"Becoming entrepreneurs" : an ethnographic study of subject formation under Chinese mass internet entrepreneurship

Abstract

In recent years, the “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation” (ME&I) campaign has been actively promoted in China as a national project to achieve economic restructuring and social equity. Against such policy measures, a new wave of tech entrepreneurship began, attracting people from diverse social backgrounds in the pursuit of such ideals, with the hope of starting up internet businesses through gaining the support of the Chinese government and private investment capital funds. In this study, I argue that the campaign of mass entrepreneurship and innovation in China should be understood in two ways. First, a mass mobilizing campaign aligning the “double aspirations” of the state and the masses to achieve national estructuring and personal upgrade. Second, a modernizing project of multiple paradoxes that confronts its participants with the tensions between the rhetoric of a socialist state and neoliberal rationales of a market economy with “Chinese characteristics”.

Based on intensive online and offline ethnographic fieldwork primarily carried out in a state-designated startup space in Beijing between the years of 2017 and 2019, this study examines how internet entrepreneurship was manifested and incorporated into the Chinese state’s national project of modernization and documents the everyday practices constituting the subject formation processes of grassroots internet entrepreneurs in Beijing.

Drawing from Michael Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, I analyze how a variety of “technologies” and discursive practices, namely, mass makerspaces and affective atmospheres, mediated imaginaries and disenchanted experiences, communicative labor and digital rhetoric, were normalized, routinized and habituated in the everyday lived experiences of grassroots startup entrepreneurs to form “aspiring subjects” carrying a habitus of aspiring. I delineate three main subjective processes constituting socialization of aspirations and “technologies of aspiring”, namely, “resonate and imagine”, “adapt and refashion”, and finally “reflect and reconcile”. I argue that these processes are collectively constructed by the changing dynamics of a web of interdependent actors, namely, the state, private capital, media and communication technologies, and the individual startup entrepreneurs, through which social disadvantages may be culturally sustained, reinforced, and recreated among the already precarious. Adopting a macro-meso-micro lens, I present a heuristic conceptual framework to understand modernization and the making of modern subjectivities in China and beyond, and the cultural reproduction of social inequalities at the level of the most mundane and verydayness. It contributes to critical debates on how cultivation of aspirations among the subalterns responds to existing social inequalities from a class perspective. I argue that the formation of “aspiring subjects” reflects and constitutes the contingencies of Chinese modernity as an entanglement of mass aspirations, cultural traditions and tensions felt by grassroots startup entrepreneurs in everyday life.