Ep 225 - China and the Labor of Reinvention with Lin Zhang

Dr. Lin Zhang talks with Steve about her book "The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy."

Her book includes stories of individuals who transformed themselves and their lives to take advantage of this new global economy. She tells of Min, a former prisoner...

“I think Min's story in a way captures the sort of imperative of entrepreneurialism in which we are all still living. The contemporary capitalist economy. The need to kind of keep reinventing oneself to adapt to the constant changes, but also the kind of contradiction generated on personal and collective level. So, the coexistence of opportunities, risk and frustrations. So this is, I think, what I try to document in the book, the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention.”

Dr. Zhang and Steve discuss the support provided by the state, which is no small matter. It makes entrepreneurism in China different from that of the US, or from India or developing countries of the global South.

Zhang also talks about the roots of Chinese nationalism in China's socialist anti-imperialist history, which are reinforced by recent American sanctions and containment of China.

Zhang argues that the US tends to view China through a simplistic lens of authoritarianism versus democracy, while the majority of Chinese people do not see their relationship with the party state in such terms. She provides a more nuanced picture of the Chinese state, discussing the competing demands of the central government to maintain economic development, social equity, and national security, as well as the discrepancies between central and local states.

Dr. Lin Zhang is an assistant professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire. She graduated from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, with a PhD in Communication, and MA from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. She is the author of The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy, one of the first multi-sited ethnographic accounts of the rising entrepreneurial labor in urban, rural, and transnational China since tech innovation had accelerated in the country after 2008.

https://linzhangweb.org