Zhang The Labor of Reinvention

Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-0-231-55129-8
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 312 Seiten

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zhang, Lin

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftssektoren & Branchen Medien-, Informations und Kommunikationswirtschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Studien zu einzelnen Ländern und Gebieten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Contributor: Lin Zhang Lin Zhang (USC Annenberg School for Communication, Ph.D.) is assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of New Hampshire. Her work has been published in a wide range of publications, including New Media and Society, International Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies, and China Information.