Interviewed on February 20, 2024 for the Spring 2024 SKAT Newsletter by Larry Au

Lin Zhang is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the University of New Hampshire, focusing on critical innovation studies, knowledge, and digital labor and intersectionality. She is the author of The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia University Press, 2023).

Larry: Your book relies on such rich and incredible fieldwork, and it takes us all over China—from Beijing’s technology hub Zhongguancun to the Taobao villages. You were able to paint the lives of your interlocutors with such vivid detail, capturing the range of dreams and hopes that these aspiring entrepreneurs had. Could you tell us a little bit about what it was like studying and traversing these very different worlds within—and also beyond—China? Were there any challenges that you faced doing this?

Lin: I originally had a methodological appendix in the book, but I ended up incorporating it in my first two chapters. I explain my journey of moving through these spaces. In general, it’s a very eye-opening experience for me. I made a lot of very different friends, as you said. Some of them are very elite, transnational, and mobile. Some of them are based in rural China and have never made it to the capital city of Beijing. I learned to adjust how I worked as a researcher. For example, when I was in Zhongguancun. It’s like what we do here, where we set up an appointment to meet at 8am at a cafe. But in the countryside, when I do fieldwork, you’ll drop by where they work at home, and you might not see anyone. It’s a very informal culture. The rhythm is very different there. Going in between those spaces, I had to adapt my style to each field side. The last part of the book focused on transnational reselling. I did a lot of online ethnography for that. At that time Zoom didn’t exist yet. I did a lot of WeChat and Skype interviews. I also followed their posts on social media and e-commerce sites, and had a lot of documentation that I have to go through to analyze and try to be creative in my methods. I would say it’s a very hybrid way of going through the field. When I was a PhD student, it was challenging because I traveled a lot. When I had to write up the dissertation, which eventually became the book, I had to find a thread that’s the central argument and also build up the narrative arc of the book. It’s definitely more challenging than just focusing on one site. My approach in the book is a combination of the cultural studies analytic-centered or theme-centered approach and the more sociological ethnographic approach. It also helped open my eyes to how the bigger phenomenon unfolded in different sites.

Larry: One of my favorite aspects of this book is the many layers and textures you have in your account of transformations in contemporary China, as well as the many contradictions that exist in these overlapping social, political, and economic institutions. Even the phrase “mass entrepreneurship and innovation”, a slogan of the Chinese state, seems strange. How did entrepreneurialism become so central to Chinese state ideology, and society more broadly?

Lin: This is definitely a historical and political economic question. Entrepreneurship has long existed in China. Even in imperial China, we see all types of entrepreneurship, like grassroot traders and red hat merchants. A central debate in economic history is over the Great Divergence, or how industrialization led to prosperity for some parts of the world and not for others. In China, industrialization didn’t really unfold very quickly. There’s discussion about the entrepreneurship that exists in China and how it is similar or dissimilar to what happened in Western Europe and the United States. I engage in that debate somewhat tangentially. What I try to emphasize—inspired by economic historians—is that state power, in the form of the imperial state and later in the socialist state and national state, is an important factor in mediating entrepreneurship in China. China was a large agrarian nation for a long time, and family institutions played a big role in the informal economy and entrepreneurship in China. In the book, I talk about how the socialist decades played an important contradictory role in shaping the commodity economy, industrialization, and laying a foundation for labor, talent, and innovation capacity. For example, in the Zhongguancun chapter, I showed that early technologies that Zhongguancun commercialized were produced in the military-industrial complex, similar to what happened in the U.S. However, over time, Chinese policymakers became convinced that the Soviet command and control, centralized model, did not work in promoting economic development. Policymakers realized that China needed markets, competition, and incentives. That also made China comparable to the European welfare states and even with the United States, which now also rely on various types of protectionist policies. With reform and opening in the 1980s, we see a sea change in the attitudes towards entrepreneurship. We see pent-up energy released into private business, and also at a more grassroots level. Reform and opening initially boomed in rural areas through the TVEs or Township Village Enterprises. Later in the 1990s, state-owned enterprises underwent privatization too.

But in the book, I try to emphasize that the 2008 financial crisis was really a watershed moment that led to the proliferation of an unprecedented level of entrepreneurship in China. It was a product of converging forces. I identify two forces. First, we witnessed a capital surplus in China after decades of accumulation through its export-oriented economy. Globally, the excess liquidity generated by low interest rates in the U.S. and quantitative easing led to capital flowing into other parts of the world and, especially to China. Among all these developing countries, China was ready to capture and catch on that moment, and we saw a proliferation of technologies from when I was doing research in the early 2010s, like O2O (online to offline)—something we no longer talk about that—and then 4G, 5G, technology platforms, and later on, AI, robotic technology, and renewable energy. That shaped the convergence of different types of entrepreneurship, whether they are overseas returnees, or diasporic Chinese using the advantage of transnational linkages of international flow of goods, or young college graduates, middle class professionals, or migrant returnees back to the countryside. The different types of entrepreneurial culture mediated by platforms is something new. Second, this process was driven by state policies, like mass entrepreneurship, innovation, automation, and so on. I do think the former premier Li Keqiang played an important role in shaping these policies. There’s a lot of discussion about, the sort of different policy approach and leadership style between him and Xi Jinping. We can attribute the rise of the internet class and the mass entrepreneurship innovation campaigns to his cabinet team at that time.

Larry:  Another theme that looms large in your book is the relationship between technology and the state. In your account, the state is neither all-powerful, nor are Chinese tech firms simply proxies of the state. Instead, what you depict is a much more dynamic, back-and-forth choreography between at-times conflicting interests. How would you describe the relationship between Chinese tech firms and the state?

Lin: It’s a question that keeps haunting me. A lot of China scholars have put a lot of energy into understanding and making sense of the Chinese state-market relationship in different historical periods. For me, the state market relations in China, especially with regard to the big internet companies, is a co-evolution process. I would also say that it is a pendulum swing: a back-and-forth between control and deregulation. This movement is increasingly shaped by global financial cycles because of how these internet companies are very much integrated into the global financial regime. Backed by U. S. dollar capital, they were very global to begin with, and thus are susceptible also to shifting geopolitical dynamics. China studies scholars, in their research, also try to ask which state we are speaking of. Because in mainstream English, Anglophone media, we usually talk about the central state, the party-state, or the CCP. But those of us who study China know the bureaucracies are really complex. You have local, central, multi-layered states. And also all types of institutions, sometimes competing with each other. You have discrepancies between policy goals and interests.

What I try to do in the book is to demonstrate this temporally specific and constantly changing dynamic.Alibaba, one of my cases in the book, is a fascinating company because of all the things the company has gone through over the years. In earlier years, it thrived under an environment of deregulation, where the government adhered to the idea of “releasing the water to raise the fish”.The government wanted to let these internet companies, including Alibaba, grow in the environment. From the mid-1990s till the early 2010s, Alibaba became more powerful centrally. But from the early 2010s to mid-2010s, there were gradual shifts in attitudes towards Alibaba locally, especially in areas outside of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, areas close to the headquarters of Alibaba. For example, in Shandong and in middle and western China, the leaders at the beginning didn’t really appreciate e-commerce because it didn’t generate tax revenue for them. If anything, it took it away from them, because of the virtualization of the local economy. Even today, e-commerce taxation is still a problem for the state. But by the mid-2010s as I mentioned in the book, Alibaba both at the central level and through its network of media, academic, and other agents at the local level really spent a lot of time educating, training, and working with local counties. What I saw at that time, especially from 2015 until 2019, was competition and rivalry among all these provincial and county-level leaders trying to integrate their economy with the platform. It was a symbiotic and renegotiating relationship. The state also tried to utilize Alibaba to do things like poverty reduction. However, you’ll see the conflict between the profit-driven model of the internet companies and the economic mission that the state really wants them to do, like the Belt and Road Initiative.

By the late 2010s, with the recent situation of the Chinese economy, there is a trend towards more control and regulation, with antitrust enforcement and a crackdown on internet companies. The priority really has shifted. There are many different factors behind that on the central and local level. For example, on the local level, the evaluation of local cadres is shifting emphasis away from the developmental model, such as environmental issues and anti-corruption. At the central level, with rising geopolitical challenges, we see, for example, an emphasis on data security. There is also this lingering suspicion of these private companies because they are listed overseas in the U.S., for example, with Didi and ANT Financial Group. That’s still the situation we are in at this moment. It’s a new round of renegotiation. With worries about China’s economic slump, you would imagine that the state attitudes towards these companies are shifting again, with the pendulum swinging towards less control. But I don’t think it’s a return to the past. It’s a different situation. In my current work, I try to unpack exactly what is going on right now.

Larry: We’ll definitely need your help unpacking that. On a related note and as a follow up, if I read it correctly, in popular accounts in which how Western tech firms like Google, Microsoft, etc. have been pushed out of the tech market in China is through direct central state actions aimed at protecting domestic tech firms. But from your account, there’s a lot more work that needs to be done between these tech platform companies to integrate into local governments to create a supply chain for certain products on these platforms. How much of the failure of Western tech firms in growing in the Chinese market can be attribute to central state actions, versus their failure to activate ties to local governments and markets?

Lin: I wouldn’t deny that there are efforts from the central state to cultivate what they call private champions. In the early years, in the mid-2000s, the Chinese state was less protectionist and more open to foreign business and competition and the time. But there was still a local advantage. With Alibaba’s competition with eBay, nationalism was mobilized to call for protectionist policies and it definitely worked.But for eBay, it was very hard to compete with Alibaba’s embeddedness and on-the-ground collaboration with local counties in building up infrastructures, logistics, and transportations networks. Alibaba’s soft infrastructures, such as its tracking and legal systems, also mattered. Alibaba is one case, but in comparison to other companies, like Tencent, ByteDance, Pinduoduo, or Temu, they’re embedded differently into the local economy. Now, with China’s expansion into, for example, India, Southeast Asia and North America, these Chinese companies find themselves in a different environment in their competition with local firms, and we see protectionist action against foreign businesses there, too. But at the same time, it’s also a very different economic dynamic. For example, in Southeast Asia, it’s very decentralized. In China, it’s decentralized too, but it’s a different type of decentralization.

Larry: Your analysis of labor, work, and production is also incredibly intersectional. You demonstrate how production for platforms like Taobao maps onto geographic, gender, educational, class, and familial inequalities. As you point out, platforms have blurred distinctions between the public and private, production and consumption, and more. You also point out that those who engage in the platform economy are not simply “victims” and show how these actors can be subversive and exercise some degree of agency. What can we learn about the embodiment of entrepreneurship, and how a focus on entrepreneurship can be exclusionary in Chinese society?

Lin: The more individualized model of entrepreneurship could be exclusionary or problematic. This new round of proliferation of entrepreneurship is different in the sense that the distinction between entrepreneurship and labor is highly blurred. The narratives of the tech companies, both in China and in the U.S. with companies like Uber and Amazon, perpetuate, especially in the early days, a mystification of the real source value. Surplus value really came from the informalization of labor. Without protections for labor, people really had to rely on their own energy and sometimes their families. The overemphasis on entrepreneurship and the digital can be problematic. But also, especially as I mapped out in the Taobao Village chapter, there is a long supply chain. If you only study from the mediated side of the platform, we don’t see the gendered, age-based, and locale-based division of labor behind who makes the products. The reality in China today is also what happened in the U.S. and Western Europe a long time ago. No one wants to do the hard labor of manufacturing. Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs in this environment carried a lot of cultural value. Becoming an influencer and live streamer seemed better in comparison to going to the factory to work. Even though the entrepreneurial regime of labor is more precarious when compared to the factory regime, which is actually more stable and sometimes provides good money. But people would prefer the new type of work. Definitely, this characterized the 2010s, when I did my research. This focus on entrepreneurship could be exclusionary and generate a lot of inequalities and mystifications in the process. But things are gradually changing at this moment globally.

Larry: In reading the book, I am also thinking back to my own experiences in and around China during the 2010s. Your description of the earlier and middle part of the decade really rings true in terms of techno-optimism—or perhaps, just more generally, optimism about the future and China’s growing role in the world. But as the decade waned on, you captured some of the more sober assessments of technology-driven growth and some longing for this earlier period. How would you characterize where the Chinese economy is now? Should we go back to the early 2010s?

Lin: I’m currently in China to continue my research and figure out exactly what is happening. The Spring Festival holiday just ended, and I see a lot of news about the economic situation in China, in relation to the U.S. and globally. I did a lot of my research in the first half and middle part of the 2010s and continued into 2019 before the pandemic hit. In the process of revising the dissertation for the book, I heard a lot of reflections and critiques of the first half of that decade and the proliferation of mass entrepreneurship and innovation and about excessive financialization. I partially incorporated these critiques into the book, such as the critique on the continuing reliance on real estate. As I mentioned in the book, policymakers realized by 2019 that real estate and infrastructure building were no longer sustainable. This came to jeopardize the taxation revenue based on land sales, which is so central to how local states finance themselves. But there’s still a continued reliance on real estate, which is now disguising itself as the “innovation sector”, with things like the proliferation of incubators, coworking spaces, and later on live streaming bases. The pandemic also created this overcapacity of live-streaming buildings everywhere in China. There are also discussions about to what extent mass entrepreneurship and innovation really help China enhance its competitiveness in so-called hard technology sectors, like semiconductors, AI, and biotech, as well as discussions of the so-called excessive virtualization of the economy. In the latter half of the 2010s until very recently, the Chinese state made a lot of adjustments to its approach to innovation policy. The pendulum swung back to controlled regulation, partially as a reaction to U. S. sanctions; China had no choice but to focus on indigenous innovation, especially in semiconductor independence.

But since 2022, there’s been a shift. Real estate is basically on the verge of collapse. Where my family is, there are a lot of empty apartment buildings. The debt-financed driven model no longer works. Combined with the weak stock markets, the lackluster performance of Chinese companies in the U.S. stock markets, and the lack of investor confidence, it’s hard to see changes to the economic outlook. Externally, there are also continued high-interest rates in the US, which prevent US dollar capital from moving outwards, in addition to the sanctions, tariffs, and the dynamics of reshoring and moving manufacturing out of China. That coupled with geopolitical risks and uncertainties such as the American election, Gaza, and the Ukraine-Russia conflict, will contribute to China’s prolonged economic slump. On the more micro-level, in my interaction with family and friends during the Spring Festival holiday, I see people in all sectors, especially those working for government institutions, with salary cuts because of the high local debt. Young people no longer seek out entrepreneurship and risk. A lot of them really seek security. They are just forced into entrepreneurship because they can’t really find employment in the state sector. Private internet companies are also not hiring as much as before. What could these young people do? They turn only to e-commerce and live streaming. So there’s a lot of anxiety. But there’s a consensus amongst business people and policymakers that we can’t return to the early 2010s. There’s no space to return. China has no choice but to carve out its own space. The US-China dynamics shifted. The pragmatic economic partnership is no longer working. China has to really try and lift itself out of the economic slump and build alternative relationships, such as by expanding into forming new economic ties with Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Larry: As someone who studies China, you are probably no stranger to the question about how this case is relevant for those studying labor, platforms, and socio-technical change more broadly. As you discuss in your book, you seek to describe a “China paradigm” that can help illuminate entrepreneurial processes elsewhere. What is different about China’s tech platforms, when compared to the U.S. or elsewhere?

Lin: If we focus on just digital platforms, I don’t think there are only two models, the U.S. versus China model. Although I do agree that, these two countries generate more tech giants in comparison to other countries. There are many different models. So that’s why I talk about the China paradigm instead of a China model. We’re trying to articulate the global and more universal factors to the local situation. Based on my knowledge of China and the U.S., I would say there are three generalizable differences between platforms. First, Chinese platforms are definitely less powerful in the face of state power. As I mentioned, they have to serve a lot of extra-economic purposes, like promoting social equity and social stability on top of innovation. They cannot really rival state power in certain sectors like finance, for example. Alibaba learned this lesson the hard way when it ventured into this sector too far and was disciplined. Second, Chinese platforms are still less global in scope in comparison to Silicon Valley firms. But there are a lot of intention and vision and attempts to expand, whether through capital, opening new branches, or investing in other local firms. But there’s still a long way to go if China wants to catch up with the U.S. in this regard. Third, Chinese platforms are shaped by China’s changing position in the international division of labor. You see this changing over the years. Because I studied e-commerce, I paid a lot of attention to the supply chain. There’s also a lot of interest in overseas Chinese commerce companies like Temu and Shein, which are based on the export-oriented model in China. Although that model’s feasibility at this moment is questionable. I do feel that this overseas expansion of e-commerce is continual and sustained. Because of China’s position in the international division of labor, the informal sector in China is still quite large, and that makes people more reliant on family institutions. Based on my limited understanding, a lot of U.S. platform labor are also family-based, so I wouldn’t say this is specific to China. But because of the existence of a large informal sector and the lack of protection in general for labor, the family plays an even bigger role in China.

Larry: What are you working on next? How has challenges in accessing and studying China impacted your work, and what advice do you have for others who are interested in studying China?

Lin: I’m working on two lines of research at this moment. First, I am continuing my work on platform studies related to digital labor and e-commerce, focusing on rural China and urbanization. This is a very important dynamic that’s driving China’s transformation at this moment. With other China-based researchers, I am also looking into the geographical diversity and regional differences within China. My research has largely been focused on Eastern China, but the path dependencies and governance experiences in Western China are different, which shapes the dynamics of internet companies. In collaboration with other people, I’m also working on mapping out a larger framework of platform capitalism. For example, with Mora Weigel at Northeastern who’s studying Amazon sellers, we want to take a social reproductive perspective to analyze the role of family institutions in shaping the platform capitalism space. We feel like a lot of the discussions are from the more masculine capital, political economy perspective without taking into account the more feminist political and economic space of the family. I also organized a special issue on, platform economies in Asia. I don’t have the expertise in these other places, but I do want to learn more to open up a more comparative perspective for myself. Second, another line of research is more of a new adventure for me, in studying the U.S.-China entanglement in bioscience, biotech, and biomedicine in general. This is centered on transnational flows of scientists, entrepreneurs, and knowledge workers mediated by capital flow, policy, and shifting geopolitics. My next big monograph, which is still in its very initial stages, will look at the impact of geopolitical challenges. Of course, there are also fears about the lack of access to China at this moment. That partially drives my focus on the transnational. I could do a lot more fieldwork in the U.S., for example, by looking at the immigrants and looking at policy from both sides. I could also take a step back into history. While archival access could also be challenging, you could also base this research on oral history, focusing on more recent, post-1980s experiences. If you focus on the sciences, there are still accessible academic archives or sometimes even personal archives. Universities and other institutions can still facilitate some access.