{"id":11749,"date":"2023-02-22T07:30:53","date_gmt":"2023-02-22T07:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=11749"},"modified":"2025-04-23T09:33:27","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T09:33:27","slug":"how-the-digital-economy-transformed-entrepreneurship-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/how-the-digital-economy-transformed-entrepreneurship-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"How the digital economy transformed entrepreneurship in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lin Zhang<\/strong>\u2019s new book Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy<\/em> (2023, Columbia University Press) traces the myriad local entrepreneurs, often in obscure and remote rural locations, using technology to reinvent their businesses and themselves. Paul French<\/strong> finds out more<\/h2>\n

Whether you are a villager using e-commerce to find new and more profitable markets or a middle-class urban woman reselling luxury goods, the entrepreneurship journey is never easy \u2013 global financial crises, the US-China trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic have all taken their toll. Lin Zhang also argues that rather than being liberating, digital entrepreneurship has perhaps also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas.<\/p>\n

Whatever the conclusion, it\u2019s a very Chinese story \u2013 one you\u2019ve probably seen played out on the roadsides, shopping malls and wet markets of China \u2013 but never given detailed thought to. Paul French caught up with Lin Zhang, currently an assistant professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire, to talk grassroots digital entrepreneurship.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"launchpad<\/a><\/p>\n

Your book turns many assumptions about China on their head. For example, you give so many great examples of technology and the digital economy opening up small-scale entry-level entrepreneurship opportunities. You call this phenomenon \u2018reinvention\u2019. Can you explain what is going on with the \u2018labour of reinvention\u2019?<\/h4>\n

By centring on the analysis of the \u201centrepreneurial labour of reinvention\u201d, I am trying to problematise not only our traditional understanding of labour and entrepreneurship but also how the global phenomenon of digitalisation of labour has usually been conceptualised. We have always considered labour and entrepreneurship as two completely different activities and identities, if not belonging to two different classes.<\/p>\n

Echoing many scholars of flexible and digital labour, I argue that recent technological and social transformations have rendered the distinction between the two increasingly blurred. For example, most of the participants of my ethnographic fieldwork see themselves as entrepreneurs, whether they are peasants doing e-commerce<\/a> or college graduates starting up their own tech ventures. But if you examine their work experiences as either based on monopoly digital platforms or being dictated (and if they get lucky, eventually bought out) by venture capitalists, you see how in reality their desire for autonomy and flexibility has been channelled to restructure and redefine labour experiences and relations.<\/p>\n

By highlighting this broader transformation as \u201creinvention\u201d while focusing on the Chinese experiences with entrepreneurial labour, I emphasise the embeddedness of this new entrepreneurial labour regime in pre-existing social relations and institutional structures. I have underlined how entrepreneurial labour practices both build on and transform the multilayer and multi-pronged roles of the state in the economy and the family-based and gendered division of labour at the foundation of the Chinese economy.<\/p>\n