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.

Table of Contents:
Preface: The Cult of Entrepreneurialism 1. The Labor of Entrepreneurial Reinvention Part I. City in Transition 2. Navigating the Investor State: Elite and Grassroots Entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun 3. From Science Park to Coworking: ZGC’s Contested Spaces of Innovation Part II. Back to the Countryside 4. The Platformization of Family Production: Reinventing Rural Familism and Governance for the E-Commerce Era 5. Moving Beyond Shanzhai? The Contradictions of Entrepreneurial Reinvention in Rural China Part III. Transnational Encounters 6. Between Individualization and Retraditionalization: Reinventing Self and Work Through Platform-Based Daigou Epilogue: Toward a China Paradigm Notes Index

About the Author :
Lin Zhang is assistant professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Review :
The Labor of Reinvention makes a crucial and timely contribution to scholarship on global digital capitalism and platform studies in East Asia. Drawing on years of ethnographic work, communication, and political economy, Lin Zhang importantly contributes to our understanding of neoliberalism in China and the global creative industries; theorizing the concept of ‘entrepreneurial labor,’ Zhang offers readers a brilliant perspective on digital labor in the post-2008 economy of China. A must-read for anyone working in media and creative industries! China’s economic and social restructuring following the 2008 global economic crisis was remarkable, and Zhang tells it with vividness, compassion, and intelligence. The Labor of Reinvention brings a multivalent bottom-up approach to understanding the labor involved in making digital capitalism work in this national context. A gifted storyteller, Zhang makes the experiences of worker families living in a ‘Taobao village’ come alive on the page. The Labor of Reinvention provides a different and much-needed perspective on entrepreneurialism, studies of which have tended to prioritize a white Western subject, and in so doing essentialized others. Zhang insightfully examines the rupture between the promotion and lived experiences of entrepreneurship in the post-recession Chinese context, focusing on entrepreneurial reinvention—the labor of reworking oneself as an entrepreneur—and considers how this reinvention is involved in broader Chinese national economic and social projects. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Lin Zhang’s The Labor of Reinvention vividly delineates the lives and work of urban, rural, and transnational entrepreneurial laborers in post-2008 China. In doing so, the book not only reveals the complex meanings of new entrepreneurial selves in China but also produces a powerful critique of the ideology of entrepreneurialism in global capitalism. A major contribution. [A] granular, grass-roots, bottom-up view of the past couple of decades of the development of China’s digital landscape . . . it is a very good book. I highly recommend this book to any scholar in social sciences interested in the Chinese development, and the related entrepreneurial environment, digital platforms, and technological innovation ecosystem. The Labor of Reinvention will inspire research on digital entrepreneurialism and labour studies. Zhang’s book is an engaging read for people studying digital platforms and labor. Zhang provides a comprehensive guide to understanding the new Chinese digital economy and the pivotal role played by entrepreneurship. It avoids a one-sided interpretation of Chinese phenomena from a Western perspective and transcends the grand historical narratives. An indispensable contribution to the global search for truly progressive, 'pro-social' policy making.