New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780231195317.
Drawing on a decade of research, The Labor of Reinvention was completed at a juncture when the “China threat” supplanted the “China model.” “Complex, nuanced representations of Chinese society faded from mainstream American media and policy discourse,” writes Zhang in the preface, “to be replaced by reductionist caricatures and stereotypes” (xiv). Traversing diverse spaces ranging from tech innovation centres in Beijing to handicraft workshops in Shandong villages, from the crowded, disorienting feeds of e-commerce platforms to serene, airy luxury stores in Los Angeles, Zhang’s book captures myriad individuals strategizing and hustling to forge new lives, constituting the arising of a so-called “gig economy” in China following the 2008 global economic crisis.
In this wide-ranging book, you will meet a college-educated rural-to-urban migrant worker couple, who moved back to their village to sell bulrush crafts woven by elderly village women on the Taobao platform. The husband became the “model peasant entrepreneur,” cruising around the country to receive awards from governments and Alibaba, while his wife and mother-in-law attended to business and children. You will meet Tu, holding onto his genealogy and biography assembly business as all bookstores left the neighbourhood to make way for state-sponsored tech incubators and coworking spaces. Tu’s advertisement of “Internet + Family Names,” echoing the government’s enthusiasm for the Internet of Things (“Internet Plus”), also gestures toward the district’s past as Haidian Book City—a different economy, a different life world, and a different form of entrepreneurism.
China is not short on entrepreneurism. The gradualism of China’s “reform and opening up,” many have argued, consists of iterations of breakthrough at the margin, follow-up in theory, and normalization via policy (bianyuan tupo, lilun genshang, zhengce guifan). This “trilogy” has played out both within and outside the state. Zhang’s research tackles a particular form: the state’s heavy-handed promotion of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” and “rural internet entrepreneurship,” both formalized in 2015 in an attempt to restructure the country’s export-driven economy, boost the urban employment slump, and move up the global value chain.
The book details the implementation of this nationwide program in different settings, and how local states and parastate actors such as universities, private firms, and individuals from diverse backgrounds have made use of government subsidies, preferential policies, legitimating rhetoric, and infrastructural construction to pursue their own ends. It is one of the earliest monographs to place stories from China alongside extensive accounts of flexible, digital, and cultural labour emerging since the 1970s in liberal capitalism, as Fordism and Western welfare states weakened.
Whereas the “end products” may appear superfluously similar—gatherings with coffee in a tech incubator, authentic-looking handicrafts on an e-commerce app, or personalized care shepherding the acquisition of overseas brands—Zhang adroitly demonstrates their constitution by local social-cultural norms, institutional setups, and most saliently, the hand of the state. Zhang’s approach to the Chinese gig economy prompts a reconsideration of the literature on its Western counterpart, where the routine absence of the state, or what communication scholar Luzhou Li would call deliberate “policy silence,” may be productively parsed out with equal diligence. In this sense, markets everywhere are configured by the “many hands of the state,” to borrow the metaphor from political scientists Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff’s coedited volume (The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control, Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Zhang’s marked effort to unpack the confluence of various historical arcs constitutive of the dynamic of her field sites is a remarkable intervention in the hegemonic conception about platform capitalism and, more broadly, techno-capitalism. The existing scholarship, which has proliferated in the past 15 years or so, tends to situate the new round of tech-driven and mediated growth in relation to race-based and (neo)colonial forms of extraction. This progressive agenda, like any abstract theoretical analytic, has its own history. Yet China is uneasily positioned, and sometimes absent, in the histories of colonization, slavery, and the Cold War that are most familiar to the Western public and academia. If history informs theory and critique, to calibrate and channel critical energy in China studies entails serious work. Undertaking this often lonesome pursuit, The Labor of Reinvention does not merely bring into view regions other than Western liberal capitalist societies. It attends to local dynamics while maintaining a critical distance from Anglophone scholarship’s dominant analytical framings.
The Labor of Reinvention puts China’s postsocialist configuration at the forefront. Through its pages, Zhang identifies “residual socialist legacies” in the state effort to “entrepreneurialize development and social equity,” such as campaign-style mass mobilization, techno-nationalism (emphasizing technological self-reliance), the call for a “more inclusive economy,” and the drive to mitigate unemployment. These rhetorical and redistributional measures may serve as sites for further interrogation. Put simply, though once characteristic of socialist revolutionary ideals, when is redressing inequality taken as an end in itself? When is it taken as the means to serve the end of sustainable growth—the very logic that Mariana Mazzucato outlines in The Entrepreneurial State (Anthem Press, 2013)—or to serve the end of political stability?
The Labor of Reinvention forcefully demonstrates that one cannot understand the Chinese market without seeing its entwinement with “state power and social reproduction.” What, the book invites us to ponder, is the relationship between state power and social reproduction, given that systematic extraction from the labour of women and in the countryside is a defining feature of China’s socialist past? Even US neoliberal policies, as poignantly traced in Melinda Cooper’s work, have been undergirded by family values. Zhang’s vivid illustration of widening inequalities along old and new lines provides invaluable fodder to consider the panoramic question: What patterns of value transfer have been fostered by state-led entrepreneurialism? In the era of tech monopolies and ubiquitous state-business collusion, by bringing out tensions and frictions in one of the world’s biggest digital economies, The Reinvention of Labor is an indispensable contribution to the global search for truly progressive, “pro-social” policy making.
Angela Xiao Wu
New York University, New York