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.

In this talk, Dr. Lin Zhang will tell one story about the entrepreneurial labor of reinvention from her recently published book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy. Focusing on rural e-commerce and the “Taobao Villages” phenomenon, she will depict, with rich ethnographic details, how domestic e-commerce corporations like Alibaba work with various levels of governments to facilitate city-to-countryside reverse migration, brand model peasant entrepreneurs, and shape a new entrepreneurial labor regime and subjectivities. Problematizing worldwide euphoria about digital entrepreneurship while complicating the dichotomy of “China threat vs. China model”, she argues for a “China Paradigm” that treats the Chinese experiences as an ongoing and open-ended experiment to rearticulate global principles to local trajectories in dealing with worldwide challenges posed by decades of neoliberal capitalism. 

从中国硅谷的初创企业创始人到经历电子商务繁荣的农村村庄，再到中产阶级妇女转售奢侈品，基于互联网的创业的兴起影响了中国的每个角落。对许多人来说，将自己重新塑造为企业家似乎是适应经济和社会变化的一种颇具吸引力的方式。然而，在实践中，数字创业也强化了有关国家权力、劳动、性别和身份等中国传统观念。

在这次讲座中，张琳博士将讲述关于创业重塑所需的劳动的故事，这是她最近出版的著作 The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy 中的一个故事。她将聚焦于农村电子商务和“淘宝村”现象，以丰富的民族志细节描述阿里巴巴等国内电子商务企业如何与各级政府合作，促进了从城市到农村的逆向迁移，树立了品牌模式的农民企业家，塑造了新的创业劳动制度和主体性。在复杂化“中国威胁 vs. 中国模式”这种二元对立的同时，她对数字创业的全球狂热提出质疑，主张采用一种“中国范式”，将中国的经验视为一个持续而开放的实验，以重新界定全球原则，应对几十年来新自由主义资本主义带来的全球性挑战中所产生的地方轨迹。