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Abstract
This article explores the connections between micro-entrepreneurship, new media technologies, and gender in rural China. Based on fieldwork among diverse individuals engaged in agricultural and non-agricultural micro-entrepreneurship, I examine how uses of technology in economic production become the site for the reproduction and/or reconfiguration of gender hierarchies. Grounding my analysis in feminist and critical theories of technology, I investigate the gendered uses and discourses of new media technologies that emerge from three types of entrepreneurial spaces: physical places where micro-entrepreneurship is based on new media technologies, such as internet cafés and mobile phone shops; virtual realms where new media technologies potentially facilitate entrepreneurship, including text messaging and various websites; and virtual spaces where informal learning and sharing take place via mediated networks formed around common occupations. I argue that in the context of entrepreneurship, even among women and men who are young and have migration experience, deeply entrenched gendered power differentials produce unequal access to capital and social networks, and hence uses and understandings of technology. Although engagement with technology has opened up new spaces for economic enhancement and the rearrangement of conventional gender norms, such engagement does not overcome – indeed, in many cases reproduces – gendered power relations.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a Program for the Enhancement of Scholarly and Creative Activities grant from Texas A&M University. I thank Donnalee Dox, Rebecca Gill, Joseph Jewell, Joan Wolf and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article.
Notes
1. All names of informants and specific villages are pseudonyms.
2. Interview, July 27, 2011.
3. For an overview on the differences between urban and rural China and the spread of ICTs in rural China, see Wallis, chapter 1.
4. Rural Chinese women have one of the highest suicide rates in the world and are more likely to suffer from domestic violence than urban Chinese women. See http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/12/09-011209/en/ and http://gongyi.163.com/12/0326/10/7TH0I37L00933KC8.html.
5. In China micro-entrepreneurship is synonymous with a self-employed individual or a small enterprise employing fewer than eight people who are likely to be family members (http://www.planetfinancechina.org/resource-center/FAQ).
6. For an overview of such scholarship published in the nineties, see Entwisle, Henderson, Short, Bouma, and Zhai (Citation1995).
7. The Twelfth Five-Year Plan, approved in March 2011, continues most of these policies (Sina, Citation2011).
8. On project-based initiatives (as opposed to everyday usage), including the creation of agricultural information workstations and telecenters, see Qiang et al., Citation2009; Soriano, Citation2007; and Zhao, Citation2008.
9. Interview, August 3, 2011.
10. Interview, July 25, 2013.
11. Interview, July 25, 2013.
12. Interview, July 25, 2013.
13. Several women said they had gone without any phone connectivity between the time their husbands had cut off the landline in the mid-2000s and when they received a mobile phone, often a hand-me-down from their husbands, a couple of years later.
14. Even though I denote these small businesses as “non-agricultural,” during the planting and harvest seasons these women were likely to participate in farming.
15. Interview, July 26, 2013.
16. Interview, July 25, 2013.
17. Interview, July 25, 2011.
18. Interview, July 26, 2013.
19. Interview July 25, 2013.
20. Interview July 25, 2013.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Cara Wallis
Cara Wallis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. She studies new media technologies and issues of power, difference, subjectivity, and social change in China. She is the author of Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones (NYU Press, 2013).