Entrepreneurial Labor and Middle-Class Work Imaginaries in Beijing’s Zhongguancun

• In Event: Startups, Innovation, Technology, and the Entrepreneurship Economy

Abstract

Abstract
This article depicts the new entrepreneurial work imaginaries observed among young IT entrepreneurs in Beijing’s Zhongguancun High-Tech Zone, known internationally as China’s Silicon Valley. While Zhongguancun has been serving as the mecca for Chinese IT entrepreneurs from across the country and around the world, the region witnessed a new wave of IT entrepreneurial gold rush following the 2008 global crisis. Based on ethnography and interviews conducted in 2015 and 2016, I describe how the new work imaginaries emerged at the particular post-2008 conjuncture of China’s economic and social restructuring and the global transformations in labor organization; both continue and rupture from the previous generations (Ganesh, Cheney). Specifically, I show how entrepreneurial workers’ desire for individualized self-exploratory work and their investor mentality to labor coexist with a longing for new forms of communication and sociality. Organizational communication is articulated in alignment with the state’s strategic appropriation of socialist grassroots mobilization rhetoric and the persistence of techno-nationalist identifications among the entrepreneurs. New hybrid entrepreneurial forms are created through intersecting communication frames that reflect the contentious and unstable alliance between politics, commerce, and organizational culture under state-led funding.
 

Author

• Lin Zhang, University of New Hampshire