Information, Communication & Society, Dec 11, 2022
This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China... more This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various levels have transformed themselves into “market agencies,” acting through the market instead of governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” under the current Xi-Li administration.
How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production,... more How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production, while at the same time being energized by it? How do the historically informed, lived experiences of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs or workers in China help reconceptualize digital labor and platform studies? Deploying the analytic of platformized family production, this article addresses these questions through a deep description of the experiences of variously positioned platform-based and mediated laborers in an e-commerce village in East China. I argue that the ongoing process of platformizing family production is profoundly contradictory. As an alternative to a model of development based on unevenness and the rural-urban divide, village e-commerce has created opportunities for peasants and marginalized urban youth to achieve social mobility. However, it also shapes a new regime of value that privileges the individualized e-commerce entrepreneur as an ideal subject, and fetishizes and instrumentalizes innovation and creativity in conformity with the global intellectual property regime. These tendencies not only contradict the reality of collective labor organization both on e-commerce platforms and in villages, but also conflict with the indispensable role of manual labor in the production process-reinforcing rather than overcoming existing inequalities and stratification in rural China.
This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in
China... more This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various levels have transformed themselves into “market agencies,” acting through the market instead of governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” under the current Xi-Li administration.
China has become one of the biggest consumers and producers of online games in the world; however... more China has become one of the biggest consumers and producers of online games in the world; however, little is known about a burgeoning secondary industry emerging out of the socioeconomic interaction between gamers and the online gaming industry. Through the lens of online gaming guilds—the intermediary institutions between the industry and gamers—this article discusses how the Chinese information economy’s dependence on consumer labor and the gamers’ entrepreneurial resourcefulness have produced a secondary industry. As the secondary industry has evolved, the gaming industry has come to depend on the productive play of consumers. This changing regime of value has given rise to bio-political control of consumer labor and, along with state control, is drawing gamers into the tug-of-war between entrepreneurial invention and labor exploitation. By depicting the complex negotiations between capital and labor, and community and commerce, on both subjective and institutional levels, this a...
This article joins interdisciplinary efforts to problematize dichotomous thinking (i.e. state vs.... more This article joins interdisciplinary efforts to problematize dichotomous thinking (i.e. state vs. market, East vs. West, and new vs. old) in existing discourses concerning state capitalism. Focusing on the New Whole State System in relation to tech companies owned by Tsinghua University, we analyze the actually existing state capitalism in China as a spatiotemporally specific and conjuncturally situated assemblage of discourses, policies, and practices. We show that under both the Old Whole State System (1950s-1970s) and New Whole State System (mid-2000s onward) eras, the Chinese state, reacting to foreign economic and geopolitical pressures, attempted to graft a centralized innovation system onto preexisting decentralized governance structures, concentrating resources to promote selected strategic industries. Unlike the Old Whole State System, the New Whole State System relies on new policy tools characterized by state-led financialization and state-private fusion. The evolution of New Whole State System as an assemblage reveals that, contrary to the dominant geo-imaginary, the Chinese state is not monolithic, unchanging, and culturally essentialist. Rather, it is actively engaged in global debates about, and in contested experiments with expanding the state's role in the economy in response to global, conjunctural crises of overproduction and financialization. By foregrounding this non-Western country/region's internal debate about its own development trajectory, its uneven success in overcoming uneven development, and its interaction with the rest of the world, we propose an alternative perspective that contributes both theoretically and methodologically to the epistemologically Euro-American centric literature of state capitalism. * Equal authorship.
This article examines Chinese cyberspace debates over the racial and national identity of a telev... more This article examines Chinese cyberspace debates over the racial and national identity of a television show contestant Lou Jing, a biracial woman of Chinese and African American descent. We argue that the online commentary about her offers a productive entry point into contemporary Chinese cultural struggles over race. In particular, we consider how the Internet and other digital communication technologies are being mobilized as discursive sites for articulations of Chinese anti-black racism, as well as discursive sites of contestation, knowledge production, and cultural exchange regarding Chinese constructions of race and nationality.
Platformizing family production: The contradictions of rural digital labor in China, 2021
How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production,... more How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production, while at the same time being energized by it? How do the historically informed, lived experiences of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs or workers in China help reconceptualize digital labor and platform studies? Deploying the analytic of platformized family production, this article addresses these questions through a deep description of the experiences of variously positioned platform-based and mediated laborers in an e-commerce village in East China. I argue that the ongoing process of platformizing family production is profoundly contradictory. As an alternative to a model of development based on unevenness and the rural-urban divide, village e-commerce has created opportunities for peasants and marginalized urban youth to achieve social mobility. However, it also shapes a new regime of value that privileges the individualized e-commerce entrepreneur as an ideal subject, and fetishizes and instrumentalizes innovation and creativity in conformity with the global intellectual property regime. These tendencies not only contradict the reality of collective labor organization both on e-commerce platforms and in villages, but also conflict with the indispensable role of manual labor in the production process-reinforcing rather than overcoming existing inequalities and stratification in rural China.
When platform capitalism Meets Petty Capitalism in China Alibaba and an integrated approach to Platformization , 2020
Combining platform studies with insights from research on petty capitalism and the political econ... more Combining platform studies with insights from research on petty capitalism and the political economy of the Chinese Internet, this article takes an integrated approach to analyze key moments in the historical evolution of the Chinese e-commerce monopoly Alibaba since 1999. It argues for a dynamic model of technological and cultural transformations that treats platformization as a set of historically and culturally specific processes and relations constituted by constantly shifting and interacting forces. It finds that in the early days, Alibaba deployed platform mechanisms of participation and commodification to position itself as a democratic and participatory platform contra the deficient infrastructure of the state, while relying on foreign venture capital to keep the tensions of commodification at bay to prioritize market expansion. After Alibaba had achieved monopoly after the 2008 global crisis, it has formed more symbiotic relations with the state, ramping up mechanisms of datafication, selection, and commodification to more effectively extract the surplus value generated through the labor of platform-based petty capitalists. Platform-labor tensions intensified as Alibaba’s profit imperatives began to override its earlier promises of universal access and democratic participation.
This article examines the art and travels of two contemporary Chinese artists – Ai Weiwei and Cai... more This article examines the art and travels of two contemporary Chinese artists – Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang – to explore how each of them successfully navigates the rapidly shifting terrains and interests of the Chinese state and the global high art industry while simultaneously articulating a distinct politics and practice of creative ambivalence. We argue that these two artists’ creative productions and strategies: (1) refute various western critics’ critique of Chinese artists as inauthentic imitators of western art who produce exotic representations of China and Chinese identity for western consumption; (2) call into question the Chinese government’s numerous efforts to simultaneously promote and control Chinese contemporary art for nationalist/statist purposes. Furthermore, we unpack how both artists deploy various resources to produce complex works that interrogate and demonstrate the clashes of power, culture and identity in global spaces of encounter.
Through ethnography and interviews, this article examines the social media–based transnational re... more Through ethnography and interviews, this article examines the social media–based transnational reselling of Western luxury by Chinese women through the lens of gendered transnational prosumption. Linking prosumption to debates on the feminization of labor, it analyzes the paradoxical implications that neoliberal global capitalism’s demand for more agentive and participatory prosuming female subjects have for inter- national feminist politics. Disrupting the boundaries between the commercial or public and personal, virtual and physical, and work and consumption, transnational mobile middle-class Chinese women have ‘‘reinvented’’ prosumption as a cultural, techno- logical, and economic solution to the contradictions that inhere in competing demands of different gender regimes. In their hands, prosumption becomes a gendered response to the tensions inherent to China’s Post-Socialist modernity, allowing 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. As such, this article seeks to complicate the current discussion of prosumption by highlighting the structuring imperatives of gender, class, race, and nation.
Information, Communication & Society, Dec 11, 2022
This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China... more This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various levels have transformed themselves into “market agencies,” acting through the market instead of governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” under the current Xi-Li administration.
How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production,... more How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production, while at the same time being energized by it? How do the historically informed, lived experiences of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs or workers in China help reconceptualize digital labor and platform studies? Deploying the analytic of platformized family production, this article addresses these questions through a deep description of the experiences of variously positioned platform-based and mediated laborers in an e-commerce village in East China. I argue that the ongoing process of platformizing family production is profoundly contradictory. As an alternative to a model of development based on unevenness and the rural-urban divide, village e-commerce has created opportunities for peasants and marginalized urban youth to achieve social mobility. However, it also shapes a new regime of value that privileges the individualized e-commerce entrepreneur as an ideal subject, and fetishizes and instrumentalizes innovation and creativity in conformity with the global intellectual property regime. These tendencies not only contradict the reality of collective labor organization both on e-commerce platforms and in villages, but also conflict with the indispensable role of manual labor in the production process-reinforcing rather than overcoming existing inequalities and stratification in rural China.
This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in
China... more This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various levels have transformed themselves into “market agencies,” acting through the market instead of governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” under the current Xi-Li administration.
China has become one of the biggest consumers and producers of online games in the world; however... more China has become one of the biggest consumers and producers of online games in the world; however, little is known about a burgeoning secondary industry emerging out of the socioeconomic interaction between gamers and the online gaming industry. Through the lens of online gaming guilds—the intermediary institutions between the industry and gamers—this article discusses how the Chinese information economy’s dependence on consumer labor and the gamers’ entrepreneurial resourcefulness have produced a secondary industry. As the secondary industry has evolved, the gaming industry has come to depend on the productive play of consumers. This changing regime of value has given rise to bio-political control of consumer labor and, along with state control, is drawing gamers into the tug-of-war between entrepreneurial invention and labor exploitation. By depicting the complex negotiations between capital and labor, and community and commerce, on both subjective and institutional levels, this a...
This article joins interdisciplinary efforts to problematize dichotomous thinking (i.e. state vs.... more This article joins interdisciplinary efforts to problematize dichotomous thinking (i.e. state vs. market, East vs. West, and new vs. old) in existing discourses concerning state capitalism. Focusing on the New Whole State System in relation to tech companies owned by Tsinghua University, we analyze the actually existing state capitalism in China as a spatiotemporally specific and conjuncturally situated assemblage of discourses, policies, and practices. We show that under both the Old Whole State System (1950s-1970s) and New Whole State System (mid-2000s onward) eras, the Chinese state, reacting to foreign economic and geopolitical pressures, attempted to graft a centralized innovation system onto preexisting decentralized governance structures, concentrating resources to promote selected strategic industries. Unlike the Old Whole State System, the New Whole State System relies on new policy tools characterized by state-led financialization and state-private fusion. The evolution of New Whole State System as an assemblage reveals that, contrary to the dominant geo-imaginary, the Chinese state is not monolithic, unchanging, and culturally essentialist. Rather, it is actively engaged in global debates about, and in contested experiments with expanding the state's role in the economy in response to global, conjunctural crises of overproduction and financialization. By foregrounding this non-Western country/region's internal debate about its own development trajectory, its uneven success in overcoming uneven development, and its interaction with the rest of the world, we propose an alternative perspective that contributes both theoretically and methodologically to the epistemologically Euro-American centric literature of state capitalism. * Equal authorship.
This article examines Chinese cyberspace debates over the racial and national identity of a telev... more This article examines Chinese cyberspace debates over the racial and national identity of a television show contestant Lou Jing, a biracial woman of Chinese and African American descent. We argue that the online commentary about her offers a productive entry point into contemporary Chinese cultural struggles over race. In particular, we consider how the Internet and other digital communication technologies are being mobilized as discursive sites for articulations of Chinese anti-black racism, as well as discursive sites of contestation, knowledge production, and cultural exchange regarding Chinese constructions of race and nationality.
Platformizing family production: The contradictions of rural digital labor in China, 2021
How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production,... more How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production, while at the same time being energized by it? How do the historically informed, lived experiences of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs or workers in China help reconceptualize digital labor and platform studies? Deploying the analytic of platformized family production, this article addresses these questions through a deep description of the experiences of variously positioned platform-based and mediated laborers in an e-commerce village in East China. I argue that the ongoing process of platformizing family production is profoundly contradictory. As an alternative to a model of development based on unevenness and the rural-urban divide, village e-commerce has created opportunities for peasants and marginalized urban youth to achieve social mobility. However, it also shapes a new regime of value that privileges the individualized e-commerce entrepreneur as an ideal subject, and fetishizes and instrumentalizes innovation and creativity in conformity with the global intellectual property regime. These tendencies not only contradict the reality of collective labor organization both on e-commerce platforms and in villages, but also conflict with the indispensable role of manual labor in the production process-reinforcing rather than overcoming existing inequalities and stratification in rural China.
When platform capitalism Meets Petty Capitalism in China Alibaba and an integrated approach to Platformization , 2020
Combining platform studies with insights from research on petty capitalism and the political econ... more Combining platform studies with insights from research on petty capitalism and the political economy of the Chinese Internet, this article takes an integrated approach to analyze key moments in the historical evolution of the Chinese e-commerce monopoly Alibaba since 1999. It argues for a dynamic model of technological and cultural transformations that treats platformization as a set of historically and culturally specific processes and relations constituted by constantly shifting and interacting forces. It finds that in the early days, Alibaba deployed platform mechanisms of participation and commodification to position itself as a democratic and participatory platform contra the deficient infrastructure of the state, while relying on foreign venture capital to keep the tensions of commodification at bay to prioritize market expansion. After Alibaba had achieved monopoly after the 2008 global crisis, it has formed more symbiotic relations with the state, ramping up mechanisms of datafication, selection, and commodification to more effectively extract the surplus value generated through the labor of platform-based petty capitalists. Platform-labor tensions intensified as Alibaba’s profit imperatives began to override its earlier promises of universal access and democratic participation.
This article examines the art and travels of two contemporary Chinese artists – Ai Weiwei and Cai... more This article examines the art and travels of two contemporary Chinese artists – Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang – to explore how each of them successfully navigates the rapidly shifting terrains and interests of the Chinese state and the global high art industry while simultaneously articulating a distinct politics and practice of creative ambivalence. We argue that these two artists’ creative productions and strategies: (1) refute various western critics’ critique of Chinese artists as inauthentic imitators of western art who produce exotic representations of China and Chinese identity for western consumption; (2) call into question the Chinese government’s numerous efforts to simultaneously promote and control Chinese contemporary art for nationalist/statist purposes. Furthermore, we unpack how both artists deploy various resources to produce complex works that interrogate and demonstrate the clashes of power, culture and identity in global spaces of encounter.
Through ethnography and interviews, this article examines the social media–based transnational re... more Through ethnography and interviews, this article examines the social media–based transnational reselling of Western luxury by Chinese women through the lens of gendered transnational prosumption. Linking prosumption to debates on the feminization of labor, it analyzes the paradoxical implications that neoliberal global capitalism’s demand for more agentive and participatory prosuming female subjects have for inter- national feminist politics. Disrupting the boundaries between the commercial or public and personal, virtual and physical, and work and consumption, transnational mobile middle-class Chinese women have ‘‘reinvented’’ prosumption as a cultural, techno- logical, and economic solution to the contradictions that inhere in competing demands of different gender regimes. In their hands, prosumption becomes a gendered response to the tensions inherent to China’s Post-Socialist modernity, allowing 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. As such, this article seeks to complicate the current discussion of prosumption by highlighting the structuring imperatives of gender, class, race, and nation.
From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing... more 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.
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Papers by Zhang Lin
China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT
entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of
Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant
observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in
ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the
state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various
levels have transformed themselves into “market agencies,” acting through the market instead of
governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to
ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly
managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political
economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences
of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves
of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” under the current Xi-Li administration.
China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT
entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of
Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant
observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in
ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the
state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various
levels have transformed themselves into “market agencies,” acting through the market instead of
governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to
ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly
managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political
economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences
of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves
of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” under the current Xi-Li administration.
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.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-labor-of-reinvention/9780231551298