The Labor of Reinvention : Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. Zhang explores the surge in digital entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of global financial crises, the U.S.-China trade war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She argues that the rise of internet-based industries and practices has simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Despite embracing high-tech innovation, state-led entrepreneurialization does not represent a radical break with the past. It has provided a means for implementing developmental goals while retaining the importance of the traditional family and generating new inequalities. Shedding new light on global capitalism and the digital economy by centering a non-Western perspective, The Labor of Reinvention vividly conveys how the contradictions of entrepreneurialism have played out in China. "From start-up entrepreneurs in China's equivalent Silicon Valley to the booming phenomenon of e-commerce rural villages, IT and new internet-based industries are shaping ideas and practices regarding labor and identity in China. Digital entrepreneurship was seen as a way to energize China's slowing economy after the 2008 global financial crisis-but its implementation and practice, while successful in some respects, has also reinforced traditional ideas about state power, gender, and what it means to be Chinese. Lin Zhang argues that these new digital initiatives have simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Through her examination and critique of the new media economy in China, Zhang highlights the historical ruptures, continuities, and contradictions of entrepreneurial labor of self-reinvention in China. In The Labor of Reinvention, Lin Zhang examines digital entrepreneurship in three different areas of Chinese society to provide a multifaceted and ground-level view of how the Chinese are grappling with the new digital economy. She recounts the story of how one U.S.-educated IT entrepreneur's initial application of Google's "people-centric" management style gave way to nationalist discourse to ensure state funding for his crypto-chip startup. Far from Beijing, Zhang considers the mixed success of new ventures in rural areas that combine modern e-commerce with centuries-old practices of familial production. Finally, she discusses a group of internationally mobile upper-class Chinese women whose ability to create a space for themselves in the new digital economy selling luxury goods was curtailed by the patriarchal Chinese state"-- Provided by publisher