different lifestyle. Anna was known in Wantou as “Taobao Boss Beauty” (meinv taobao
dianzhu), a title given to her by a journalist in his news coverage of Wantou e-commerce. We
first met at the Boxing County’s KFC restaurant—a popular hangout spot for local young people.
Wearing a tight black short skirt and a pair of canvas shoes, Anna looked more urban and chic
than most rural women of her age in Wantou. Through our conversation I learnt that she studied
design in vocational college and worked in Jinan as a telephone customer service agent for the
big corporation China Mobile. In 2010, she returned to Wantou to open her own Taobao shop.
Following our initial interview, Anna invited me to do nails at a salon in Boxing County where
she was a VIP member. After that she took me to a fashionable restaurant popular with local
youngsters. Being financially independent, Anna stayed single at the age 28, which was

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considered by villagers as “abnormal” for a well-educated and good-looking girl like her. The
village gossip went that she had dated several guys but none of them was up to her standard.
From the villagers’ perspective, her beauty and business success had made her “too picky”.
The e-commerce development turned out to have outpaced the transformation of gendered
cultural norms in rural China. In Wantou where the traditionally gendered expectation of women
as dependent and inferior to her husband was still entrenched, being a successful female e-
commerce entrepreneur could be a double-edged sword. For example, male migrant returnees
who were as successful as Anna would have no problem finding a good wife. The 33-year-old
Meng Lili once told me that many of her female friends from the cities didn’t understand why
her husband always took credit for all the public recognition and awards when she had invested
equally, if not more into their family e-commerce business. “Women are expected to behave like
this in the village”, she explained to me: “as someone who had married into the village (waidi
xifu), I actually have to be humbler and more virtuous (xianhui) to fit in.” Reading the three
women’s stories together, we begin to see how women’s subjectivities are changing in relation to
the revaluation of gendered skills and work in rural China, which have entered into negotiation
with long-held cultural norms and traditions. While stay-at-home female weavers were
considered by the younger generation as being culturally “backward”, financially independent
and assertive women e-commerce entrepreneurs were regarded by many as being too culturally
“forward”. While women e-commerce entrepreneurs still have a long way to go to achieve the
cultural recognition that they deserve, the shortage of women weavers had already started to
threaten the long-term sustainability of the e-commerce industry. Villagers that I talked to hope
that the growing price of weaving labor would eventually encourages younger women to take up

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weaving again. However, compared to financial valuation, the cultural valuation of weaving
labor might be even harder to change.
Conclusion
The village of Wantou offers one perspective into the emerging regime of digital
entrepreneurial labor and the new forms of hybrid subjectivities in China that I explore in my
dissertation project. The so-called “Tabao Village Phenomenon”, as one embodiment of China’s
new policy initiative of “Internet Plus”, or the digitalization of China’s existing industrial and
agricultural production capacity, have attracted much attention. On one hand, the new Chinese
leadership and corporate tycoons believed in the seemingly unlimited labor and market potentials
of a quickly urbanizing Chinese countryside as the next frontier for capitalist expansion. On the
other hand, digital technologies and the Internet have also been re-imagined as an elixir to
redressing the growing rural-urban gap—inequalities resulted from China’s imbalanced
developmental model that had prioritized eastern costal cities at the expense of the rural and the
West.
As I have shown in the above passages, Wantou e-commerce has been riding the trend of
family-oriented individualization and the appropriation of the tradition of familial production in
the Chinese countryside. Family-based rural production, though has lowered the cost of business
for peasant e-commerce entrepreneurs, also stands as an impediment to the expansion and
upgrading of the industry. As rural economy transitions into a new regime of value,
contradictions between the manual and cultural labor, and the tension between rural and urban
identities are heightened. The growing anxiety over individual and collective capacity for
innovation, I argue, is intricately linked to the formation of an individualized and autonomous
middle-class personhood and the redistribution of resources and wealth based on individuals’

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capacity to act out this new self and perform soft skills required by the new economy. As Pang
(2012) cogently argued, commenting on the issue of creativity, that “modernity continues to
function as a structure of desire, and China, like many other non-Western countries, tries very
hard to take the lead in this new wave of competition for modernity in which creativity has now
replaced science and technology as the objective of desire and the symbolic benchmark of
progress” (p. 14). Co-constructed by the government, e-commerce corporations, and peasant
entrepreneurs as a new model of development, rural e-commerce opens up opportunities of
upward mobility for some, while excluding and disadvantaging others. The case of Wantou
complicates the Western debate on digital and cultural labor by highlighting its inherent
contradictions. It also offers a more sober assessment of the on-going IT-driven economic
restructuring and flexibilization of labor in China.

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Chapter 4:
Fashioning the Feminine Self Through Entrepreneurial Labor
Vicky is a 24-year-old foreign student from China who studies design and planning in
Florence. Like many young women her age, she loves fashion and shopping. But unlike most of
her middle-class peers, she is a frequent buyer of high-end luxury. She goes to a nearby luxury
outlet twice a week by train, visits the brands popular with Chinese consumers, sneaks selfies of
herself wearing the new releases, and catches up with a few sales associates who have become
friends. Then she posts the pictures on her microblog sites, goes for lunch, text chats on her
phone, and returns to the boutiques to make purchases. After a typical shopping trip, she comes
home with a full carry-on suitcase of branded luxury goods like Prada handbags, Tiffany
necklaces, and La Mer cream, which she mails to her “clients” in China who placed orders
online. Like a growing number of young Chinese women who either live or frequently travel
abroad, Vicky is an Internet-based luxury reselling agent (daigou) who buys branded Western
luxury products overseas, then resells them via social media platforms to middle-class consumers
in China.
12

This niche market emerged around the mid-2000s as a result of the Chinese middle
class’s growing brand awareness and spending power, increasing transnational mobility, and the
huge price disparity between luxuries sold in China and abroad.
13
The industry took off in the
aftermath of the 2008 global crisis, and soared after the country became the world’s largest

12
Some examples of the popular websites or apps used for reselling are Taobao.com, Yangmatou, com,
Sina/Tencent weibos (microblogs), Wexin (a popular smart phone messaging app), Instagram, and QQ-groups.
13
In a 2009 interview with the magazine China Market, an entrepreneur based in Europe reported that the
products she bought and sold cost at least 30% less including custom duties and shipping costs. Similarly, a buyer
who lived in the US told Law and Life magazine a discounted Louis Vuitton bag was still 20% cheaper for her
customers after deducting duties, shipping, and a 5% broker fee. Why are luxury products so costly in China?
According to Dr. Yang, a taxation studies specialist from the China Social Science Institute, the Chinese government
charges exorbitant taxes on imported luxury goods. Take imported cosmetics, for example; the government usually
extracts a 30% consumption tax, a 17% valued added tax on top of a 10% custom duty, which can render a unit of
Chanel lipstick or Estee Lauder cream 57% more expensive than in the country from which they originate (Li 2010).

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luxury market in 2011, accounting for a quarter of global luxury consumer spending.
14
A quick
search of two of the most popular reselling platforms, Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and
Taobao.com (Chinese Ebay), generated more than 33,000 shops specializing in reselling branded
foreign products and almost 20 million items on sale, respectively. The most profitable of those
businesses deal with luxury fashion and beauty products and are mostly run by young middle-
class women who are, themselves, potential luxury consumers. Faced with huge tax revenue loss
incurred by this booming informal economy, the government has tightened regulations regarding
custom inspection, adjusted duties for international travelers and overseas package shipping, and
even prosecuted a few resellers (Ma, 2013).
Using social media luxury reselling as a case study, this chapter tells another story about
digital entrepreneurial labor, examining the gendered consequences of individualization of labor
through the experiences of transnationally mobile middle-class Chinese women. These women
luxury agents are entrepreneurial laborers in that they not only consume but also resell for a
profit through personalized “engagement marketing” on social media (Morreale 2014), “co-
creating” value for both the luxury brands and the social media platforms (Zwick, Bonsu &
Darmody 2008). Through social media–based cultural production that merges the personal with
the commercial, they actively fashion their gendered identities in interaction with the networked
publics. That is, they not only produce content, but also construct the gendered “self” through
their entrepreneurial practices, which, in the Chinese context, is intertwined with a collective
“refashioning” of the national self in search of post-Socialist identities (Rofel, 2007).

14
In the same year, a report released by the Chinese E-commerce Research Centre revealed that the scale of
the online reselling industry reached 4.35 billion USD in 2011, a 120% growth rate compared to the previous year.
Many different types of products are resold, ranging from baby milk formula to diamonds, but the most popular are
branded Western luxury products, such as Gucci, Prada, and Longchamp. The search shows that the regions where
the resellers are based included Hong Kong, the US, Japan, Britain, Korea, France, Italy, Australia, Thailand, etc.

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Historically, women’s experience with work under capitalism has been shot through with
contradictions. The entrenched divides between home and workplace, private and public sphere,
and reproductive and productive labor have either rendered women’s work invisible and thus
uncompensated or subjected women to the double burden of work in the domestic and public
spheres. The global digital economy has facilitated new trends towards the feminization of labor
with its increasing demands for versatile, flexible, mobile, and affectively invested labor—
outside the traditional workplace, beyond the dichotomies of global and local, production and
reproduction or consumption, private and public, work and leisure. Scholars who study gender
and digital and cultural labor have been grappling with the implications that these
transformations hold for feminist politics, asking whether they help mitigate or reinforce the
contradictions that women experience under capitalism.
The valorization of “feminine” soft skills, such as communication, affective and emotional
labor, aesthetic judgment, sustaining networks and social relations, and the blurring between
labor and consumption, work and life, production and reproduction, have generated more
opportunities for women to experiment with new career tracks, lifestyle, and reinvent the
dominant scripts of femininities (White, 2015). These liberating potentials are also tempered by
the normalization of precarity and flexibility and their articulation to postfeminist
retraditionalization and retrenchment of feminist politics and celebration of consumer citizenship
(Adkin, 2002; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Jarrett, 2016; McRobbie, 2016).
These Chinese middle-class women’s experiences complicate these debates. Feminists
argue that the Smithian archetype of the individualistic and rational economic person and the
Marxian ideal of non-alienated and autonomous humanist figure are imagined subjects from the
perspective of “white, European, heterosexual, able-bodied cis-male”, and thus are not and

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should not be considered universal ideals (Jarrett, 2016). Compared to their Euro-American
sisters, the Chinese women are positioned even further away from such ideals along the
continuum of individualization. Contemporary Chinese women have been caught in-between a
Confucian cultural tradition that idealizes submissive and self-sacrificial femininity, a socialist
history that both empowers subjects gender-neutral laboring women to the nation-state’s political
visions, and a post-socialist hybridity in which the traditional and modern, the global and local
converge in shaping new feminine identities (Wang, 2017; Wu, 2009). Gendered entrepreneurial
labor, as represented here by the practice of social media luxury reselling, has emerged as
solution to the dilemma that contemporary Chinese middle-class women felt between
individualization and retraditionalization.
In response to these debates, I ask how does the logic of mobile transnational capital
intersect with Chinese traditional gender norms and the residual socialist politics in constituting
contemporary gendered entrepreneurial subjectivities? How do women deploy gendered
strategies, resources, and networks in fashioning their own identities along with an alternative
transnational circuit of commodities and thus redefining digital entrepreneurial labor? What
implications does women’s increased participation in Internet-based transnational entrepreneurial
labor have for feminist politics? I will address these questions in this chapter through in-depth
interviews with 25 women resellers, a ten-month online ethnography of their self-representation
and interactions with customers, and mini ethnographic shopping trips. I will start by
historicizing the debates on women’s work under capitalism, and then situate the Chinese
middle-class women entrepreneurs’ experience historically in relation to existing feminist
scholarship on gender and labor. After that, I will tell these women resellers’ stories by
presenting their motivation for entrepreneurship, the emotional labor of online self-branding and

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“interactivity,” the risks and stigmas that come with the emerging profession, and strategies they
employed to cope with the flexibility and precarity of the new economy.
Troubling the boundaries between the commercial/public and personal, virtual and
physical, work and consumption, transnational mobile middle-class Chinese women have
embarked on digital entrepreneurial labor as a cultural, technological, and economic solution to
the contradictions they experienced navigating the competing demands of different gender
regimes. This gendered response to the tensions inherent to China’s Post-Socialist modernity
allows some women more choices, autonomy, flexibility, and mobility through the strategic
performance of gendered identities and networks. But such freedom is often already contained by
the biopolitical governmentality of both advanced capitalism and the patriarchal Chinese state,
which divide women based on class, race, and nationality, render employment precarious and
atomized, encourage consumer global citizenship, and foster a self-promotional, commoditized,
and “always-on” interactive subjectivity. In this chapter, I tell the personal, yet collective story of
the gendered dreams, yearnings, and aspirations that simultaneously produce, articulate,
negotiate, and resist locally embedded neoliberal global capitalism. Challenging the dichotomy
of “Western consumers vs. non-Western producers”(Larner & Molloy 2009), this chapter shows
how young middle-class Chinese women as “non-Western prosumers” are transforming the
meanings and practices of work and consumption as the Post-Socialist nation grapples with
economic, political, and cultural transitions to further integrate into global capitalism.
Women’s Work, Digital Entrepreneurial Labor, and Globalization
The Contradictions of Women’s Work in Capitalism
The expansion of capitalism in Euro-American societies since the seventeenth century has
been a double-edged sword for women. Taking a meandering rather than linear path, women’s

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integration into the capitalist’s system has followed a trend towards individualization, granting
them greater but an incomplete autonomy from the patriarchal family (Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim, 2002). In its early years up till the late 19
th
century, the expansion of capitalism had
resulted in the separation of domestic and the public spheres wherein women, particularly
bourgeois women were chained to the former as provider of reproductive labor and were thus
prevented from entering into the latter to participate in the capitalist production proper. Hays
(1996) traced the origin of this “cult of domesticity” to the Romantic response to the rapid
development of industrial capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Europe and the
Rousseauian notion of the sacred child and innocent and caring woman. This idea that women’s
proper place was at home, caring for the children and protecting them away from the dangerous
and corrupting world out there reached industrial America a century later during which the
dichotomy became entrenched, as Hays depicted in her book:
“the public realm was understood as cold, competitive, and individualistic, the home was
valorized as warm, nurturing, and communal, explicitly pictured as a haven, a refuge, and a
sanctuary, and contrasted to the world outside in the same way that heaven was contrasted to
earth. Women, of course, were understood as the keepers of this haven.” (p. 33)”
While the relegation of women to the domestic sphere had solidified patriarchal control,
capital’s increasing demand for labor had also opened up opportunity for waged labor, first to
working-class women and gradually expanding to middle-class women as well (Hays, 1996;
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). At the turn of the twentieth century, especially during the
Two World Wars, an increasing number of women from both working and middle classes had
joined the workforce, though many of them decided to retreat back to home after child birth.
Back then, the limited but growing freedom that women had gained from domesticity didn’t
translate into men’s greater contribution to housework. Instead, women were caught up in the
competing demands of the workplace and household. Not only did they have to juggle between

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the two worlds, they were also confined by the gendered division of labor at workplace where
“women’s work”, such as typist, secretary, cleaning, and service, were considered inferior and
paid less (Brenner, 2000).
Drastic transformations had taken place since the 1960s, propelled by the concurrent forces
of the Civil Rights Movement and economic restructuring. Having received an unprecedented
level of education, women had entered the workplace en mass, often taking up full-time, rather
than part-time jobs while it has become common for mothers to stay on working after giving
birth to children (Hochschild, 1989). Financially independence and greater visibility in the public
sphere had granted women more space for social mobility and autonomy to construct their own
personal biographies (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). However, despite challenges to
patriarchal norms and gendered division of labor, the dichotomy between the domestic and
public sphere persisted with women investing significantly more time, energy, and emotional
labor into housework and childcare regardless of growing demand from a competitive job
market.
Written in the late 1980s, Hochschild coined the phrase the “second shift” to describe what
she observed as the double burden that working moms faced at home and work, as she
documented that women worked roughly fifteen hours longer per week, an extra month of 24-
hour days a year, and an extra year over a dozen years than their husband (p. 259). The dilemma
that women felt between “living life for oneself” and “living life for others” (Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim, 2002) was also echoed by Hays’ (1996). Focusing on the culture of what she called
“intensive mothering”, she argued that the quandary contemporary women felt between work
and home reflected the intensification of more profound cultural contradictions of capitalism as
mothers were called upon to reconcile the tensions experienced in an increasingly

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commercialized, individualistic, competitive, and rational society. While women willingly
participate in perpetuating these cultural contradictions for a variety of reasons, they also help
reinforce “existing gender hierarchy” and sustaining the domination of “capitalism and the
centralized state” (p. 178). In general, at heart of the contradictions of women’s experience since
the genesis of capitalism is the public/private split that has either rendered their reproductive
invisible or created the “second shift” problem of becoming overburdened by waged work and
unpaid domestic labor.
Digital Entrepreneurial Labor and Women’s Work
Since the mid-1970s, the gradual expansion and deepening of Post-Fordist production in
the West under neoliberal policies, especially the development of new media technologies and
the Internet, had transformed the landscape of work. With the outsourcing of material
manufacturing jobs to the developing world, “immaterial production” and service work have
grown more prevalent in developed countries (Hardt and Negri, 2004; Harvey, 1989). Work has
become simultaneously more socialized and individualized. Gone was the Fordist factory, and in
its place is the “social factory” in which people work in restaurants, cafes, shopping malls, from
homes or in offices that increasingly look and feel like all of the above (Ross, 2003). As laborers
in the post-Fordist economy, people are also called upon to cultivate and put to work their unique
individual qualities, such as gendered, racialized and nation-based personality, emotion,
creativity, and life experience (Hochschild, 1983; Mills, 1951; Pang, 2012). With the
privatization of social welfare and the normalization of the Silicon Valley style start-up culture
since the 1990s, work has also grown more risky and precarious as social risk has been
individualized (Neff, 2012).

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The rise of web 2.0 interactive technologies and platform-based social media since the mid-
2000s has only rendered these trends increasingly prominent. Digital entrepreneurial labor
epitomizes the new regime of work as being shaped by these intersecting trends. In the web 2.0
economy, the Fordist distinctions between production and reproduction/consumption, home and
workplace, leisure and work have collapsed (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010; Terranova, 2004;
Toffler, 1980). This blurring of the previously considered “separate spheres” has amounted to an
amplification and centralization of what generally perceived as “women’s work”, such as
consumption skills, communication, aesthetic judgment, emotional and affective labor,
community-building, flexibility, and precariousness in the new economy (Adkins 2002; Gary
2003; Hochschild 1983; Larner & Molloy 2009; McRobbie 2011; Morini 2007; Weeks, 2011).
Meanwhile, the sense of precariousness and insecurity typical of women’s work under industrial
capitalism had become more prevalent today, affecting not only women and the working-class
but a large number of middle-class skilled male workers as well (Gill and Pratt, 2008). This
“qualitative feminization of work” has paralleled the “quantitative feminization of work” in the
Post-Fordist economy whereby women in both affluent West and emerging economies had
entered the workplace en masse, leading feminists to announce that “the gender of Post-Fordism
is female” (McRobbie, 2016) and to compare digital work to domestic work and the ideal subject
of the new economy to the figure “Digital Housewife” (Jarrett, 2016).
It is generally acknowledged that women’s historical experience with labor (either home-
based domestic labor or gendered wage work) and feminist scholar’s long-term efforts in
expanding the notion of labor by making visible women’s contribution to capitalism have
become evermore crucial to conceptualizing and understanding work and life in the digital
economy (Jarrett, 2015; McRobbie, 2016; Weeks, 2011)). However, there’s less consensus

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regarding what the rise of boundary-blurring entrepreneurial labor practices and the intensified
qualitative feminization in the Web 2.0 era bode for women’s wellbeing and feminist politics?
Optimistic views hold that the elevated status of “feminine skills” constitutes a “new source of
economic power” and “workplace authority” for women (McDowell 1997, as cited in Adkin,
2002), identifying the valorization of “reproductive labor” (Cameron & Gibson-Graham 2003),
and the blurring between consumption and work in certain female-dominated industries like
fashion (Larner & Molloy 2009) as presenting potential challenges or alternatives to patriarchal
capitalism.
With the rapid digitalization of economy and life and financialization of the technology and
new media industries since the new millennium, there has been growing concerns about the
aestheticization of labor (Williams & Connell 2010) in contemporary service industries and
“cognitive capitalism’s” tendency to prioritize “extracting value from relational and emotional
elements” (Morini 2007). They look at these shifts as the colonization of life by work
(Hochschild 1983), which lead to new forms of alienation (Hochschild 1983), discrimination, re-
entrenchment of job segregation, and fetishism of consumption (Williams & Connell, 2010:
349). Even when such feminization of work contributes to the desegregation and
detraditionalization of labor, its effects are often unevenly distributed along lines of class, race,
and nationality (Adkin 2002; Fantone 2007), and are often preempted by the “biopolitical
governmentality” of “consumer culture and the promises of personal satisfactions therein”
(McRobbie 2011, p. 72).
The dominant mood here is one of ambivalence as scholars come to emphasize the
specificity of cases under investigation and urge against over-generalization and abstract
theorizing (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Jarrett, 2016). Centralizing the symbolic icon of the “Digital

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Housewife”, Kylie Jarrett (2016) drew on the feminist theorization of labor and capitalism to re-
conceptualize the current debate on immaterial labor. Dismissing the autonomist’s emphasis on
the radical novelty of networked boundary-blurring immaterial labor, Jarrett referenced Marxist
feminists to highlight the persistence of capital’s exploitation of the labor of reproduction as well
as reproductive labor’s social role in shaping subjectivities, generating meanings, and sustaining
communities and social relations. Adopting a feminist standpoint, Jarrett called for a ceasefire
between the two camps that either celebrates digital labor as empowerment or reduces it to
exploited consumer labor. Building on the work of Rosi Braidotti (2013) and Haraway (1991),
Jarrett argued that the romantic humanist figure of the inalienable, autonomous, and self-
determining individual, having been conceptualized based on the imagination of “white,
European, heterosexual, able-bodied cis-male”, was neither achievable nor necessarily desirable.
Instead, she centralized the “relational identities and other-oriented caring practices from which
women have historically drawn their agency and meaning and which are often found in cultures
that do not draw on Western European paradigm of individuality” as an alternative perspective
(p. 102-103). Ultimately, she conceptualized networked immaterial labor as both socially
productive (in its use value) and deeply imbricated in the capitalist regime of value extraction (in
its exchange value).
Jarrett’s reliance on the autonomist legacy of locating potentials for politics and resistance
against capitalism within (rather than outside of) capitalist relations was shared by Kathy Weeks
(2007, 2011). She urged against the recurring Marxist move to couch critiques in a constructed
authentic space (such as the inalienable self), which, according to her, has become increasingly
ineffective in the Post-Fordist “contexts where reproduction is no longer identifiable with a
particular space or a distinctive set of practices and becomes coterminous with production”

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(Weeks, 2007: 426). Instead, she suggested an alternative vision of shifting the antagonism
between productive work (public sphere) and reproductive work (domestic sphere) to the
mutually-transformative realms of “work and life”. Thus, women’s experience with affective,
socialized, and communicative labor can be deployed as a “logic of political desire” to re-
imagine a different “quality of life” under post-Fordism (Ibid, p. 428). In general, both Jarrett
and Weeks saw women’s historical experience with labor in capitalism and the Post-Fordist
feminization of labor (both qualitative and quantitative) as sites for transformative politics that
are albeit immanent to capitalism.
Following the CCCS’s tradition of emphasizing culture and leisure (as compared to the
classical and autonomist Marxist focus on labor), McRobbie (2016), on the other hand, was less
optimistic about the Post-Fordist feminization of work. Focusing mostly on the UK and Western
European experience and particularly regarding the rise of gendered flexible and entrepreneurial
work in the cultural industries since the early 1990s, McRobbie saw more tensions and
ambivalence (as compared to Jarrett and Weeks) in the politics of gendered entrepreneurial labor.
She linked the emerging discourse of “passionate work” and the “creativity 189ispositive” to the
postfeminist culture in the past two decades, and argued that the new entrepreneurial labor
regime, while having offered women more opportunities for work and self-actualization, also
legitimizes and normalizes gendered precarity and gender re-traditionalization. She concluded:
“I pose the idea of passionate work being a distinctive mode of gender re-traditionalization whereby
the conservatism of post-feminism re-instates young women’s aspirations for success within
designated zones of activity such as creative labour markets, which then becomes spaces for the
deployment of highly normative femininity such as ‘girlish enthusiasm’, which can be construed as a
willingness to work all hours for every little pay in the hope of gaining a foothold in the field of work”
(p. 110).
For McRobbie, women’s “passionate attachment to creative work”, often embedded in
memories and familial histories of their parents (particularly mother’s) “previously blocked

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hopes and frustrations”, might comprise “lines of flight” and crystallize into “social criticism”.
However, it might also prevent them from identifying with working-class values and lifestyle
while feeling obliged to conform to individualized consumerist code of femininity (p. 46, 90).
Generally, McRobbie conceptualized networked entrepreneurial labor as a result of
individualized rejection of second wave feminism and a form of Foucauldian governmentality
that both makes possible new practices of self-fashioning and self-realization and disciplining
and governing the gendered bodies.
This linkage between gendered entrepreneurial labor and postfeminist culture was also
echoed in Diane Negra’s (2009) and Michele White’s (2015) research on postfeminist
“retreatism”. Focusing on recent representation of women and work in popular culture, Negra
observed a postfeminist tendency to re-valorize traditional feminine attributes and roles and the
domestic sphere due to the need to “radically re-imagine the contemporary culture of work” (p.
89). Career women are exhorted either to maintain work-life balance or to embrace romantic
relationships or domestic bliss as a happier and more authentic state of being a female in the
postfeminist context. In a similar vein, White explored the entrepreneurial mother sellers on
Ebay and Etsy to show how Internet-based entrepreneurial labor had been touted as a desirable
alternative career for stay-at-home moms to “have it all”. While e-commerce was both advertised
by the corporations and mothers as freedom, empowerment, and more community-oriented and
ethnical career trajectory than traditional wage work, women sellers often find it challenging to
reconcile the tensions between Internet-based entrepreneurial labor and the demands of
“intensive motherhood”. However, according to White, by profiting from “their maternal
position”, these mothers had also revised “the more limiting conceptions of stay-at-home
mothers and femininity” (p. 56). In summary, these recent accounts of women’s entrepreneurial

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labor in the Web 2.0 economy reveal its paradoxical implications to feminist politics, just as
Eisenstein (2004) observed that “global capital is tremendously contradictory: it promises
freedom and riches to the very people it exploits and degrades, while also putting this
contradictoriness in view” (p. 192)
The transnational dimension remains oddly under-explored in both the literature on
digital entrepreneurial labor and the recent feminist interventions into this subject. This neglect is
especially surprising given, on one hand, the ferocious expansion of neoliberal global capitalism
assisted by new technologies, re-organizing production and consumption, and generating new
and locally embedded entrepreneurial subjects wherever it goes (Appadurai 1996); and, on the
other, the added labor that non-Western consumer laborers have always invested in circulating,
decoding, resisting, or rendering meaningful Western cultural and commercial products (Lukacs
2013). Globalization and its latest phase as driven by digitalization and financialization is often
conceptualized as a masculine and Western endeavor (Castells 1996; Giddens 1990)—a macro-
economic process traversed by white, male Silicon Valley innovators and Wall Street bankers
with non-Western women as its victims (Chang & Ling 2000; Freeman 2001). For instance,
Freeman (2001) has candidly pointed out the dichotomous construction of “local and micro as
feminine versus global and macro as masculine” in scholarly accounts of globalization, in which
“third world woman is defined either outside globalization or as the presumed back upon which
its production depends” (p. 1013). This paradigm explains why the majority of research on
gender and labor in China to date has concerned working class manufacturing and service
workers, studies that—ironically—have obscured the growing number of female middle-class
working professionals, college students, housewives, and entrepreneurs in academic literature
(Larner & Molloy 2009). Given Chinese women’s “incomplete individualization” resulted from

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the historical trajectory taken from Confucian patriarchal society through state-led socialism and
the post-socialist reform and globalization, the transnationally-mobile Chinese middle-class
women’s encounter with digital entrepreneurial labor offers a unique perspective complementing
and contributing to the feminist intervention into digital entrepreneurial labor (Yan, 2011).
Between Individualization and Retraditionalization: Female Entrepreneurial labor in Web
2.0 China
Traditionally in the Confucian moral system dominated by rigid patriarchal hierarchical
orders, women were defined by their allegiance to the king, the father, and the husband. Though
subjected to historical vicissitudes, the ideal Confucian womanhood was associated with
chastity, loyalty, moral uprightness, and self-sacrificial virtues. Women’s “proper place” was
considered to be at home while men monopolized the public sphere as designated by the
traditional Chinese saying “ru zhu nei, nan zhu wai”. As a result, traditional female identities
were solely determined by their familial roles as daughters, wives and mothers as they were
confined to the domestic sphere for thousands of years till the turn of the 20
th
century (Mou,
2004).
Unlike in Euro-American countries where the modern feminist movement originated with
women’s struggle for equal rights with men, the major force driving the Chinese feminist
movement in the Late-Qing and early Republican years was not gender inequality, but the
nationalist demand to modernize and develop the feudalistic Chinese nation-state and to achieve
national independence from Western colonial powers (Song, 2016). Championed by modernist
reformers like Liang Qichao, the introduction of feminist ideas into China had a dual effect on
Chinese women. On one hand, following the Darwinist evolutionary paradigm and the
“Smithian” dichotomy between “productive labor” and “unproductive labor”, women’s inferior

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status was perpetuated, if not reinforced by the introduction of modern science. Due to their
confinement to the domestic sphere and their role as agent of reproduction, women became the
scapegoat for the inferiority of the Chinese race (Barlow, 2004; Song, 2016). On the other hand,
the modernists’ promotion of feminism as a way to improve the Chinese race and strengthen the
Chinese nation-state had also emancipated women from the domestic sphere. As citizens of the
modern Chinese nation-state, women had entered the public sphere through modern schooling
and by participating in capitalist production (Song, 2016). However, the expansion of capitalist
economy and the indigenization of modernist ideology of the separate spheres had planted the
seed for women’s double burden as agents of both reproduction and production.
The Chinese socialist revolution and the Communist regime founded upon its victory in
1949 were partially legitimized by its achievement in and promise for women’s liberation from
patriarchal domination (Lin, 2006; Wang, 2005). During the socialist years, women’s identities
were first and foremost defined by their contribution to the state-led socialist revolutionary and
modernization cause. In the public sphere, the ideal female subject was embodied by the gender-
neutral “iron girl”. Having been liberated from the traditional feudal bounds, they had embraced
the socialist “new society” wholeheartedly by proudly participating in building the socialist
nation-state as a female citizen who enjoyed in equal rights in most social aspects as men (Wu,
2012). Though in the socialist regime, both men and women’s individual rights were limited in
exchange for the “iron rice bowl”: stable employment, state-guaranteed housing, economic
security, and life-long welfare (mainly in urban China as mediated through the work unit
system). However, gender inequalities persisted in socialist China, intersecting in various ways
with class, rural-urban, ethnic, and geographical disparities (Lee, 2007; Lin, 2006; Wang, 2017).
In the workplace, dictated by a gendered division of labor, women were often assigned to service

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and auxiliary work and were expected to prioritize their husbands’ career development (Wang,
2005). In the private sphere, women were still responsible for the bulk of housework and were
burdened, like their counterparts in Western capitalist societies, by a second shift of domestic
and reproductive labor (Wang, 2017). Nevertheless, the blurred distinction between public and
private spheres—the socialization of domestic work through work unit based collective child
caring, public dining, and distribution of daily necessities and the penetration of state political
governance into the household—had the paradoxical consequences of easing women’s domestic
burden while constraining individual autonomy and choices in private life (Jiang, 2012; Lin,
2006). In general, socialist economic and nationalist development took precedence over feminist
politics during the socialist years as women’s bodies and life chances were subjected to the
domination of the patriarchal state (Wang, 2017).
China’s re-integration into the global capitalist system since the 1980s has challenged
women’s equal rights to employment and wage. As early as in the 1980s, there were debates in
Chinese academic calling upon women to “return home” and sacrifice their career and economic
freedom to ease the state’s mounting unemployment pressure. As part of a post-socialist liberalist
and traditionalistic backlash against socialist ideologies, women’s high employment rate during
the socialist years were critiqued as one of the many ills of Maoist egalitarianism and women had
again become the scapegoat for the nation’s slow progress in modernization and economic
development (Song, 2015; Wang, 2005). The state’s embrace of an export-oriented and labor-
intensive manufacturing economy and the emerging urban consumer market in the aftermath of
the 1989 Tiananmen incident had facilitated intra-gender class differentiation and instigated
parallel waves of class-based feminized labor.

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The first group was the urban “pink-collar class” represented by the young, vivacious, and
often hyper-sexualized eaters of the “rice bowl of youth”. These young women joined newly-
created urban service industry professions, ranging from luxury hotel waitresses, beauty products
sales girls, flight attendants, to fashion models and show girls (Hanser, 2008; Zhang, 2000;
Wang, 2005). According to Wang (2005), the creation of the “rice bowl of youth” is a “‘joint
venture’ of consumerism and sexism that commodifies and objectifies women”, though these
young women were often active and shrewd in maximizing the economic value of their youth by
boosting their earning power and potentials through various means of self-improvement (p. 174).
In comparison, the “white collar beauty” represented a more elite group of female professionals
with college degrees who often worked in foreign-owned or joint-venture companies in large
coastal cities. In many cases, young urban middle class Chinese women were the preferred
subject of the new foreign-dominated sector compared to male candidates of equal qualification
because of their better command of foreign language, superior communication skills, gender
appeal and physical attractiveness, greater flexibility and willingness to “become aligned with
foreign corporate interests (Ong, 2005: 234). Meanwhile, new opportunities in the private sector,
coupled with gender discrimination in the state-owned industries, had led to a growing number
of women entrepreneurs (Osburg, 2013; Zhang, 2005).
15

Women’s participation en masse in the urban workforce boosted their consumption power
and spawned a booming consumer sector targeting professional women, such as high-end
shopping malls, beauty salons, and cosmetic surgery clinics (Yang, 2011). The rise of
consumerism was fueled by a return of traditional gendered morality and gender essentialism,
which worked together to reinforce gender inequality with the withering of socialist

15
According to 1998 statistics from the State Industry and Commerce Bureau, 18.35 million registered private
enterprise owners are female, constituting 40.16 percent of the total. Clearly many women have opted to become
their own bosses. (Zhang, 2005).

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egalitarianism (Wu, 2012). While a younger generation of middle-class women experienced the
new feminized labor opportunities and consumption choices as liberating from Maoist asceticism
and erasure of sexuality (Rofel, 2007; Zhang, 2000), their empowering potentials were tempered
by a widening urban-rural divide. The fourth group of feminized workers—female peasant girls
drawn to manufacturing jobs in the factory zones on urban outskirts—were largely marginalized
from the consumerist boom and rendered invisible in mainstream gender representation (Pan,
2005). Not to mention the growing generational gender gap as older women had been
disproportionally disadvantaged during the reform of the state-owned enterprises in the 1990s.
As a result of the state’s withdrawal of socialist commitment to gender equality, a large number
of women were laid-off from state factories by a male-dominated middle management despite
the sacrifices that they had made during the socialist years by taking up the more dispensable and
less skilled jobs (Hanser, 2008; Wang, 2005).
The female entrepreneurial subject has emerged from these fluctuating gender dynamics.
The overwhelming majority of the those who engage in online luxury reselling are college-
educated and transnational mobile middle- or upper-middle-class young women in their twenties
to thirties. As members of the urban post-80s (bailinghou) and post-90s (jiulinghou)
generations—the first batch born after the Communist state embarked on the reform and opening
up policy in the late 1970s, they have both reaped the fruits of socialist feminist revolution,
benefiting from the equal educational opportunities and many other byproducts of the women-
friendly egalitarianism of the socialist years, and enjoyed the opportunities created by the post-
socialist education reform, the “one-child policy”, and the material wealth accumulated
(Greenhalgh, 2010). All of these have accorded them equal status with their male counterparts in

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terms of educational and professional credentials.
16
However, few identified with collective-
oriented and gender-neutral socialist femininity. Growing up in the 1990s immersed in an
unprecedented influx of commodities, images, and ideas from the West and from Asian
neighbors and coming of age after the nation’s entry into the WTO in 2001, they are
cosmopolitan, enterprising, transnationally mobile savvy consumers attuned to global pop culture
trends. Upon graduating from college, many of the women, like their older sisters, chose to work
in foreign or joint ventures in major cities as white-collar workers. Heavily subsidized by their
parents, a growing number obtains Western degrees or migrates abroad as professionals or
middle-class wives. Unlike the pink-collar and peasant migrant workers, their skills, education
credentials, and “can-do” attitudes have made them as competitive—if not more—as men in the
new knowledge economy. As the technology-savvy “net generation,” they use the Internet and
other ICTs more frequently than traditional media outlets for information, communication, and
leisure (Liu, 2011).
However, caught in-between the market, the state and re-invented traditional forces, these
young women are confronted by a reality shot through with contradictions. On one hand, this
new generation of women appears as increasingly individualized. They are also often depicted as
a “me generation” that identifies more with the individualistic and interactive communication
style of the Internet than with traditional media (Li & Shi 2013). An important way to express
and construct their individuality is through consumption. In the past decade, with the growing
buying power, consumer confidence, and global outlook of middle-class balinghou and
jiulinghou women, global luxury brands have emerged as the latest marker of cosmopolitan
identity and class distinction. Well-groomed, forever youthful, and luxury brand-wearing female

16
The recent national demographic census reported that the numbers of balinghou women or men with
university (associate, bachelor’s, and master’s) degrees are about the same (Li & Shi, 2013).

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bodies are represented as “empowered” female consuming subjects who exercise their consumer
agency and financial power to carve out their unique identities through commodities. This
gendered “consumer citizenship” is encouraged by the post-socialist “state-market nexus”,
enjoining women to seek self-worth through consumption in want of political participation and
citizen rights (Wang 2001). The proliferation of transnational e-commerce and global travel has
only facilitated this trend. More recently, a discourse of “passionate work”, compelling women
to do what they love, rather than just love what they do, has been gaining traction among the
younger generation. Combining an individualized version of the socialist working women
feminism and a gendered variation of the Silicon Valley inspired IT entrepreneurialism, women
are encouraged to quit traditional nine-to-five employment to become their own boss and to
prioritize the pursuit of self-actualization, creative and autonomous career, and personal
achievement.
On the other hand, women’s pursuit of individualism is often curtailed by a bleak reality of
unequal gender relationships sanctioned by various commercial, political, and cultural agents.
The extent to which the gains achieved by urban middle-class young women in education, and to
a lesser extent, in employment, can be translated into political empowerment is less certain—not
to mention that such advancement is often made at the expense of their working class and rural
sisters. Workplace gender discrimination and female underemployment is on the rise along with
women’s declining labor participation, especially following the state’s retreat from ensuring
egalitarianism in employment and welfare for women in the mid-1990s under pressure of the
market, and more recently exacerbated by the flexibilization of labor in both traditional industrial
and service, and the new knowledge sectors (Hanser, 2008; Ong, 2006; Wallis, 2013).
17

17
A recent survey with post-80ers graduated from top universities in China reported that males are 20%
more likely than females to secure a full-time employment upon graduation. The fact that woman graduates reported

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Meanwhile, women again have to bear the brunt of negative impacts resulted from the expansion
of the capitalist and the retreat of the socialist welfare regime. The privatization of child-caring
and education systems and the state-advanced human capital regime aiming at cultivating full-
rounded talents competitive in the neoliberal global capitalist market, have shaped a new culture
of “intensive mothering”, placing more demands on young mothers determined not to let their
children “fall behind at the starting line” (Greenhalgh, 2010).
These transformations have led to a revival of traditional Confucian gender discourses,
calling upon women to “return home” and become housewives (Song, 2015). For example, the
Chinese president Xi Jinping, in a 2013 talk addressing a new leading body of the All-China
Women’s Federation, emphasized that “special attention should be paid to women’s unique role
in propagating Chinese family virtues and setting up a good family tradition.” (Wang, 2017).
More importantly, such revival of traditional cultural values are framed through the discourse of
“work-life balance” as expanding women’s choice and freedom and are experienced by young
middle-class mothers as a search for and realization of “authentic femininity” (Song, 2015; Wu,
2012). Women who prioritize career advancement over family are often depicted as selfish and
“unbalanced”. The smartest are those who not only “succeed in the job market” (gan de hao) but
also “win in the marriage market” (jia de hao). These representations complemented the
structural transformations, which have led some women to give up their career and become full-
time housewives and some other women to tone down their career ambition after marriage for
the sake of the family.
These converging elements in Post-WTO China conspire to make the female
entrepreneurial self the ideal subject of the global new economy, opening up new political

a significant lower average wage reveals that female professionals are still impeded by a glass ceiling, even more so
in state-owned or governmental sectors than foreign or joint ventures (Li & Shi 2013).

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possibilities while generating new regimes of power and exclusion. No passive consumer of
Western luxury, she knows where and how to locate the best deal using her “feminine” consumer
skills and knowledge. More importantly, her technology savvy and cosmopolitan worldliness
serve her effort to convert “feminine” knowledge and gendered networks into monetizable
capital for innovative businesses and self-driven careers. The valorized entrepreneurial self is
often manifests through self-conscious and highly skilled construction and publicization of a
personal brand based on classed and gendered identities, experiences, networks, and bodies
(Banet-Weiser 2012, Gray 2003; Larner & Molloy 2009).This gendered and technology-
empowered entrepreneurship seems to have handily “resolved” the conflict between the
neoliberal feminine ideal of a consumerist, individualistic, global mobile, and actively desiring
woman, and the self-sacrificing and family-oriented woman demanded by traditional patriarchal
norms. Though the young women might still be structurally disadvantaged, their entrepreneurial
practices serve as a coveted alternative—or supplement—to their white-collar career track,
educational pursuits, and housewifery. But this cultural solution to structural problems runs the
risk of legitimizing, even making desirable, the rising flexibilization of labor, withering public
welfare provisions, new domesticity, and feminine retreatism. Far from a non-discriminating
equalizer, this emergent regime of value generates new forms of exclusions, and privileges
certain versions of “femininity,” rendering others less valuable, visible, or desirable.
As the Chinese economy struggles to transition from industrial to Post-Fordist, further
integrating into neoliberal global capitalism, these gendered transnational consumerist and
entrepreneurial subjectivities will be desirable and necessary to constituting a different regime of
accumulation and economic rationality. The female entrepreneurial subject represents a rupture
in subjectivation from the socialist “iron rice bowl” or the industrial migrant workers and the

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“rice bowl of youth,” nonetheless personifying the nation’s struggles at this particular historical
conjuncture in which different elements—traditional, socialist, and neoliberal capitalist—battle
to define their identity and future (Wu, 2012). Global neoliberal capital’s demand for a more
agentive, creative, and participatory consuming and laboring womanhood has certainly elevated
the status of young middle and upper class Chinese women, but this freedom and agency are
often constrained by new regimes of control exercised through a transnational network and
discrimination based on class, race, and ethnicity.
The Transnational Quest for Feminine Self
There are mainly two types of women luxury resellers—those who treat reselling as a day
job and those who moonlight as a reseller on a part-time basis in addition to their formal
employment or educational pursuit. The former consists mainly of housewives with young
children and professionalized resellers. Five out of the 25 women that I interviewed represented
themselves as professional resellers. All five identified their desire to get into reselling as “a
means to an end” of making it out of China”. The majority of the women had “accidentally
stumbled upon” luxury reselling while living, studying, or traveling abroad. Eight were stay-at-
home housewives and the others were either working full-time or enrolled in universities as full-
time students. They often started out by purchasing and sending/carrying back products to China
on the behalf of their relatives or friends as a favor. It was often a delight to realize that they
could actually make money out of their favorite pastime while maintaining close contact with
their home country. Later on, they began charging a service fee as they gradually expanded their
circle of customers. For the part-timers—mostly full-time students or professional women—
reselling is less “serious” but functions more like an extension of their leisure and hobbyist

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pursuits, such as sharing sales information or new purchases via social media, going shopping
after work, or following the latest fashion information through blogs and magazines.
However, the distinctions between full-time and part-time are often blurred as those women
embark on different roles as wives or mothers, or switch tracks professionally in and out of full-
time jobs and schooling. In fact, the main reason behind the popularity and resilience of luxury
reselling as a gendered way to make a living is its flexibility, which makes it easy for women to
fit it into their various social roles and pursuits. Oftentimes, reselling grants them a certain
degree of financial and psychological independence, serving as a supplement to a not-so-
satisfactory full-time job or to subsidize their education. Reselling becomes more like a career
for those when a full-time day job stands in conflict with their socially-demanded responsibilities
as mothers or immigrant wives. In this sense, transnational luxury reselling helps women resolve
the tensions that they experienced between “living for themselves” (e.g. geographical mobility,
educational, career, consumerist pursuits, financial independence) and “living for others” (e.g.
being a girlfriend, mother, or wife who prioritize the needs of her family members).
Luxury reselling, either pursued as a part-time hobby turned job or as a full-time career,
was often experienced by my interviewees as a quest for spatial and social mobility and personal
or financial autonomy. For instance, Amanda quit her job to become a full-time luxury reseller in
Dubai: “I know a few Chinese women who are in the same business here. They are very much
like me, former white-collar office ladies who felt stuck in their old professions, have a good
fashion sense, and want to explore the world.” After two years of hard work between high-end
shopping venues, social media platforms, and post offices, she now runs a team of six: one
online customer service in China and five buyers scattered in Europe and the US. Similarly,
Sally left her former job one year prior to our interview after a “passport epiphany”:

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This woman in my office, who was in her early thirties, unlike everyone else, she always wore a smile
on her face at work. She never worked overtime like us, and she just didn’t seem to care as much as we
did about work. I was bewildered until she told me that she holds a Canadian passport and bought a
house in Vancouver a few years ago. I said to myself: “You need to get one of these.”
Sally now operates a social media luxury reselling business on Sina Weibo with almost 9,000
followers while working toward her MBA in Los Angeles. “Hopefully, I will find a way to stay
permanently in the US,” said Sally. Western developed nations, as a signifier of
cosmopolitanism, present a sought-after alternative to the now environmentally degraded and
overpopulated China; so, too, is luxury reselling a more desirable profession than the hyper-
exploitative Chinese workplace—now a new and fiercer battleground of neoliberal global
capitalism.
18
The emblematic superiority attached to Western citizenship, luxury commodities,
and lifestyle holds so much allure for young middle-class Chinese women like Sally and Amanda
that the quest itself is experienced as a search for social mobility, personal autonomy, if not the
“true” gendered self (Rofel, 2007).
The feeling of empowerment afforded by association with Western consumer culture also
resonates with women who are based in China but make frequent overseas “shopping trips” that
often serve multiple purposes—commercial and personal, business and tourism. Mina left her
research job in a cosmetics company in Northeast China to start an e-commerce shop
specializing in reselling Western (including Korean and Japanese) cosmetics. She rotated with
her business partner, a full-time white-collar worker in a German company, in their bi-weekly
shopping expedition to duty-free shops in Seoul. Like most of my other China-based
interviewees, international travel for Mina is one main attraction of the profession for its
cosmopolitan cache and the sense of mobility it affords. Consider the comments made by Ellen,

18
Western nations also include more developed Asian neighbors, such as Hong Kong, Macau, Korea,
Japan, etc.

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a full-time agent just returned from graduate school in the US to Beijing, who compared her
current job to an alternative preferred by her parents:
I just couldn’t take that job (working in a state-owned petroleum corporation). I know it’s gonna be
much more secure and much less stressful and risky, but it’s simply too boring and fixed. I cannot bear
doing the same tasks 9-to-5 in the same office everyday. I like traveling, getting to know different
culture, going shopping too much to trade my soul for security!
Xiaowen, another China-based reseller who work full-time as a governmental civil servant in
Jinan, a large city in Northeast China, partnered up with her high school classmate in Australia to
sell cosmetics and baby milk formula. Compared to her female friends working non-
governmental jobs, Xiaowen’s workday was less stressful and she seldom had to work overtime.
But the downside was that she also earned less. In order to make up for the excitement and
money missing from her current job, Xiaowen multitasked at work and used much of her spare
time to conduct customer service and send out deliveries. “I really enjoy this part-time job since I
can earn some extra cash to buy cosmetics and clothes from abroad for myself, and I have also
saved enough for overseas traveling with my husband during my winter break?”, Xiaowen told
me.
Ella, Mina, and Xiaowen are not alone in their longing for the exotic and cosmopolitan
cultural experience that comes with overseas tourism and luxury consumption. In recent years, a
boom in transnational air travel and consumption has been fueled by a fast-growing Chinese
middle class. Since 2012, China has surpassed the US to become the worlds’ leading outbound
tourism market. And the year 2016 alone had witnessed a 12% increase in overseas spending by
Chinese tourists (UNWTO). However, the Chinese government continued to levy heavy import
taxes on foreign luxury products. Luxury agent emerged as a niche profession amid these trends,
propelled by the gendered and classed aspirations of the new generation of Chinese middle-class
women. If, as Rofel has posited, cultural tourism in Post-Mao China—in contrast to travel for

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political goals in Socialist China—indicates the “truly free self” for young urban women, then
the rise of luxury reselling as a profession perfectly unites economic rationality/pragmatism and
the romanticized cosmopolitan sensibility “embodied in the act of traveling” that ultimately
symbolizes a new kind of feminine subject (Rofel, 2007: 128). Indeed, the Maoist class-based
spatial politics of “going to the countryside” has been replaced by the contemporary calling of
“going global” in renegotiating China’s post-socialist position in the world.
Those who end up turning full time are often young immigrant housewives, especially
those with small children. As an important source of supplementary family income, reselling
delivers a much-needed sense of achievement or autonomy from housework, unemployment or
underemployment. Being a luxury agent, as an Internet-based profession that merges work and
leisure, allows young mothers and housewives to balance their household chores, such as
shopping and cooking, with a well-paid job. As an important source of supplementary family
income, reselling again furnishes a much-needed sense of achievement or autonomy from
housework, unemployment or underemployment. In the words of Xiaomei, the full-time mom
and wife of a physicist working for a national science lab in Chicago:
“I just wanna show my baby boy that his mom is working hard, not just for the family, but also to keep
a dynamic life and stay pretty for herself. I don’t want him to think that I am sacrificing myself for
him” (Interview with Xiaomei, November 2013).
Xiaomei told me that she usually got her grocery shopping done during outlet shopping trips and
cooked or walked the family dog while answering her customer’s questions on her smart phone.
Similar to Xiaomei, Ran, a woman in her mid-30s who immigrated to Poland with her husband
and young boy two years ago also shuffled between housework and luxury reselling. Back in
China, she also elicited the help from her mother and young sister. While her mother took care of
transferring delivery packages sent from Europe to Ran’s Chinese clients around the country, her
sister assisted in accounting and conducting customer service while Ran’s sleeping or busy doing

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housework. Wanwan, a young woman in her mid-20s commuted frequently between South
Korea and China to reunite with her husband. He was working in the overseas branch of a
Chinese company based in Seoul after obtaining a degree in marketing from a Korean university.
In China, Wanwan lived with her parents while maintaining a job that allowed her to work 3
days a week. To supplement her income while enjoying the flexibility to commute at least once a
month between Seoul and China, Wanwan sold Korean beauty products via her WeChat account.
Like Ran, Wanwan’s mother, who had already retired from her job as a middle-school teacher
also contributed to her business by helping her send out packages.
This transnational familial division of labor in which female family members work together
in building up family businesses echoes Naudin’s (Naudin, 2015) observation of ethnic minority
women entrepreneurs in Britain who often had to rely more on the support of their family
members. Women in less developed regions of the worlds, according to Berger (1991), are often
driven more by “values relating to family and family life” than market rationality (p. 29). While
the younger generation of Chinese women have become more individualized, the thousands
years of Confucian tradition that treats family as a core economic and moral unit still persists in
contemporary Chinese society, which explains why Chinese women, especially though who are
caught in-between different national cultures, experience more tensions between the
individualized and the family-oriented self. Here, the flexibility of luxury reselling as a
profession merges the private with the public, domestic with commercial, which goes toward
reconciling the contradictions between duties demanded by their traditional gender roles as
mothers, wives, daughters, and girlfriends, and individualistic pursuits of business success,
financial independence, and consumption to craft the feminine self.

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The perks that come with the job—VIP membership of luxury brands, pampered shopping
experience, and staying in the know with global fashion trends—reinforce the sense of mobility
and empowerment—real or imaginary. However, simply equating luxury reselling with leisure or
feminist empowerment risks romanticizing this gendered labor practice. Indeed, this “prosumer
global citizenship” is complicated by the emotional labor women must assume in managing their
business personae and maintaining flows of communication online. As individualized, class-
based, and consumerist solutions to structural problems, the real liberating potential of this
particular iteration of entrepreneurship is limited.
The Emotional Labor of Digital Work
In a competitive market of service-oriented social media selling, the gendered affective
relationships between sellers and customers are key to business success. The social media–based
marketplace of luxury brands and “prosumer”-generated services is also a transnational space in
which cultural identities form, different cultural values clash, and consequential human
interactions take place. This interconstituency of culture and commodity, and the shifting of
“cultural labor into capitalist business practices” (Banet-Weiser 2012, p. 8), are the defining
features of the Internet-based entrepreneurial labor regime. The breaking down of the boundaries
between the public market of selling and the private sphere of life, between work and leisure,
consumption and production, the global and local challenges the “long held dichotomy between
instrumental and affective action” rooted in “Western European cosmology” (Rofel, 2007: 223).
While such hybridity has long characterized women’s experience in capitalism, the fact that
these gendered practices and subjectivities become directly monetizable and are increasingly
crucial to capitalist production distinguishes the present moment from the past, which shapes the
construction of new “womanhood”, and holds contradictory implications for feminist politics

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(Hays, 1996; Jarett, 2016). It is incumbent upon these women entrepreneurs to reconcile the
multiple tensions experienced on a daily basis. By doing so, they also come to redefine what
constitutes work and capitalist production in late capitalism. My interviewees strategically
engaged new media practices like online branding and lifecasting as both “authentic” expressions
of the cosmopolitan feminine self and as a less intrusive means for product promotion. Online
transnational networks and interaction solidify emotional ties and cross-cultural solidarities, but
the excess of instrumentalization and interactivity also generates emotional and physical burdens.
Fashioning an “authentic” self-brand—that is successfully annexing individuals’ unique
personalities and life experiences to commercial products through visual and discursive
narratives—is paramount to attracting customers, enhancing “stickiness,” and increasing profit
margins (Banet-Weiser 2012; Marwick 2013). To excel amid fierce competition in a risky,
mediated informal market, these women must be skilled at communicating their personal and
affective appropriation and engagement with Western luxury brands. The brands and their
cultural meanings, in turn, become resources through which the women articulate “authentic”
gendered identities that are, in fact, heavily coded with class markers, patriarchal feminine codes,
and cosmopolitan distinction. Successful women agents creatively highlight the product’s aura of
authenticity while conveying personalized messages to their target customers. One glimpses this
creativity in the names these women give to their online businesses, as well as in the multiple
ways they describe the self-brand they seek to project.
My European Home: I came up with this name to make customers feel at home in my shop. . . . Of
course, adding “European” gives me cache—everyone knows that Europe is the heaven of high-end
luxury.
Global Shopping Girl: My shop’s name contains a sense of self-mockery. But it’s who I am—I like
shopping, especially global brand names. I believe that’s what most of my customers like to do as well.
Oh, I know the word “global” makes me sound too ambitious. (Laugh).

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Kevin Baby’s Mom @ USA: Kevin is my two-year-old’s name. I name my shop after him partly
because that I set up this business to earn him a better life. I realized after a while that my customers
trust me more because of my identity as a mother. Many of them are young mothers too, so in a way
we are not just doing business but are helping each other out to make life better.

In addition to strategically naming and presenting their businesses, all of the women—to
different extents—engaged in social media lifecasting (Marwick, 2013). Selfies taken inside the
fitting room wearing branded products are juxtaposed with photos of their children, family pets,
houses, meals, or daily activities and events, such as concerts, picnics, parties, and road trips.
Product information is narrated along with entrepreneurs’ individualized curation based on
personal engagement with the product or retweeted in a “customer show” (maijiaxiu) that
presents client-generated visual and discursive testimonies of the product and services provided.
Quite a few numbers of the resellers I interviewed were customers before starting their own
business, following in the footsteps of their trusted agents. The interactivity of social media
selling constitutes a sense of quasi-community that contributes to substantiating the
“authenticity” of the luxury brands (Banet-Weiser, 2012).
Interviewees who lived in certain time zones would occasionally “live broadcast” their
shopping trips, taking orders via their smartphone while making purchases in the shopping
venues—in their view, a smart promotional strategy that both authenticates their products and
offers vicarious shopping pleasure to their clients. These bits and pieces all function to constitute
coherent gendered self-brand images in relation to their various social roles as mothers,
daughters, wives, girlfriends, students, or businesswomen. However, these feminine images are
never value-free—they are always encoded with middle- or upper-class cosmopolitanism via
branded material status symbols and the symbolism of place. A quick scan of the recent “leisure
photos” posted by my interviewees reveals the tendency to showcase conspicuous consumption

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and leisure in global landmark locations, such as a romantic dinner for two at a Michelin-ranked
restaurant in Beverly Hills, an evening at a fashion show in downtown Dubai, a facial at an
upscale beauty salon in Shanghai, and a relaxing Sunday morning spent with girlfriends at an art
gallery in Warsaw.

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Photos taken from the social media sites of some well-known luxury resellers

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This annexation of affect by economic rationality works to reconcile the contradictions
between the individualistic, flexible, consumerist, and enterprising femininities commanded by
mobile capital, and the respectable, family-oriented, and altruistic womanhood anchored in
traditional Confucian values. If anything, traditional female “virtues” and gender roles are often
deployed by the resellers both subjectively and objectively to mitigate excessive commercialism
and justify mercantile interests. The complex interaction of the two provides the dominant
gender scripts in shaping their gendered entrepreneurial labor subjectivities, filling the void left
by the fading socialist feminism.
One exemplary figure embodying these new gendered subjectivities is the family-
oriented but also self-loving and caring middle-class “hot mom” (la ma). Internet-based luxury
reselling comes to represent an ideal profession for the hot moms. The hot moms are enterprising
reproductive subjects who had embraced the traditional domesticated femininity as authentic
expression of the cosmopolitan self. They are the well-educated, cosmopolitan-minded, and
technology-savvy “net moms” depicted by Greenhalgh (2010) who actively make use of new
technologies to enhance their “scientific” mothering techniques to produce globally superior
children. They also take pleasure and in domestic chores such as cooking, baking, decorating and
cleaning the house and pride themselves on a well-kept middle-class home (Negra, 2009).
However, they consciously distinguish themselves from the traditional self-sacrificial femininity
and the socialist gender-neutral laboring women by pampering their individualistic desires and
asserting their agency and independence.
Luxury reselling becomes popular with those hot moms because it offers opportunities for
individualistic pursuits like social media mediated self-expression, consumerist indulgence,
maintaining a desirable and well-kept figure, establishing networks with like-minded women,

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while granting them time to fulfill their domestic roles. For instance, Ellen, the reseller in her late
20s who had just returned back to China after finishing graduate education in the US showcased
her pregnant and mothering experience along with the products that she sell in her WeChat
moments. After returning to China, she also expanded her business scope from reselling Western
luxury products to manufacturing and selling traditional Chinese medicines and processed food
known for their youth-preserving and beauty-enhancing effects. One day in 2016, she posted a
series of pictures advertising her best-selling products in juxtaposition to photos of her youthful
and well-kept postpartum body and commented: “I want to tell my fellow sisters using my own
story that you can have it all—a fulfilling career and a happy family while staying young and
beautiful”. Stories like Ellen’s might sound empowering for aspiring hot moms who want to
“have it all”, but they did more to conceal than to reveal. They constitute new feminine codes
that not only set extremely high standards for women to live up to through excessive exercise,
luxury consumption, and personal care, but also celebrate commodity-coded cosmopolitan
middle and upper class gendered identities while marginalizing rural and working class women.
Based on my interview with women resellers, their real experience with reselling is more
contradictory than the social media images that they carefully managed. Oftentimes, the extent to
which “online interactivity” felt like work on a subjective level varied according to the woman’s
degree of involvement in the business. For those who participated in a more leisurely manner,
shopping for family or a small circle of loyal customers who had become friends felt more
pleasant than burdensome. Modestly engaged, the emotional labor of interactivity helps the
women maintain established workplace or friendship ties transnationally while expanding their
social network beyond the small circle of people at work or school. For example, Lele was a
former adjunct professor who had just switched to full-time luxury agent from her two-year

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lecturer stint in a small college in Washington, DC. She heartily embraced the change in her life
because of the pleasure derived from being appreciated and needed. Whereas Xiaoma, a 22-year-
old college junior in Macau told me:
“I really enjoy chatting with my customers online, and many of them are my friends or friends’
friends. Especially with the first few batches of customers, we talk about everything—not just
cosmetics and fashion, but also dating, marriage, kids, work and family. Sometimes I will send them
small gifts with their packages. I love to imagine the surprised smile on their face when they see the
little extra thing that is invested with my love!” (Interview with Xiao Ya, November 2013).
These virtual interpersonal ties are often reported to be especially beneficial to the emotional
well-being of stay-at-home moms:
It used to be just me and my baby. My husband is super busy during the day and tired at night after
work. It is hard for me to make friends in the suburban neighborhood where we live. Now I feel much
happier waking up every morning knowing that there are people waiting for me online who find my
advice useful and who appreciate my taste and hard work. I guess this is what motivates me.
Because most of Xiumei’s customers were also mothers, they often exchanged tips about child
rearing, which helped her “make better sense of the cultural difference in family pedagogy
between China and the US.”
However, self-exploitation and overwork were common among more established agents,
who often managed a large base of regular customers with little extra help. As the business
expanded and the customer network grew in size, many interviewees started to feel overwhelmed
by the expectation to be constantly available to answer client inquiries that may or may not lead
to a deal; living in different time zones from their customers only exacerbated the onus. Consider
the following comments made by two full-time agents:
I was on the verge of a breakdown when my client network ballooned during sales seasons. I became
obsessed with my laptop and smart phone for fear of losing a client. I couldn’t go to bed till 3 or 4 in
the morning since more people bug me after midnight. My friends were leaving me because I was
always distracted. (Interview with Sally, January 2014).

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“Sometimes I would feel so sick and tired of my cell phones—the non-stop message alerts just drive
me crazy, especially after I’ve gone to bed. It looks like an easy job—just typing replies? But I tell
you, talking to people, tending to their needs, and persuading them to buy something as expensive are
not easy!...I have very little control over my time.” (Interview with Xiaoou, November 2013).

Some women’s reselling businesses had even jeopardized their personal networks. For instance,
a few were “defriended” by their old acquaintances in social media or received complaints about
“being bombarded by commercials on things they can never afford” (Interview with Wang, April
2014). This interpenetration of life and work echoes the collapsing of personal and business
identities in online self-branding, but was felt more concretely by the women entrepreneurs on a
daily basis. Most women reported feeling guilty about spending less time enjoying leisure
activities with their family and friends after getting into the business. The contradictions
generated by competing gender ideals, the “potential trauma” of the “excess” of representation
proved hard to reconcile in everyday practices (De Lauretis, 1987).
These implicit cultural expectations of multiple feminine ideals function as biopolitical
power that disciplines the women’s bodies. Only certain identities and stories are brandable, and
brandability in an online market of luxury goods can require constant self-work and a perpetual
reshaping of the feminine self in compliance with—rather than challenging—gender scripts
dictated by mainstream consumer culture.
19
For example, Xiaolan, who showcased high-end
bags, such as Hermes and Chanel in her photos, told me that she hired a “personal nail
technician” who visited her home twice a week. Lily who sold designer fashions online had
given birth half a year previous to when we talked. She confided in me the pressure to “slim
down fast” and “tighten up her muscle” so she could feel confident again about posing in the

19
In general, for the transnational luxury resellers, a young, slim, and curvy female body is always more
brandable than one that is overweight or aged, just as cosmopolitan and middle-class lifestyles are more brandable
than rural and working class backgrounds.

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photos. The constant need to stay photogenic requires both self-surveillance and a form of
“aesthetic labor” that subsumes everyday leisure activities into “the productive domain” to create
the “look” for work (Wissinger 2009, p. 281). The physical and affective labor involved in online
self-production demand an updated understanding of Bordo’s (2003) “feminine praxis” in
“prosumer capitalism”—the routinized practices and labor in which women engage to construct a
Foucauldian “useful body.”
If the labor invested in “looking good” generates both pleasure and burden, to “sound
right” in an interactive, “always on” mediated environment only takes more work (Williams &
Connell 2010). The muddling of leisure and labor, private and commercial in online
entrepreneurship conflates the sense of social recognition gained from the gendered network with
self-exploitation and overwork, blurring the distinction between the community logic of mutual
sharing and female solidarity with the profit-driven imperative of commercial utilitarianism.
Luxury reselling might help solve some women’s dilemma. However, being exclusively
accessible to transnationally mobile middle-class women, it constitutes at best individualized
solution to gendered structural problems and contribute to the post-socialist myth that
represented capitalist modernity as a “classless wonderland “offering material abundance and
opportunities available to anyone as long as they are entrepreneurial enough to grab them
through their individual efforts (Wang, 2017, p. 252).
Risk, Stigma, and Alienation
The industry’s association with high-end luxury products, cosmopolitan lifestyles, and the
high-tech sector has drawn numerous young aspirants; but beneath the profession’s veneer of
glamour are the many contradictions these women negotiate on a daily basis. Being novel and
informal, the profession often appears illegitimate in the eyes of the older generation. In a culture

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in which many middle-class parents expect their daughters to focus on getting good grades in
school and entering a stable and reputable profession like teaching or working for the
government so that they can “marry well” and enjoy a “balanced” life, becoming an e-commerce
entrepreneur is unconventional at best. Several women shared stories of being misunderstood or
teased by their parents when they first started their businesses:
I was so afraid of her disapproval that I didn’t tell my mom about my business until half a year later.
She was quite mad at me because I was making a good salary at the newspaper. Being a journalist
sounds right for a girl like me. (Interview with Dada, April 2014)

“I remember when I first started and sold only a couple of things in the first month, my parents teased
me about earning only 300 RMB a month. One day they saw this female contestant on If You Are the
One (a popular Chinese blind dating show). She is an e-commerce shop owner and quite a character.
My parents made a big joke out of it and kept referring her to me throughout the whole season.”
(Interview with Mina, November 2013)
Risks and uncertainties are also part of the informal industry, which demands quick reaction,
high-risk tolerance, and good problem-solving skills. One risk concerns tax and customs evasion.
Many of the women were gaming the legal system, for instance, by concealing an immigration
status that prevented them from engaging in money-making activities, or mailing and physically
carrying commodities past customs as personal items to avoid taxation. The Chinese state, facing
huge custom and tax revenue loss, has begun to get tough with the industry in the past couple of
years.
20
The women agents also confronted numerous risks unique to international trading, such
as those incurred by transnational shipping, unstable currency exchange rates, intricacies of the
banking system, fake luxury, unreliable clients, and the often hostile attitudes of the luxury
brands toward reselling practices. Since April 2016, the government has toughened custom
inspection and significantly increased the taxes imposed on branded products brought into

20
An example is the new regulation issued by the state in late 2010 to impose a tax on personally mailed
items into China if they are above the dutiable value of 50 Yuan (6 USD) (Xu, 2010). A string of prosecutions
brought by the state against smuggling since 2011 also acts as a deterrent (Ma 2013).

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Chinese borders by overseas travelers and mailed back from abroad (Yu, 2016). With the
growing international mobility of Chinese middle-class customers, many have opted to purchase
luxury products personally during tourist or business trips overseas, which has also negatively
impacted the reselling industry. According to the “2015 China Luxury Market Study” conducted
by the consultant firm Bain & Co, the luxury reselling industry had already started to shrink as
its sales figure took a dramatic drop from 11.5 billion in 2014 to 8.5 billion USD in 2015 (Yang,
2016). Meanwhile, to put a brake on capital flight, the Chinese state has also started to put more
constraints on overseas credit card spending, cash withdrawals, and the amount of Renminbi
allowed to carry for international travelers (Bradsher, 2016).
Conducting business in a legal gray zone comes with stigmas that are often intricately
linked to citizenship, race, and nationality. Despite their elite background, these gendered
laboring practices follow a long history of immigrant women conducting home-based informal
work outside the watchful eyes of immigration and citizenship enforcement agencies. For
instance, it was a widely known “dirty little secret” that the Silicon Valley IT industries had
relied heavily on the cheap labor of stay-at-home female immigrant “independent contractors” in
its early days, including the labor of illegal immigrants (Mosco & McKercher, 2009). Compared
to those “exploited” immigrant female workers, women luxury resellers consider themselves
agentive and autonomous entrepreneurs. However, in spite of being relatively privileged in
China, these young middle-class women had to constantly negotiate and readjust their identities
in dealing with the luxury brands. Such negotiation is made trickier by the world’s ambivalent
attitudes toward China’s newly acquired love for luxury and its growing purchasing power as an
“upstart” nation. A 2013 article in the New York–based Epoch Times described a Chinese female
luxury agent’s humiliating experience with Louis Vuitton:

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Ms. Zheng, a luxury reseller from Los Angeles, is a frequent customer of Louis Vuitton’s American
website. Her repetitive purchases finally alerted the company to blacklist her credit card. To maintain
her business, Zheng kept applying for new cards and changing her shipping address, sometimes under
her husband and friend’s names. Her business didn’t last long, and Louis Vuitton now has a permanent
ban on Ms Zheng’s name. (Sun, 2013)
Ms. Zheng’s story was substantiated by the majority of my interviewees, who reported that some
luxury brands racially profile Asian/Chinese customers online to maintain a brand image of
exclusivity and to ensure the profit of their overseas branches. One of my interviewees had her
Bank of America credit card blacklisted by Louis Vuitton after a one-time online purchase.
Another was rejected on her first attempt to use her Visa credit card issued by a Chinese bank to
purchase a Coach product online.
This ethnicity- or nationality-based discrimination in virtual transactions is bitterly ironic
considering that many of the luxury products (or their parts) are manufactured in China by
working class factory girls on the global assembly line with their “nimble figures” and who
might never be able to afford transnational mobility or the pricy goods they themselves make
(Pan, 2005). Although able to buy multiple citizenships through large capital investments, these
elites nonetheless cannot entirely escape the racism of immigration laws as well as everyday
forms of racism. The specificities of these gendered and racialized experiences, along with the
inassimilable reality of widening social inequality and what many perceive to be a moral crisis in
China, serve as a constant reminder of the limitations of such “flexible citizenship” based on
consumption rights and transnational entrepreneurship. The women’s struggles epitomize the
nation’s dilemma—the contradictions embedded in “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”—
in transcending its positions defined by past histories, hierarchical international divisions of
labor, and global geopolitics, while maintaining autonomy, independence, and preserving its
unique cultural and revolutionary traditions.

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Facing a variety of constraints based on race, class, and nationality, most of my
interviewees were well aware of the widening social inequality, consumerist national image, and
commodity fetishism that they, in fact, foster. Some rationalized the structural and personal
barriers as a natural stage China is going through after decades of economic reform and opening
up. Consider the comment offered by Kitty, a 23-year-old architecture student in Italy:
“I just go with the demand. Chinese people are so hungry for these (Western luxury products). Why
not just take advantage of the trend. Nowadays with the world economy suffering, it’s hard to make
money out of foreigners, but I really respect their values. For instance, people here in Italy, they like to
make friends and enjoy life. Unlike in China where it’s all about money and status…” (Interview with
Kitty, March 2014).
Others realized the limitations of such “prosumer” global citizenship in offering a truly
meaningful career and life. Many women complained about feeling “alienated” by consumption
after the initial joy. For example, one told me that, at first, she was very excited about “doing
shopping with someone else’s money,” but later she started to develop “aesthetic fatigue” after
“buying similar products and going to the same boutiques over and over again,” which ruined her
love for shopping. As counter measures to the sense of alienation felt, some of the women had
started to set up clear work-life boundaries. Common strategies include separating personal
social media accounts from those devoted exclusively for “work”, and turning off electronic
devices during certain period of the day to preserve personal time with family and friends. A few
women got so sick that they had left the industry when I conducted my follow up interviews in
2017.
Flexibility as the New Normal
In September 2012, a news story shocked China, provoking anxiety in the agent
community. A 26-year-old former flight attendant was sentenced to 11 years in prison plus a
hefty fine for smuggling. As the story goes, the young woman set up an e-commerce shop three

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years previously, after being fired from her flight attendant job for having a chronic disease.
Thanks to her former professional identity (she named her online business “Flight Attendant’s
Small Shop”), her business reselling luxury products bought in Korean duty-free shops was
making good profits. Within a year, the woman and her boyfriend made 29 smuggling trips back
and forth between Beijing and Seoul, evading more than one million RMB worth of duties,
before she got caught passing through customs at the Beijing Capital Airport, carrying six bags
of unpackaged cosmetics (Ma, 2013). This story exemplifies the coexistence of uncertainties and
opportunities faced by contemporary Chinese young women, which require constant re-
adjustment, considerable flexibility, and an enterprising mentality—traits that are both
quintessentially “feminine” and typical of the neoliberal “new economy” (Gray, 2003).
21

Of course, women have been relegated to the “flexible labor reserve” throughout modern
Chinese history (Wu, 2005). Even during the height of Maoist feminism when women’s
participation in the labor force was celebrated as a major political achievement under socialism,
they were interpolated by the state to shoulder the double burden of serving the Maoist
metonymic state/family (jiaguo) beyond their self-interest (Barlow, 2004). In Post-Mao China,
flexibilization intensifies with deepening market reform, social campaigns that encourage
women to “return to the family” (funvhuijia) and engage in “periodic employment” (jieduanxing
jiuye) are launched whenever unemployment rate jumps (Wu, 2009). However, what makes the
post-socialist notion of flexibility different is a neoliberal governmentality that emphasizes
women’s freedom of choices as a self-serving and self-reliant “economic person,” epitomized by
the discourse of quality, or suzhi, that demands constant adjustment, retraining, and self-
improvement in response to capricious capital (Wallis, 2013). More recently, China’s growing

21
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000, when international travel was still a luxury for the majority of
Chinese, flight attendant was a coveted profession for young girls for its decent pay and cosmopolitan cachet.

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importance in the global economy not only as producer but also, increasingly, as consumer and
investor, have opened up new “flexible” transnational career and life opportunities for middle-
class Chinese women.
Such individualized entrepreneurial labor subjectivities are also mutually constitutive with
new feminine ideals popular with the younger generation of middle-class women. While being a
housewife or a stay-at-home mom was dismissed by socialist ideologies that celebrated the
laboring woman who “holds up half of the sky”, it now been encouraged by mainstream culture
as a “return” to “authentic femininity” marked by one’s traditional roles as wives and mothers. It
is also a shift facilitated by the growing class disparities in post-socialist China as “returning
home” represents a middle or upper-class privilege—an option that is only available to women
who can afford. The new feminine codes are also thoroughly immersed in consumerist doctrines
and essentialized beauty ideals that urge women to take pleasure and pride in consumerist
pursuits to maintain a well-groomed and fabulous body. Herein lies the catch of luxury reselling
and other similarly gendered flexible work—they align perfectly with the new feminine ideals
demanded by the neoliberal new economy that young women willingly trade in job security for
the autonomy, flexibility, technological cache, and commercial glamour promised. To quote
West and Zimmerman (1991), “what is produced and reproduced” in and through these new
entrepreneurial labor practices, is not merely products and transactions, but also the “material
embodiment” of gendered roles and identities (p. 30)
Flexibilities, work-life balance, network, and opportunities to express and perform
“authentic” feminine identities redefined what it means for a middle class woman to be
successful and to have a meaningful life in the contemporary world. One of the resellers, Yaosi,
stated:

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I feel like it’s very common, or even necessary for young Chinese woman nowadays to maintain an
informal career apart from whatever they do during the day . . . It’s not just the money, for us
balinghou, it’s more about the excitement and the process of self-discovery. A lot of my professional
women friends also run part-time businesses, like a restaurant or an online shop.
Her belief in the necessity of an “informal career” for Chinese young professional women might
be exaggerated, but it is nonetheless strong enough to rationalize her overpacked schedule. One
reason that she gave was that she didn’t take reselling as work, rather, she enjoyed using her
lunch break to try on pretty clothes and bags in the shopping complex near her company. It was a
nice supplement to her already stressful job as a consultant in a financial investment company
where she was surrounded by male colleagues who “talk about money all the time”. So for
Yaosi, though she was competitive enough to work in a male-dominated industry, she considers
such work too “masculine” to allow gendered self-actualization. And luxury reselling became a
channel through which she could perform and express her femininity.
However, such gendered cultural rationality not only doesn’t contradict but also contribute
to the economic rationality of survival and success in a precarious market. Later in our interview,
she also confessed that she “overwork(s) herself with an extra job” to build up “people network”
so that she can “have connections in different industries.” The importance of multitasking and
networking had never occurred to her until her sudden layoff in 2009; it took her a long time to
get back on her feet because she was too focused on “getting the work done” and lacked
professional connections beyond her company. Because she planned to invest in the new media
industry in China, luxury reselling helped her establish her network and better understand the
market.
Interestingly, this network-based, multi-tasking and multi-job “portfolio career” is held or
anticipated by most of the women interviewed (Larner & Molloy, 2009; Neff, 2011). Networking
and moonlighting are just two of the strategies adopted to cope with the new flexible work

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culture. Web 2.0 media platforms, such as weblog, microblog, Instagram and Facebook/Myspace
pages, also function as multi-media portfolios for entrepreneurial workers. One woman who fits
into this scenario is the 33-year-old Dada. She owns an online business that sells a mixture of
Western luxury and unbranded fashion imported from Korea, but she earns more money
modeling for other e-commerce businesses. In addition, she has also turned her social media
accounts and blog into advertising platforms for the businesses that she models for. During our
interview, she explained to me how the career that she is building up is not a “rice bowl of
youth” that will fade with her age:
“I know that I get paid well modeling because I am now young and pretty. But my youth won’t last—
that’s why I am building up my own business not only selling products but also advertising for others.
So as time goes by, the value will be transferred to my website and business—not just my pretty face
and slim body.” (Interview with Dada, November 2013)
This conscious move to externalize and “transfer” value from the feminine body to something
more lasting, such as a website, network, more stable business enterprise or skills that are in
demand, is echoed in several of my interviews. For example, Mina, the biology Master’s degree
holder who specializes in cosmetics told me that she is assisting a former college professor to set
up a new cosmetic line based on a patented technology. And her current reselling business
certainly helps her better understand the marketing and sales side of the industry. Others also
mentioned the intention to balance out the risk through, for instance, opening a brick and mortar
shop, or accumulating enough capital for investment in real estate, tourism and art etc. Most of
the women that I talked to saw luxury reselling as either a supplementary job to their main role
as mothers and wives or a transitional and temporary profession that afforded transnational
mobility and useful skills, experiences, or resources that would ultimately lead to something
more stable and lasting.

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These creative experiments with novel career and lifestyle options made available by
technological transforms are reminiscent of Haraway’s famous cyborg metaphor—liberating
feminine ideals that exist in-between “human and nonhuman, technology and biology,
civilization and nature, male and female, masculine and feminine” (Jarrett, 2016, p. 103).
However, situated firmly within the capitalist circuits, the flexible subject of feminine
entrepreneurial labor is both empowered and exploited, which complicates the liberating
potentials of new technologies for women. Indeed, in this fickle economy, flexibility has become
the new normal, for women and men alike. Their flexibility in adapting to the capricious global
market and in transcending the narrow value that the market places on their feminine and
youthful body recalls Gray’s (2003) conceptualization of contemporary “enterprising
femininity,” which speaks to the “new value” that the Post-Fordist labor market places on
feminine and consumer skills accrued through informal means. Their willingness to self-
transform, to undertake personal makeovers, and to upgrade their knowledge and skills to adjust
to—or even outwit—both the neoliberal transnational capital and the disciplinary state power
paradoxically speaks of their “high quality” (gaosuzhi). In coping with the risks and uncertainties
of a volatile industry, the women entrepreneurs ran themselves like an “enterprise,” braving the
market as different “made-up” subjectivities that allow them to respond to changes and
opportunities.
Conclusion
Focusing on Internet-based luxury reselling as a transnational gendered practice of
entrepreneurial labor, this chapter explores how the technology-driven restructuring of labor and
consumption on a global scale intersects with changing gender regimes in crafting gendered
subjectivities. The new profession of Internet-based luxury reselling has emerged as a cultural,

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economic, and technological “fix” to the contradictions that young, middle-class women in urban
China experience as result of the competing demands of different gender regimes in post-
socialist China. The practice is empowering in offering globe-trotting middle-class women the
opportunity to expand mobility, gain autonomy, and pursue individual dreams and desires
despite of constraints. This social-media based selling that merges affect with economic
rationality provides resources for cultural expression, human connection, identity construction,
and business entrepreneurship as the women creatively deploy their gendered network, skills,
and bodies in fashioning an informal circuit of branded commodities that bypasses corporate and
state control and “democratizes” luxury for emerging middle-class consumer in China. More
significantly, the multiple flexibilities proffered by the profession allow women to find a
balance— if always delicate and precarious—between fulfilling their traditional gender roles as
mothers, wives, daughters, or girlfriends, and the individualistic, independent, enterprising, if not
self-serving traits “set free” by global capital.
It is harder to tell whether their participation in the informal transnational circuit of brand
name commodities challenges global capital’s profit-maximizing logic, or merely heralds a more
advanced form of corporate power that aims at “working with and through the freedom of the
consumer” (Zwick, Bonsu, & Darmody 2008). It also begs the question of the extent to which
the politics of entrepreneurial labor challenge the Chinese state’s post-reform regime of
governance that fosters a self-reliant, self-improving, and economically rational personhood
(Ong, 2006; Rofel, 2007). Although this “prosumer global citizenship” can be empowering for
some women, it also subjects them to the biopolitical control of advanced capitalism, and is
unevenly structured to exclude their working class and rural peers from the “space of flows” of
networked communication (Castells, 1996).

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Unlike the working class female service workers in newly emerged shopping malls or
luxury hotels (Hanser 2008; Otis 2012), or the factory girls working on global assembly lines in
China (Pan, 2005), women entrepreneurial workers represent a different type of gendered “global
value subject” (Hearn, 2008) as the nation makes the transition into Post-Fordism. The pleasure
that the women in this study derived from monetizing female “reproductive labor,” transnational
travel, shopping high-end brands, experimenting with novel identities, and making meaningful
connections online are real—but so are the pains incurred by the imperatives of online self-
branding and interactivity, balancing life with work, juggling different time zones, and being
constantly responsive and emotionally invested in their service. However, it would be partial at
best to understand the flow of influence as unidirectionally from the “global” to the “local,” or
the women as passive victims of the neoliberal capitalism. The women entrepreneurs’ ingenuity
in piecing together different cultural and social resources—at times exploiting and at other times
trying to resist or outwit various regimes of subjectization—reinvents and redefines what
constitutes work. Ultimately, their stories are not only about individual women’s struggle in
neoliberal times, but also about the nation’s, if not any nation’s, collective search for identity and
meaning in a world dominated by global capital, that is, to make neoliberalism work for them.

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Epilogue
One winter day in 2016 following the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday, I walked into one
of the many “incubating spaces” on Zhongguocun’s Innoway to interview a middle-aged
entrepreneur. His start-up team had recently been selected by this well-known local incubator
(out of hundreds of applicants) as an incubatee. This granted his team, in the next 6 months, free
office space and equipments, along with the many free start-up services provided by the
incubator. He greeted me in the lobby, and showed me around the co-working style office floor
shared by about three dozens start-up companies before we sat down to talk about how he had
got here. A man in his late 40s and a bankrupt millionaire, he was older and more experienced
than the majority of the entrepreneurs that I met in Zhongguancun. As our conversation
proceeded, I came to realize that his life story is a perfect illustration of the history of
entrepreneurship in post-socialist China and its relation to the co-evolution of individual
subjectivities and nation building.
Born in the early 1970s to poor peasant parents in South China’s Fujian province as the
youngest of 8 siblings, he had to be entrepreneurial at a young age to transform his fate as a
peasant and make something out of himself. “I think entrepreneurship is in my blood”, he told
me,
“Fujian people are very entrepreneurial. In my home village, we didn’t have much land to plant food.
And we are costal folks living far away from the centre in the north. So for generations, people
migrated overseas to Southeast Asia, Europe, and America to become laborers and businessmen. We
are everywhere in the world, just to make a living. My mom worked hard to raise us. My dad was a
migrant worker in the city and had been absent most of my life. But he sent money home regularly.”

Being a sensitive and artistic kid, he became an apprentice to a local painter living in the nearby
county and went on to study art at a local vocational middle school specializing in training

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teachers—the only type of school that charged no tuition while guaranteeing post-graduate job
assignment—a sensible choice for a poor youth of rural origin in the 1980s. After graduation, he
became an art teacher in a middle school in the city of Fuqing and started to experiment with a
string of small businesses to subsidize his humble salary.
The Chinese economy took off in the 1990s following Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern
Tour. Business opportunities were especially abundant in southern coastal cities like Fuqing,
which, as experimental sites for neoliberal reform, were opened up to foreign investment earlier
than central and north China and the vast hinterland. Riding on the early entrepreneurial waves,
he accumulated a small fortune by first moonlighting as an after-school teacher, and then
expanding the one-man enterprise into a full-scale training school. “It was a great time for small
entrepreneurs, if you are brave, willing to take risks and work hard, you will succeed,” he told
me recalling the old days. However, sometimes businesses could get too risky for those who
braved the commercial storms. He also invested in cafes and dancing halls, which connected him
to local gang members and accidentally involved him in a local gang fighting. He ended up
servicing in the prison for six months in 1998.
In 1999, to start afresh and shake off old connections, he migrated to Beijing, carrying
nothing but a single suitcase. Entering the new millennium, the Chinese economy turned a new
page following its admission to the WTO. Foreign investment skyrocketed around the country as
the nation transformed into the factory of the world. Meanwhile, anxiety over foreign monopoly
spawned new policies supporting local businesses and promoting national brands. His
entrepreneurial acumen and his training as an art teacher again served him well. Starting out as a
sales agent in a clothing store, he quickly made his way up in the garment manufacturing and
sales industry and eventually launched his own brand. A self-made businessmen who has an eye

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for design and fashion, he succeeded by following the H&M and Zara way--turning latest high
fashion style into affordable clothes for young people, taking advantage of China’s garment
manufacturing capacity while catering to the cosmopolitan taste of a rapidly expanding Chinese
middle-class millennials. At its apex in 2006, his business boosted an annual sales volume of
more than 1 billion RMB as he owned a Beijing-based garment factory and many chain stores in
more than 30 provinces around the country.
However, his business began to falter after 2008, partially impacted by the global recession
but also out-competed by the unstoppable trend towards digitalization and e-commerce. He told
me that he learnt the lesson the hard way that the good days for “traditional industry” is over and
now it’s time for a new model, as he explained to me: “Internet is the future. IT startup is
capital’s new favorite child—compared to the traditional businesses, IT companies develop very
fast and are valuated very high.” He went on, sounding like a digital utopist:
“It has more to do with the kind of future imagined than the reality. You know, it’s the promise of
sustained development and a different lifestyle in the future—the unlimited potential of technologies
and financial capital. Unlike, say, the garment industry, which is slow, heavy, and low in profit. So
how on earth can you compete with the future? After 2008, I realized that I can’t even hire the best
people in Beijing no matter how much I pay. Young talents today all want to start their own IT
company or join an IT business. They all want to go to Zhongguancun!”

So in 2008, he closed his old company located in south Beijing, sold all of his real estate
properties in Beijing and Fujian, and joined the young IT entrepreneurs in north Beijing’s
Zhongguancun. “It felt like yesterday once more as I drove all my belongings from the south to
start anew in the north of Beijing, only this time, I am no longer a young man,” he said
emotionally, “it took me 16 years to walk across the city. I admit that I hit a wall. There were
hundreds and thousands of people like me who felt left behind and are trying to catch up with

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what’s going on. I did it, though I still don’t know whether I will survive here in
Zhongguancun.”
As I sat there and listened to him, I came to better understand what entrepreneurial labor
meant for Chinese entrepreneurs like him. It’s about accepting your history—what you were
born with—carrying the legacy with you and making the best out of it; envisioning the future—
being optimistic about what’s to come and imagining what you want to become; and embracing
the present—riding the waves of change and brave the storms of transformation. In many ways,
these personal (individualized and family) stories of entrepreneurial transformation and
reinvention are intricately linked to the post-socialist reform and re-construction of the nation to
re-integrate into global capitalism. Like these entrepreneurs, China as a nation has to accept and
appropriate its history, constantly adapt to changes, and imagine a better and more sustainable
future. That is, making the best out of what capitalism (or for that matter, socialism) has to offer.
Towards the end of our interview, he turned from an interviewee into an interviewer and
advisor, asking me what I want to do with my dissertation. When I told him that I want to
eventually turn this dissertation into a book, his face suddenly brightened up and started to offer
advice like a good and experienced marketer about identifying my target readers, having an eye-
catchy title, and finally he said: “most importantly, you have to get the stories right.”
I hope I have lived up to his expectation.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Zhang, Lin (author)

Core Title Entrepreneurial labor: digital work and subjectivities in China’s new economy

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 04/07/2019

Defense Date 10/07/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag China,cultural industries,digital capitalism,East Asia,entrepreneurship,gender,innovation,labor,migrants,OAI-PMH Harvest,subjectivities

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Frazier, Taj (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Rosen, Stanley (committee member)

Creator Email zhan370@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-443374

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Legacy Identifier etd-ZhangLin-5825.pdf

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Rights Zhang, Lin

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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