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"From start-up entrepreneurs in China's equivalent Silicon Valley to the booming phenomenon of e-commerce rural villages, IT and new internet-based industries are shaping ideas and practices regarding labor and identity in China. Digital entrepreneurship was seen as a way to energize China's slowing economy after the 2008 global financial crisis-but its implementation and practice, while successful in some respects, has also reinforced traditional ideas about state power, gender, and what it means to be Chinese. Lin Zhang argues that these new digital initiatives have simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Through her examination and critique of the new media economy in China, Zhang highlights the historical ruptures, continuities, and contradictions of entrepreneurial labor of self-reinvention in China. In The Labor of Reinvention, Lin Zhang examines digital entrepreneurship in three different areas of Chinese society to provide a multifaceted and ground-level view of how the Chinese are grappling with the new digital economy. She recounts the story of how one U.S.-educated IT entrepreneur's initial application of Google's "people-centric" management style gave way to nationalist discourse to ensure state funding for his crypto-chip startup. Far from Beijing, Zhang considers the mixed success of new ventures in rural areas that combine modern e-commerce with centuries-old practices of familial production. Finally, she discusses a group of internationally mobile upper-class Chinese women whose ability to create a space for themselves in the new digital economy selling luxury goods was curtailed by the patriarchal Chinese state."

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity.Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. Zhang explores the surge in digital entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of global financial crises, the U.S.-China trade war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She argues that the rise of internet-based industries and practices has simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Despite embracing high-tech innovation, state-led entrepreneurialization does not represent a radical break with the past. It has provided a means for implementing developmental goals while retaining the importance of the traditional family and generating new inequalities.Shedding new light on global capitalism and the digital economy by centering a non-Western perspective, The Labor of Reinvention vividly conveys how the contradictions of entrepreneurialism have played out in China

State-controlled listed companies have always dominated Chinese stock markets. As a result of the rampant scandals related to them, there have been voluminous academic efforts to explore their corporate governance, underpinned by agency costs. However, these studies have yet to examine the phenomenon from the perspective of venture capital and adaptive efficiency. During the last ten years, despite China's remarkable progress in the development of its venture capital market, its domestic venture capital has been marginalized by American competitors. Given the different performance between them, the author contends that the corporate governance system of Chinese state-controlled listed companies has hampered the performance of the institutional factors which are responsible for the prosperity of American venture capital in Chinese venture capital markets. With the practice of American venture capital as the mirror, he empirically demonstrates that Chinese domestic venture capital lacks the four factors related to the success of their American counterparts: large and independent funding, application of incentive mechanisms, efficient exit channels, and a high risk tolerance level. More importantly, these defects as a whole are closely linked to the corporate governance of state-controlled listed companies. Considering the potential negative consequences on economic and social development, the author identifies policy reforms underway to harmonize agency costs and adaptive efficiency

The history of the internet, whether in China or elsewhere in the world, is often told through the stories of successful and often publicly listed companies, state policy initiatives and chronology, or prominent individuals and groups such as tech company founders and influential social and political activists. This short essay tells a different story of the Chinese internet history in the past 30 years from a social reproductive perspective, centering on rural e-commerce and families caught in between the rural-urban divide, against the wider currents of the state's rural informatization campaign, Chinese Big Techs' expansion into the countryside, and ongoing transformation in urbanization and rural-urban conversion. The goal is to move beyond a techno-determinist, individualized, and male-centric framework of analyzing digital media and the internet to adopt a materialist, feminist, and substantivist approach.

Boys' Love (BL), a subculture centered around same-sex male romances and eroticism, has become increasingly integrated into mainstream commercial culture in China. However, the genre explores homosexuality and pornography, which are considered taboos in China. BL has thus become situated at the intersection of the economic ambition of digital giants and the authorities' increasingly ideological control. I discuss the position of BL in Tencent's pan-entertainment ecosystem to highlight the results of platformization and the impact of the vague framework of platform governance.

PurposeExpanding the research on traditional history of economic ideology into the research on the history of economics composed of three elements – history of ideology, history of policies and events – is a new idea for researching the history of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics. The start of the history of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics is consistent with that of the Sinicization of Marxist political economy and can be dated from at least 1917.Design/methodology/approachThe key point of the research on the history of ideologies of the socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics is to treat the relationship between theory and people properly, i.e. we should not neglect the effect brought out by the economists on theory construction while we attach importance to the theoretical contribution of the leaders and leading group of the Communist Party of China (CPC).FindingsFor the research on the history of economic policies of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics, on the one hand, we should clarify the relationship among ideologies, strategies and policies; on the other hand, we should not evade the summarization of lessons from history.Originality/valueBesides presenting the development route of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics under competition, the research on the events in the history of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics should also help develop the socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics.

Deploying the concept of the entrepreneurial labor of reinvention, this article contrasts the experiences of elite and grassroots IT entrepreneurs as they navigated China's post-2008 economic restructuring centered around IT innovation and entrepreneurship in Beijing's Zhongguancun high-tech district, also known as China's Silicon Valley. By situating the changing labor practices and subjectivities of a new generation of Zhongguancun IT entrepreneurs in the history of the post-Mao evolution of IT labor and entrepreneurship, this article emphasizes the specificities of digital work that both continue from and reinvent historically situated local labor practices. It also deconstructs the universalism of the state-led entrepreneurialization campaign to highlight its regime of inequalities and persisting politics of exclusion.

Combining platform studies with insights from research on petty capitalism and the political economy of the Chinese Internet, this article takes an integrated approach to analyze key moments in the historical evolution of the Chinese e-commerce monopoly Alibaba since 1999. It argues for a dynamic model of technological and cultural transformations that treats platformization as a set of historically and culturally specific processes and relations constituted by constantly shifting and interacting forces. It finds that in the early days, Alibaba deployed platform mechanisms of participation and commodification to position itself as a democratic and participatory platform contra the deficient infrastructure of the state, while relying on foreign venture capital to keep the tensions of commodification at bay to prioritize market expansion. After Alibaba had achieved monopoly after the 2008 global crisis, it has formed more symbiotic relations with the state, ramping up mechanisms of datafication, selection, and commodification to more effectively extract the surplus value generated through the labor of platform-based petty capitalists. Platform-labor tensions intensified as Alibaba's profit imperatives began to override its earlier promises of universal access and democratic participation.