Entrepreneurial Labor in the Chinese Digital Economy: interview with Lin Zhang

Lin Zhang, assistant professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire, just published the book  The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia University Press). The book focuses on the rising entrepreneurial labor in urban, rural and transnational China since tech innovation had accelerated in the country after 2008.

Zhang presents rich and nuanced perspectives on the subject, 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 good. The labor of reinvention means both changes and continuities, adapting to a changing society at the same time that this digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender and identity.

In this conversation with Rafael Grohmann, Lin Zhang details some important points of the book The Labor of Reinvention.

LIN ZHANG: I think that’s a central question I grapple with throughout the process of working on this project. The position you describe is the position I end up finding most comfortable in, as a scholar who studies China in relation to platforms, innovation, labor and entrepreneurship from a critical perspective. The tension between all these seemingly “universal” trends that we all witness, like financialization and platformization of work, and the specific things I observed on the ground when I did my ethnography and the continuities I saw when I read into Chinese economic, political-economic traditions. A central concept that I try to build here is the “China Paradigm”, which is concept that I borrowed from the late Marxist and historian or China Arif Dirlik. After the 2008 global crisis, there were a lot of discussion about a “China model”, because China emerged from the crisis as a force that was re-energizing, leading the global recovery in a way. In response, Dirlik wrote a short article to make an intervention and proposed the concept of China Paradigm, which has informed my thinking of how we understand, study, and theorize China. While the China model implies that China set up an example for other people and countries to emulate or learn from. This always has an idealized aspect, which also prompts critiques like: “Oh, Chinese experiences is not applicable elsewhere”. China paradigm, on the other hand, says that what the Chinese experiences teach us, and also the contradictions inherent to its transformation, is how China articulates global trends and principles to its local practices and reality, which both builds on and breaks from its own history. Specifically in the book, I talked about the contradictions between development and egalitarianism. After China rejoined the global capitalist order in the late 1970s after decades of experiment with socialism, the party-state had really emphasized development over all others. But the state still claims to be communist and does still hold on to some of its egalitarian and redistributive visions. And you see these visions being re-emphasized and re-emerged in different ways more recently since the late 2000s, especially under Xi Jinping. The 2008 global financial crisis rekindled the desire for more autonomy and independence, in continuity from the anti-imperialist tradition of the Chinese Communist Party. And these desires really manifested in technological innovation—trying to become more independent in terms of technological standards, talents etc.—in part also reacting to the sanctions of the US. Political historian Lin Chun showed in her book on China’s socialist transformation that the nation has really been grappling with the tensions between development, equity, and independence/security from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. But as you see read from my book, these tensions manifested in different ways at different historical moments, as the state swing back and forth trying to emphasize different aspects in the attempt of articulating the global and the local. That’s really sort of the framework I try to set up there.

I have to say that I’m very ignorant of Latin America, but I would be curious to hear what you think of any points of conversation that we could establish there. It would be useful for me as someone who’s learning about Latin America, learning about the global South in general how we all definitely grapple with all these tensions as you know, the sort of post-colonial, or the colonial tradition there. I’m interested in learning about other traditions and how other regions really grapple with these tensions and try to find a way that would work for them. How they grapple with global trends whole also being really rooted in local traditions, local practices, and how these tension might manifest differently. If we compare the Chinese case to Brazil, probably the Chinese State does play a more authoritarian role, and there’s less civil society participation, especially so in the past five years or so. It would be productive to see how different paradigms are been coordinated, manufactured, configured on the ground to provide a basis, to have a conversation with researchers from the global South and elsewhere for discussion.

GROHMANN: Two strong points of your book are about historicizing and tensions and contradictions. I would like to know from you about the challenges you faced during the research regarding this labor of historicizing Chinese history and the connections between the digital economy and rural areas.

ZHANG: To answer this question, I will share some behind-the-scenes stories about the review and fieldwork processes. I had quite a positive experience with the review process, but I also learnt a lot from the process about how to tackle the challenges scholars like us, international scholars from the Global South face when we work and publish in the US and the Anglophone public sphere. I think I had in general two set of reviewers: one does not have much prior understanding of China, but are more interested in, for example, entrepreneurship, who has probably worked on Silicon Valley and similar topics focusing on the Global North; the other set are scholars in China studies who may or may not work on issues like technologies, labor, and entrepreneurship. So it was very helpful, through my publisher, to revise and improve the book for these two groups of imagined readers. But as you could imagine, I did get some competing reviews that intended to take me into different directions. For example, reviewers reading in a comparison to Silicon Valley, or the sort of general dynamics of global capitalism, wanted me to speak more about algorithm, platforms and how this is related to the US.  In a way, this is legit, because that’s what they want to get out of this book, i.e., to understand from a comparative perspective how my analysis of China inform the debates that they’re familiar with. But the other set of reviewers were really appreciative of the rich history and the Chinese trajectory that I mapped out. So, the revision was really a process of me negotiating with them and myself to produce a book that would make sense to different readers who may or may not have background knowledge about China, which took me a long time to figure out.

A similar process of negotiation also happened when I was doing my fieldwork. As you know, I was trained in communication studies, so I entered my fieldwork of research as a junior scholar of communication interested in the interdisciplinary study of digital labor and platformization. But once I entered the field, I realized though a lot of these global trends are definitely there, but they might not explain fully the experiences of my informants on the ground. For example, in rural e-commerce, the entrepreneurs and workers’ daily life was not predominantly informed by algorithm or even the platforms, but more by the existing industrial structure and village relations. This is also true with another of my field site—Zhongguancun high-tech district in Beijing in which its history as China’s Science and Tech innovation hub since the early socialist years matter a lot if we are to understand its more recent reinvention to produce global tech companies like Lenovo and Bytedance. That’s when I had to read more interdisciplinary in China studies and beyond to really historicize and embed what I observed into literature, but also to establish new connections between existing works and my ethnographic data so as to contribute to multiple fields like China studies, platform studies, innovation studies, and to build bridges between them. This is definitely not just unique to scholars studying China, but a question relevant to all scholars, i.e., how could we find common themes and establish a broader conversation with other scholars working in the same space while also being observant of the specific genealogy and trajectory of your own research site and artifact.

Of course I can’t possibility accomplish everything I want to do in one book, so I see this book more as my attempt to build up a structure and establish conversations, and shape the way of inquiry into, and the epistemology of how we approach technologies, work, and digital labor in the global context. Writing in English and publishing in the North American context certain dictate to certain extent my target readers. And it’s definitely a lot of work keeping a balance between what you know/what to say and what you think your readers might be interested in reading. In the process of negotiation, you gain something, you also lose something. Like I had to delete big chunks of history that I spent months putting into the pages. A strategy I figure out along the way was to save it for offshoot papers, so I try to write shorter papers where I could really focus on the other interventions I couldn’t make or centralize in the book. I don’t know if you have the same problem when you are working on your research, but definitely, that’s something that I grappled with.

GROHMANN: Another thing that I found so impressive in your book is: clearly the book involves a lot of your own history and your relationships, and this is very beautiful in the book, too. How has research changed you and what were the main methodological reflections or challenges through this research, in terms of doing this research while this affects your own life?

ZHANG: Definitely, so immediately you are more invested, if it’s related to people who are similar to you, or who you care about. The good thing is that it’s easier, in a way, to establish connections and get access to do your research. Doing ethnography is really difficult, too, if you don’t have that access and for example, in rural China, where they’re people speaking dialects, not the standard Mandarin Chinese. For example, there are many e-commerce villages in China. I started out visiting some villages in Southeast China, but found it hard to understand the accents of the older village residents. Even in the villages which I ended up doing most of my fieldwork research for the e-commerce chapters in my book, I had to take some time to get accustomed to their dialects though I grew up not far from the villages.

Talking about the pros and cons of working from where you are most unfamiliar with. It could also add an emotional burden, because you always think about how you can best represent them. You want to represent them in a way that they find fair, right? A lot of them couldn’t really read my work because it’s in English. I did publish something in Chinese. I know you publish a lot in Portuguese, right? It’s important. I’m actually planning to do more of that. I know it’s always a struggle if you work in the US, you have that pressure to keep producing in English because that’s what people read. But I have also translated some of my works into Chinese and published some public scholarship in Chinese newspapers or gone to podcasts and interviews in Chinese so that I could really establish a conversation with people there. But that also means it’s tricky to make critiques where you see necessary. For example, rural China is still a very patriarchal society, so I want to show the gendered and other inequalities at work though people were in general quite friendly to me as a female researcher. Also in high-tech districts like Zhongguancun, especially in response to American sanctions, nationalism is a big sentiment now. When you talk to people, the fact that you are working in an American university might make you suspicious. People might be thinking why are you here? Are you collecting information? I did get questions like “Why are you doing this? What’s your nationality? So I think the challenge here is really how to do it fairly, that is, how you find a balance between representing them based on their preferences, but also finding the space to make critiques because you see larger structural issues at work shaping their practices, understanding, and identities etc..

But in general, just going there to establish and maintain those connections with people in China really helped me to stay grounded and stay updated, and often give me fresh perspectives that I don’t get by looking from a distance. And Covid and the worsening relations between the US and China had made this type of grounded research harder to do now. Since I left right before Covid hit in 2019, I feel I am increasingly losing that grounded understanding which I cannot really get just via social media and remote interviews. But luckily, I have booked my flight to revisit China and of course my research sites this summer. I think the worsening bilateral relations between the US and China has made is more imperative for me to present my research in a way that speaks for China and the people who generously shared with me their experiences, in a way, not losing sight of the critiques that would eventually, I hope, would help them and make the world a better place.

GROHMANN: In what ways do you complicate or nuance frameworks in relation to entrepreneurship from your research? Or why is the global entrepreneurization of labor a dynamic process of reinvention?

ZHANG: Definitely we see a lot of similar trends that happen not just in the US, but in China, I imagine in Brazil, in Latin America as well. This blurring of the line between labor and entrepreneurship, a lot of researchers like you also wrote about the entrepreneurialism, the emphasis placed on this desire to be more autonomous, more flexible in work. How it could be capitalized and monetized by venture capitalists and new businesses to offload some of the responsibilities that they would traditionally have for workers. Now that you are entrepreneurs and your own boss, whether it’s being a taxi-driver mediated by apps, or in my case owning a digital storefront on an e-commerce platform, or working on or dreaming about your own startup in a co-working space. This changing meaning and experiences of what count as entrepreneurship and work are definitely something that we all can see, understand, and relate to in our lives.

In the Chinese context I try to highlight, trying not to oversimplify things,  the two aspects of family and state, though they are not unique to China. For example, you see in rural China how family as a unit functions in the organization of labor, and the role of family businesses in the export-oriented manufacturing industries and how they have been reinvented for e-commerce. That’s why I emphasize the term “reinvention” here, how family-based division of labor is reinvented to make sense for a domestic-market-targeting platform economy with the rise of big corporations like Alibaba. In the Zhongguancun case you see more the role of the state–whether it’s the central state or the local state– in the process of shaping this space. For instance, I described the discrepancies between central and local state priorities as well as that between policy design and implementation. In the case of reinventing Zhongguancun, the central state’s goal is really to promote indigenous innovation and to redress inequalities, for better or worse, through entrepreneurship. But when it’s time for the local officials to implement central state visions, their priorities are mainly in boosting the local economy, driving employment (self employment) as they are locked up in both a market-driven competition with local officials in other regions and a political tournament to meet the central state’s new agenda.[1]  That’s why many of the high-tech zones, incubators, and co-working spaces end up being more about real estate than high-tech innovation. Because the land in China is still owned by the state, with land transfer income being a crucial source of Chinese local state revenue. So the debt-financed infrastructure and real estate construction became another force propelling entrepreneuralization. With all the new incubators and co-working spaces, they need to find more entrepreneurs to fill the empty offices. That’s partially why the so-called grassroots entrepreneurs who are better off doing something else elsewhere were drawn to the co-working spaces to learn how to write a business proposal to pitch to venture capitalists. They might have fared better doing e-commerce in their hometowns and earned more income working in factories. But I think this desire to become an entrepreneur like a Silicon Valley person—dressed up in a suit and going to a co-working space, sipping a cup of coffee and working on your laptop— is powerful cultural motivations for people to participate in the new entrepreneurial lifestyle.

Again I want to reiterate that I’m not trying to reinforce stereotypes about a strong Chinese state, but rather to really complicate what we mean by the state in highlighting central-local discrepancy and the multipronged goals of the state. Instead of the common assertation that the Chinese state just want to suppress its people. I want to highlight how the Chinese state is also trying to constantly reinvent itself, like how it has entrepreneuralized the economy to simultaneously redress inequalities and advance indigenous innovation. These contradictions and hybridity really complicate what we mean by the family traditions and what statism is in contemporary China. Another way to avoid essentialization is to do more comparative work, which is what I didn’t have space in that to do in this book. For example, comparing the Brazilian practice with Chinese practice, we might find some similarities and also differences that would help even further, right?

GROHMANN: I really enjoyed reading about the role of women resellers, because this is very common in Brazil, historically and it is now updated with click farms and another type of platform labor. What were the main findings you have regarding women resellers in the Chinese context?

ZHANG:  It’s interesting to learn that luxury reselling is also common in Brazil, I don’t know if it has something to do with the fact that both China and the Brazil are kind of on the periphery and Western luxury brands generate lots of appeals for the middle to upper middle class in both countries. Most of the research I did for this chapter was done between 2011 and 2016, with some updates in the past few years because the industry in China has been changing very fast. But when I started working on this chapter, there was a big price discrepancy between luxury products sold abroad and in China, mainly because of customs and tariffs. So price difference generated incentive to arbitrage. Luxury agents also sold niche brands that were not available in China, which was related to the emergence of social media and the new mediated consumer behavior. That is, social media and influencers have become an important force driving and shaping fashion. All of these were, of course, linked to the increased transnational mobility of Chinese people. Although a small percentage of the Luxury resellers I met lived in China, the majority were abroad. They were international students, diasporic professionals, or immigrants who followed their families. I met people who were based in the US, Japan, Korea, Europe, even Dubai, which is also a center of reselling that I didn’t know before.

There’s definitely a gendered dimension there, but that’s not to say all the people who are involved in this industry are women. There are some guys who are selling sometimes more expensive stuff like watches and cars. But a lot of the women resellers were more actively engaged in social media branding (or self-branding), which made their business indistinguishable from their personal life. For some of the women, reselling is only a part-time job. But for others, it is a full-time venture. Either way, luxury reselling carried promises to solving problems that they encountered in life. For example, some were students studying abroad wanting to make some extra cash, others were migrant housewives on H4 or F2/J2 who could not work legally in the formal industry because of their visa status. Luxury reselling, I learnt, did not just serve monetary needs, but it also helped them to, for instance, establish new social contacts, and/or keep in touch with family and friends back in China. This is especially true for new immigrant housewives who felt isolated from the mainstream society. To social media mediated luxury reselling provided a way for them to resolve gendered tensions engaging in pleasurable activities like going to luxury outlets of boutiques, being pampered by shop assistants who offered you extra gifts, bonus, and exclusive access to new or rare product collections once you become a frequent customer. Most women I met were not super elites, but luxury reselling allowed them to, in terms of consumption, live that elite lifestyle. The majority would never afford to buy, say 10 Hermes bags per month. But they were “consuming” for their businesses, which shaped consumerist identities in gendered ways—how they represented themselves in the virtual space, in their social media postings.

This type of new consumerism, I argued in the book, was linked to the formation of new post-feminist entrepreneurial selves as women attempted to reconciles the tensions between multiple, and sometimes conflicting gender scripts. For example, immigrant housewives who had to quit their jobs in China to join their family members abroad wanting to have some sort of a career outside of the family and child-rearing. Young students want to be a good child while finding a way to satisfy their consumerist desires. Here, post-feminist entrepreneurial and consumerist desires and more traditional and familial demands work together to shape their hybrid identities, and in the process, luxury reselling seems to emerge as a magic bullet. But in reality, this individualized consumerist and entrepreneurial solution often cannot help these women to overcome structural problems, and sometimes also give rise to ten tensions.

Luxury reselling could be a risky and precarious, despite the women resellers’ middle-class status. On one hand, they must face the scrutiny and discipline from the Chinese government. The Chinese government would sporadically crackdown on custom evasion, and luxury reselling is one of their main targets. This scrutiny has been heightened in recent years with the construction of China’s own duty-free zones and province (Hainan) within the border to formalize the industry and keep the revenue inside China. On the other hands, the attitude of the Western brands towards luxury reselling are quite mixed. Some niche new brands, like the Australian cosmetics brand Jurlique, rely heavily on Chinese resellers to market in the Chinese consumer market and naturally warmly welcome reselling. Some European high fashion brands, meanwhile, prefer to maintain brand exclusivity and sometimes would also crackdown on Chinese luxury reselling. Some of my informants had the experiences of having their credit card blocked and blacklisted by certain brands because they bought in bulk and had a Chinese name. Sometimes local residents also throw racist attacks at Chinese luxury resellers for taking away their limited resources and squeezing the locals out of the market when it comes to necessity products like baby milk formula. These challenges that they face on the ground are also complicated by those associated with managing virtual and long-distance communication and selling, e.g. navigating time differences and being constantly attentive to customers.

As I said in the beginning, the industry had changed a lot in the past five years towards formalization. This is partially driven by the toughening of government regulation. But another major force is the digital platforms. Major platforms like Alibaba, JD, and Amazon have all invested to expand their reselling businesses. New platforms like Xiaohongshu and Yangmatou also emerged specifically targeting the reselling industry. Now resellers have become more like subcontractors of the platforms than private self-employed entrepreneurs and their relationship with all these different brands are also becoming more formalized. When I visited Florence, Italy in the winter of 2023, I learnt that many of the luxury resellers there had become quite professionalized. There were even luxury reselling companies hiring teams and teams of resellers who would live in rental apartments/dorms near major luxury outlets with highly specialized division of labor among each team.

GROHMANN: In the book, you differentiate platform-based labor and platform-mediated labor. What is that in what examples in China you identify more with, platform-based labor or platform-mediated labor?

ZHANG: This is a set of concepts that I proposed in the book, which I also elaborated in another journal article on “platformizing family production”. Theorizing from e-commerce in rural China, I argued that  platform e-commerce is actually grafted on established supply chains, but if researchers only observe via platforms like Amazon or Taobao, they might not be able to see the full-range of labor on or mediated by the platforms. I only realized this when I became emerged in the e-commerce villages where manufacturing and platform-based selling happen in one space.  

The people whom I call platform-based laborers were entrepreneurial workers who spent most of their time online, working to update their products, design their storefronts, take  and photoshop product pictures, communicate with both customers and the platforms. E-commerce selling had gotten so complex that the entrepreneurs had to take many lessons to learn about latest updates, new platform rules and how to game with algorithms so that they can improve their ranking. There are also all kinds of paid marketing tools that you can use to move up your product and store rankings. Entrepreneurs could also hire raters in the gray industry to comment on and rate their products to boost rankings and store ratings. This platform-mediated labor is very important, and also quite new in terms of mechanisms. But it is also not the whole picture.

If you go beyond that, you’ll see the other workers in the supply chain who are invisible on the platform but are indirectly mediated by it. They impacted by how platform reorganizes or reinvents the whole supply chain. In my case of the handicraft village, many different types of platform-mediated workers have been in the trade for many decades. For example, the home-based handicraft makers—the majority are older women had been producing for the export companies during the Republican, socialist, and post-Mao years. It’s only in the past 15 years when they started to produce for e-commerce. They had to adapt to the new production regime in many ways. The rhythm of e-commerce production is different from export. Export is often dictated by Western holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, but selling small furniture and home decorations to domestic consumers online, the busiest seasons are back-to-school and before the spring festival holiday. When they manufacture for export, they do not participate in the design process, and they usually make certain types of generic products in large bulk quickly to meet the demand of overseas retail businesses. But selling to domestic e-commerce consumers requires constant innovation and adaptation. The labor practices on the ground, thus, are also different with more collaborative relationship between the weavers and the e-commerce sellers trying to come up with new designs. That’s also when things could get tricky about innovation: who gets the credit or more of the credit? who gets paid more? Not only that,  the sellers who come up with the most innovative designs are usually not the most benefited. Rather, those who invest more into and more savvy about marketing and gaming with platform ranking algorithm benefit from a new design more. Logistics is another big industry that is platform-mediated. So, product-mediated labor is definitely different from platform-based, because your relationship with the platform is not as direct. But you are still very much impacted by it. I don’t know if that makes sense in my own case, so I’m also trying to figure out if it’s applicable to other industries and to other areas as well. And if it can really be more generalizable.

GROHMANN: How does platformization affect rural China?

ZHANG: Platforms affect rural China in so many ways. I could comment on that from the perspective of e-commerce and live streaming, the latter had made e-commerce more cultural. The introduction of e-commerce into rural China had made digital and cultural economy more participatory now that ordinary rural residents could also participate in branding, design, and social media selling, and live streaming. These are transforming the nature of work and labor in rural China. Traditionally, peasants engaged mostly in farming, and sometimes in other activities to supplement farming, like handicrafts. In post-Mao China, rapid urbanization and urban industrialization drew peasants to work in the city as migrant workers in industries like manufacturing, construction, and services. However, because of the household registration or the Hukou system, most migrant workers could not fully integrate into urban live. The platformization of rural China both drives and is also part of a larger shift in which more migrant workers are returning to the countryside and urban residents are also moving to rural China to seek new opportunities. In many ways, this is a positive trend that helps to revitalize rural economy and provide economic and entrepreneurial opportunities for rural residents. I don’t know whether similar trend is happening elsewhere, but the collective ownership of land in rural China provides a basis for rural residents to move back. In the Chinese context and maybe elsewhere too, rural platformization usually bulds on existing industries, whether it’s agriculture, handicraft, or industrial manufacturing.

But platformization is also changing what it means to live and work in rural China along with rural social relations. It’s also creating new inequalities and differentiations. It often only benefits people with certain backgrounds, whether it’s related to migration history, educational credentials, or certain skill sets. More recently the popularity of live streaming also privileges those who are more articulate and better at represent themselves culturally. As the livestreaming industry is getting more sophisticated, MCNs entered the industry to scout for and manufacture rural influencers. They not only package and brand rurality to sell to urban consumers, but also are reshaping rural subjectivities. Another important question here is to figure out how revenue is distributed in the livestreaming industry. In general, is platformization in rural China lifting everyone up, or does not only create more intra-village inequalities?

With the deepening of platformization, the countryside is also not the same. For example, the handicraft village that I studied have more than 20 logistic companies stationed just in the village, which had transformed rural landscape. Although the village has witnessed a large inflow of people in the past decade because of the e-commerce boom, you don’t see many people on the street as most of them were at home sitting in front of their computers. Instead you constantly hear the sound of instant chatting messenger alerts. This is very different from traditional Chinese villages in which it’s common for villages to stop on the street to chat randomly or visit fellow villagers’ homes to socialize, especially following dinner. Not evening becomes the most busy time for e-commerce customer services and that most shop owners have to stay up late take care of their digital businesses.  Some of them even revamped or rebuil their houses just to accommodate the industry, adding a photo studio here or building a large warehouse there. It’s definitely changing rural living and lifestyle. But I wouldn’t say it’s making life more precarious, because life has always been probably precarious in the Chinese countryside, so that’s one of the reasons I find some of the Global North literature on digital labor problematic when it’s directly applied to the Chinese context, because rural labor has always been informal. Construction work in the city or working in the factory in South China is not formalized labor either, but of course, e-commerce and platformized labor is also a different type of precarity.

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[1]       Here I am drawing on economist Zhou Li-An’s work. See Zhou L-A (2019) Understanding China: A Dialogue with Philip Huang. Modern China 45(4): 392–432.

Entrepreneurial Labor in the Chinese Digital Economy: interview with Lin Zhang

Lin Zhang, assistant professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire, just published the book  The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia University Press). The book focuses on the rising entrepreneurial labor in urban, rural and transnational China since tech innovation had accelerated in the country after 2008.

Zhang presents rich and nuanced perspectives on the subject, 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 good. The labor of reinvention means both changes and continuities, adapting to a changing society at the same time that this digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender and identity.

In this conversation with Rafael Grohmann, Lin Zhang details some important points of the book The Labor of Reinvention.

RAFAEL GROHMANN: My first question to you it’s about your perspective on China, that it’s really interesting to me in avoiding either endorsing the US-centric liberal capitalism, universalism, and also avoiding a room for Chinese exceptionalism through the entire book. And this means not taking China as exotic, essentially saying, or only as an empirical example, as we saw. This is very powerful for both China and also so-called Global South and majority world studies. You propose to think about procedural principles and contradictions, and my question to you is: what does that mean, or what is it like to build this theoretical background in how your view on China can contribute to a broader framework on labor and platforms in epistemological terms?

LIN ZHANG: I think that’s a central question I grapple with throughout the process of working on this project. The position you describe is the position I end up finding most comfortable in, as a scholar who studies China in relation to platforms, innovation, labor and entrepreneurship from a critical perspective. The tension between all these seemingly “universal” trends that we all witness, like financialization and platformization of work, and the specific things I observed on the ground when I did my ethnography and the continuities I saw when I read into Chinese economic, political-economic traditions. A central concept that I try to build here is the “China Paradigm”, which is concept that I borrowed from the late Marxist and historian or China Arif Dirlik. After the 2008 global crisis, there were a lot of discussion about a “China model”, because China emerged from the crisis as a force that was re-energizing, leading the global recovery in a way. In response, Dirlik wrote a short article to make an intervention and proposed the concept of China Paradigm, which has informed my thinking of how we understand, study, and theorize China. While the China model implies that China set up an example for other people and countries to emulate or learn from. This always has an idealized aspect, which also prompts critiques like: “Oh, Chinese experiences is not applicable elsewhere”. China paradigm, on the other hand, says that what the Chinese experiences teach us, and also the contradictions inherent to its transformation, is how China articulates global trends and principles to its local practices and reality, which both builds on and breaks from its own history. Specifically in the book, I talked about the contradictions between development and egalitarianism. After China rejoined the global capitalist order in the late 1970s after decades of experiment with socialism, the party-state had really emphasized development over all others. But the state still claims to be communist and does still hold on to some of its egalitarian and redistributive visions. And you see these visions being re-emphasized and re-emerged in different ways more recently since the late 2000s, especially under Xi Jinping. The 2008 global financial crisis rekindled the desire for more autonomy and independence, in continuity from the anti-imperialist tradition of the Chinese Communist Party. And these desires really manifested in technological innovation—trying to become more independent in terms of technological standards, talents etc.—in part also reacting to the sanctions of the US. Political historian Lin Chun showed in her book on China’s socialist transformation that the nation has really been grappling with the tensions between development, equity, and independence/security from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. But as you see read from my book, these tensions manifested in different ways at different historical moments, as the state swing back and forth trying to emphasize different aspects in the attempt of articulating the global and the local. That’s really sort of the framework I try to set up there.

I have to say that I’m very ignorant of Latin America, but I would be curious to hear what you think of any points of conversation that we could establish there. It would be useful for me as someone who’s learning about Latin America, learning about the global South in general how we all definitely grapple with all these tensions as you know, the sort of post-colonial, or the colonial tradition there. I’m interested in learning about other traditions and how other regions really grapple with these tensions and try to find a way that would work for them. How they grapple with global trends whole also being really rooted in local traditions, local practices, and how these tension might manifest differently. If we compare the Chinese case to Brazil, probably the Chinese State does play a more authoritarian role, and there’s less civil society participation, especially so in the past five years or so. It would be productive to see how different paradigms are been coordinated, manufactured, configured on the ground to provide a basis, to have a conversation with researchers from the global South and elsewhere for discussion.

GROHMANN: Two strong points of your book are about historicizing and tensions and contradictions. I would like to know from you about the challenges you faced during the research regarding this labor of historicizing Chinese history and the connections between the digital economy and rural areas.

ZHANG: To answer this question, I will share some behind-the-scenes stories about the review and fieldwork processes. I had quite a positive experience with the review process, but I also learnt a lot from the process about how to tackle the challenges scholars like us, international scholars from the Global South face when we work and publish in the US and the Anglophone public sphere. I think I had in general two set of reviewers: one does not have much prior understanding of China, but are more interested in, for example, entrepreneurship, who has probably worked on Silicon Valley and similar topics focusing on the Global North; the other set are scholars in China studies who may or may not work on issues like technologies, labor, and entrepreneurship. So it was very helpful, through my publisher, to revise and improve the book for these two groups of imagined readers. But as you could imagine, I did get some competing reviews that intended to take me into different directions. For example, reviewers reading in a comparison to Silicon Valley, or the sort of general dynamics of global capitalism, wanted me to speak more about algorithm, platforms and how this is related to the US.  In a way, this is legit, because that’s what they want to get out of this book, i.e., to understand from a comparative perspective how my analysis of China inform the debates that they’re familiar with. But the other set of reviewers were really appreciative of the rich history and the Chinese trajectory that I mapped out. So, the revision was really a process of me negotiating with them and myself to produce a book that would make sense to different readers who may or may not have background knowledge about China, which took me a long time to figure out.

A similar process of negotiation also happened when I was doing my fieldwork. As you know, I was trained in communication studies, so I entered my fieldwork of research as a junior scholar of communication interested in the interdisciplinary study of digital labor and platformization. But once I entered the field, I realized though a lot of these global trends are definitely there, but they might not explain fully the experiences of my informants on the ground. For example, in rural e-commerce, the entrepreneurs and workers’ daily life was not predominantly informed by algorithm or even the platforms, but more by the existing industrial structure and village relations. This is also true with another of my field site—Zhongguancun high-tech district in Beijing in which its history as China’s Science and Tech innovation hub since the early socialist years matter a lot if we are to understand its more recent reinvention to produce global tech companies like Lenovo and Bytedance. That’s when I had to read more interdisciplinary in China studies and beyond to really historicize and embed what I observed into literature, but also to establish new connections between existing works and my ethnographic data so as to contribute to multiple fields like China studies, platform studies, innovation studies, and to build bridges between them. This is definitely not just unique to scholars studying China, but a question relevant to all scholars, i.e., how could we find common themes and establish a broader conversation with other scholars working in the same space while also being observant of the specific genealogy and trajectory of your own research site and artifact.

Of course I can’t possibility accomplish everything I want to do in one book, so I see this book more as my attempt to build up a structure and establish conversations, and shape the way of inquiry into, and the epistemology of how we approach technologies, work, and digital labor in the global context. Writing in English and publishing in the North American context certain dictate to certain extent my target readers. And it’s definitely a lot of work keeping a balance between what you know/what to say and what you think your readers might be interested in reading. In the process of negotiation, you gain something, you also lose something. Like I had to delete big chunks of history that I spent months putting into the pages. A strategy I figure out along the way was to save it for offshoot papers, so I try to write shorter papers where I could really focus on the other interventions I couldn’t make or centralize in the book. I don’t know if you have the same problem when you are working on your research, but definitely, that’s something that I grappled with.

GROHMANN: Another thing that I found so impressive in your book is: clearly the book involves a lot of your own history and your relationships, and this is very beautiful in the book, too. How has research changed you and what were the main methodological reflections or challenges through this research, in terms of doing this research while this affects your own life?

ZHANG: Definitely, so immediately you are more invested, if it’s related to people who are similar to you, or who you care about. The good thing is that it’s easier, in a way, to establish connections and get access to do your research. Doing ethnography is really difficult, too, if you don’t have that access and for example, in rural China, where they’re people speaking dialects, not the standard Mandarin Chinese. For example, there are many e-commerce villages in China. I started out visiting some villages in Southeast China, but found it hard to understand the accents of the older village residents. Even in the villages which I ended up doing most of my fieldwork research for the e-commerce chapters in my book, I had to take some time to get accustomed to their dialects though I grew up not far from the villages.

Talking about the pros and cons of working from where you are most unfamiliar with. It could also add an emotional burden, because you always think about how you can best represent them. You want to represent them in a way that they find fair, right? A lot of them couldn’t really read my work because it’s in English. I did publish something in Chinese. I know you publish a lot in Portuguese, right? It’s important. I’m actually planning to do more of that. I know it’s always a struggle if you work in the US, you have that pressure to keep producing in English because that’s what people read. But I have also translated some of my works into Chinese and published some public scholarship in Chinese newspapers or gone to podcasts and interviews in Chinese so that I could really establish a conversation with people there. But that also means it’s tricky to make critiques where you see necessary. For example, rural China is still a very patriarchal society, so I want to show the gendered and other inequalities at work though people were in general quite friendly to me as a female researcher. Also in high-tech districts like Zhongguancun, especially in response to American sanctions, nationalism is a big sentiment now. When you talk to people, the fact that you are working in an American university might make you suspicious. People might be thinking why are you here? Are you collecting information? I did get questions like “Why are you doing this? What’s your nationality? So I think the challenge here is really how to do it fairly, that is, how you find a balance between representing them based on their preferences, but also finding the space to make critiques because you see larger structural issues at work shaping their practices, understanding, and identities etc..

But in general, just going there to establish and maintain those connections with people in China really helped me to stay grounded and stay updated, and often give me fresh perspectives that I don’t get by looking from a distance. And Covid and the worsening relations between the US and China had made this type of grounded research harder to do now. Since I left right before Covid hit in 2019, I feel I am increasingly losing that grounded understanding which I cannot really get just via social media and remote interviews. But luckily, I have booked my flight to revisit China and of course my research sites this summer. I think the worsening bilateral relations between the US and China has made is more imperative for me to present my research in a way that speaks for China and the people who generously shared with me their experiences, in a way, not losing sight of the critiques that would eventually, I hope, would help them and make the world a better place.

GROHMANN: In what ways do you complicate or nuance frameworks in relation to entrepreneurship from your research? Or why is the global entrepreneurization of labor a dynamic process of reinvention?

ZHANG: Definitely we see a lot of similar trends that happen not just in the US, but in China, I imagine in Brazil, in Latin America as well. This blurring of the line between labor and entrepreneurship, a lot of researchers like you also wrote about the entrepreneurialism, the emphasis placed on this desire to be more autonomous, more flexible in work. How it could be capitalized and monetized by venture capitalists and new businesses to offload some of the responsibilities that they would traditionally have for workers. Now that you are entrepreneurs and your own boss, whether it’s being a taxi-driver mediated by apps, or in my case owning a digital storefront on an e-commerce platform, or working on or dreaming about your own startup in a co-working space. This changing meaning and experiences of what count as entrepreneurship and work are definitely something that we all can see, understand, and relate to in our lives.

In the Chinese context I try to highlight, trying not to oversimplify things,  the two aspects of family and state, though they are not unique to China. For example, you see in rural China how family as a unit functions in the organization of labor, and the role of family businesses in the export-oriented manufacturing industries and how they have been reinvented for e-commerce. That’s why I emphasize the term “reinvention” here, how family-based division of labor is reinvented to make sense for a domestic-market-targeting platform economy with the rise of big corporations like Alibaba. In the Zhongguancun case you see more the role of the state–whether it’s the central state or the local state– in the process of shaping this space. For instance, I described the discrepancies between central and local state priorities as well as that between policy design and implementation. In the case of reinventing Zhongguancun, the central state’s goal is really to promote indigenous innovation and to redress inequalities, for better or worse, through entrepreneurship. But when it’s time for the local officials to implement central state visions, their priorities are mainly in boosting the local economy, driving employment (self employment) as they are locked up in both a market-driven competition with local officials in other regions and a political tournament to meet the central state’s new agenda.[1]  That’s why many of the high-tech zones, incubators, and co-working spaces end up being more about real estate than high-tech innovation. Because the land in China is still owned by the state, with land transfer income being a crucial source of Chinese local state revenue. So the debt-financed infrastructure and real estate construction became another force propelling entrepreneuralization. With all the new incubators and co-working spaces, they need to find more entrepreneurs to fill the empty offices. That’s partially why the so-called grassroots entrepreneurs who are better off doing something else elsewhere were drawn to the co-working spaces to learn how to write a business proposal to pitch to venture capitalists. They might have fared better doing e-commerce in their hometowns and earned more income working in factories. But I think this desire to become an entrepreneur like a Silicon Valley person—dressed up in a suit and going to a co-working space, sipping a cup of coffee and working on your laptop— is powerful cultural motivations for people to participate in the new entrepreneurial lifestyle.

Again I want to reiterate that I’m not trying to reinforce stereotypes about a strong Chinese state, but rather to really complicate what we mean by the state in highlighting central-local discrepancy and the multipronged goals of the state. Instead of the common assertation that the Chinese state just want to suppress its people. I want to highlight how the Chinese state is also trying to constantly reinvent itself, like how it has entrepreneuralized the economy to simultaneously redress inequalities and advance indigenous innovation. These contradictions and hybridity really complicate what we mean by the family traditions and what statism is in contemporary China. Another way to avoid essentialization is to do more comparative work, which is what I didn’t have space in that to do in this book. For example, comparing the Brazilian practice with Chinese practice, we might find some similarities and also differences that would help even further, right?

GROHMANN: I really enjoyed reading about the role of women resellers, because this is very common in Brazil, historically and it is now updated with click farms and another type of platform labor. What were the main findings you have regarding women resellers in the Chinese context?

ZHANG:  It’s interesting to learn that luxury reselling is also common in Brazil, I don’t know if it has something to do with the fact that both China and the Brazil are kind of on the periphery and Western luxury brands generate lots of appeals for the middle to upper middle class in both countries. Most of the research I did for this chapter was done between 2011 and 2016, with some updates in the past few years because the industry in China has been changing very fast. But when I started working on this chapter, there was a big price discrepancy between luxury products sold abroad and in China, mainly because of customs and tariffs. So price difference generated incentive to arbitrage. Luxury agents also sold niche brands that were not available in China, which was related to the emergence of social media and the new mediated consumer behavior. That is, social media and influencers have become an important force driving and shaping fashion. All of these were, of course, linked to the increased transnational mobility of Chinese people. Although a small percentage of the Luxury resellers I met lived in China, the majority were abroad. They were international students, diasporic professionals, or immigrants who followed their families. I met people who were based in the US, Japan, Korea, Europe, even Dubai, which is also a center of reselling that I didn’t know before.

There’s definitely a gendered dimension there, but that’s not to say all the people who are involved in this industry are women. There are some guys who are selling sometimes more expensive stuff like watches and cars. But a lot of the women resellers were more actively engaged in social media branding (or self-branding), which made their business indistinguishable from their personal life. For some of the women, reselling is only a part-time job. But for others, it is a full-time venture. Either way, luxury reselling carried promises to solving problems that they encountered in life. For example, some were students studying abroad wanting to make some extra cash, others were migrant housewives on H4 or F2/J2 who could not work legally in the formal industry because of their visa status. Luxury reselling, I learnt, did not just serve monetary needs, but it also helped them to, for instance, establish new social contacts, and/or keep in touch with family and friends back in China. This is especially true for new immigrant housewives who felt isolated from the mainstream society. To social media mediated luxury reselling provided a way for them to resolve gendered tensions engaging in pleasurable activities like going to luxury outlets of boutiques, being pampered by shop assistants who offered you extra gifts, bonus, and exclusive access to new or rare product collections once you become a frequent customer. Most women I met were not super elites, but luxury reselling allowed them to, in terms of consumption, live that elite lifestyle. The majority would never afford to buy, say 10 Hermes bags per month. But they were “consuming” for their businesses, which shaped consumerist identities in gendered ways—how they represented themselves in the virtual space, in their social media postings.

This type of new consumerism, I argued in the book, was linked to the formation of new post-feminist entrepreneurial selves as women attempted to reconciles the tensions between multiple, and sometimes conflicting gender scripts. For example, immigrant housewives who had to quit their jobs in China to join their family members abroad wanting to have some sort of a career outside of the family and child-rearing. Young students want to be a good child while finding a way to satisfy their consumerist desires. Here, post-feminist entrepreneurial and consumerist desires and more traditional and familial demands work together to shape their hybrid identities, and in the process, luxury reselling seems to emerge as a magic bullet. But in reality, this individualized consumerist and entrepreneurial solution often cannot help these women to overcome structural problems, and sometimes also give rise to ten tensions.

Luxury reselling could be a risky and precarious, despite the women resellers’ middle-class status. On one hand, they must face the scrutiny and discipline from the Chinese government. The Chinese government would sporadically crackdown on custom evasion, and luxury reselling is one of their main targets. This scrutiny has been heightened in recent years with the construction of China’s own duty-free zones and province (Hainan) within the border to formalize the industry and keep the revenue inside China. On the other hands, the attitude of the Western brands towards luxury reselling are quite mixed. Some niche new brands, like the Australian cosmetics brand Jurlique, rely heavily on Chinese resellers to market in the Chinese consumer market and naturally warmly welcome reselling. Some European high fashion brands, meanwhile, prefer to maintain brand exclusivity and sometimes would also crackdown on Chinese luxury reselling. Some of my informants had the experiences of having their credit card blocked and blacklisted by certain brands because they bought in bulk and had a Chinese name. Sometimes local residents also throw racist attacks at Chinese luxury resellers for taking away their limited resources and squeezing the locals out of the market when it comes to necessity products like baby milk formula. These challenges that they face on the ground are also complicated by those associated with managing virtual and long-distance communication and selling, e.g. navigating time differences and being constantly attentive to customers.

As I said in the beginning, the industry had changed a lot in the past five years towards formalization. This is partially driven by the toughening of government regulation. But another major force is the digital platforms. Major platforms like Alibaba, JD, and Amazon have all invested to expand their reselling businesses. New platforms like Xiaohongshu and Yangmatou also emerged specifically targeting the reselling industry. Now resellers have become more like subcontractors of the platforms than private self-employed entrepreneurs and their relationship with all these different brands are also becoming more formalized. When I visited Florence, Italy in the winter of 2023, I learnt that many of the luxury resellers there had become quite professionalized. There were even luxury reselling companies hiring teams and teams of resellers who would live in rental apartments/dorms near major luxury outlets with highly specialized division of labor among each team.

GROHMANN: In the book, you differentiate platform-based labor and platform-mediated labor. What is that in what examples in China you identify more with, platform-based labor or platform-mediated labor?

ZHANG: This is a set of concepts that I proposed in the book, which I also elaborated in another journal article on “platformizing family production”. Theorizing from e-commerce in rural China, I argued that  platform e-commerce is actually grafted on established supply chains, but if researchers only observe via platforms like Amazon or Taobao, they might not be able to see the full-range of labor on or mediated by the platforms. I only realized this when I became emerged in the e-commerce villages where manufacturing and platform-based selling happen in one space.  

The people whom I call platform-based laborers were entrepreneurial workers who spent most of their time online, working to update their products, design their storefronts, take  and photoshop product pictures, communicate with both customers and the platforms. E-commerce selling had gotten so complex that the entrepreneurs had to take many lessons to learn about latest updates, new platform rules and how to game with algorithms so that they can improve their ranking. There are also all kinds of paid marketing tools that you can use to move up your product and store rankings. Entrepreneurs could also hire raters in the gray industry to comment on and rate their products to boost rankings and store ratings. This platform-mediated labor is very important, and also quite new in terms of mechanisms. But it is also not the whole picture.

If you go beyond that, you’ll see the other workers in the supply chain who are invisible on the platform but are indirectly mediated by it. They impacted by how platform reorganizes or reinvents the whole supply chain. In my case of the handicraft village, many different types of platform-mediated workers have been in the trade for many decades. For example, the home-based handicraft makers—the majority are older women had been producing for the export companies during the Republican, socialist, and post-Mao years. It’s only in the past 15 years when they started to produce for e-commerce. They had to adapt to the new production regime in many ways. The rhythm of e-commerce production is different from export. Export is often dictated by Western holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, but selling small furniture and home decorations to domestic consumers online, the busiest seasons are back-to-school and before the spring festival holiday. When they manufacture for export, they do not participate in the design process, and they usually make certain types of generic products in large bulk quickly to meet the demand of overseas retail businesses. But selling to domestic e-commerce consumers requires constant innovation and adaptation. The labor practices on the ground, thus, are also different with more collaborative relationship between the weavers and the e-commerce sellers trying to come up with new designs. That’s also when things could get tricky about innovation: who gets the credit or more of the credit? who gets paid more? Not only that,  the sellers who come up with the most innovative designs are usually not the most benefited. Rather, those who invest more into and more savvy about marketing and gaming with platform ranking algorithm benefit from a new design more. Logistics is another big industry that is platform-mediated. So, product-mediated labor is definitely different from platform-based, because your relationship with the platform is not as direct. But you are still very much impacted by it. I don’t know if that makes sense in my own case, so I’m also trying to figure out if it’s applicable to other industries and to other areas as well. And if it can really be more generalizable.

GROHMANN: How does platformization affect rural China?

ZHANG: Platforms affect rural China in so many ways. I could comment on that from the perspective of e-commerce and live streaming, the latter had made e-commerce more cultural. The introduction of e-commerce into rural China had made digital and cultural economy more participatory now that ordinary rural residents could also participate in branding, design, and social media selling, and live streaming. These are transforming the nature of work and labor in rural China. Traditionally, peasants engaged mostly in farming, and sometimes in other activities to supplement farming, like handicrafts. In post-Mao China, rapid urbanization and urban industrialization drew peasants to work in the city as migrant workers in industries like manufacturing, construction, and services. However, because of the household registration or the Hukou system, most migrant workers could not fully integrate into urban live. The platformization of rural China both drives and is also part of a larger shift in which more migrant workers are returning to the countryside and urban residents are also moving to rural China to seek new opportunities. In many ways, this is a positive trend that helps to revitalize rural economy and provide economic and entrepreneurial opportunities for rural residents. I don’t know whether similar trend is happening elsewhere, but the collective ownership of land in rural China provides a basis for rural residents to move back. In the Chinese context and maybe elsewhere too, rural platformization usually bulds on existing industries, whether it’s agriculture, handicraft, or industrial manufacturing.

But platformization is also changing what it means to live and work in rural China along with rural social relations. It’s also creating new inequalities and differentiations. It often only benefits people with certain backgrounds, whether it’s related to migration history, educational credentials, or certain skill sets. More recently the popularity of live streaming also privileges those who are more articulate and better at represent themselves culturally. As the livestreaming industry is getting more sophisticated, MCNs entered the industry to scout for and manufacture rural influencers. They not only package and brand rurality to sell to urban consumers, but also are reshaping rural subjectivities. Another important question here is to figure out how revenue is distributed in the livestreaming industry. In general, is platformization in rural China lifting everyone up, or does not only create more intra-village inequalities?

With the deepening of platformization, the countryside is also not the same. For example, the handicraft village that I studied have more than 20 logistic companies stationed just in the village, which had transformed rural landscape. Although the village has witnessed a large inflow of people in the past decade because of the e-commerce boom, you don’t see many people on the street as most of them were at home sitting in front of their computers. Instead you constantly hear the sound of instant chatting messenger alerts. This is very different from traditional Chinese villages in which it’s common for villages to stop on the street to chat randomly or visit fellow villagers’ homes to socialize, especially following dinner. Not evening becomes the most busy time for e-commerce customer services and that most shop owners have to stay up late take care of their digital businesses.  Some of them even revamped or rebuil their houses just to accommodate the industry, adding a photo studio here or building a large warehouse there. It’s definitely changing rural living and lifestyle. But I wouldn’t say it’s making life more precarious, because life has always been probably precarious in the Chinese countryside, so that’s one of the reasons I find some of the Global North literature on digital labor problematic when it’s directly applied to the Chinese context, because rural labor has always been informal. Construction work in the city or working in the factory in South China is not formalized labor either, but of course, e-commerce and platformized labor is also a different type of precarity.

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[1]       Here I am drawing on economist Zhou Li-An’s work. See Zhou L-A (2019) Understanding China: A Dialogue with Philip Huang. Modern China 45(4): 392–432.