Entrepreneurs in China’s ‘Silicon Valley’: state-led financialization and mass entrepreneurship/innovation

ABSTRACT

This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various levels have transformed themselves into ‘market agencies,’ acting through the market instead of governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves of ‘mass entrepreneurship and innovation’ under the current Xi-Li administration.

KEYWORDS:

• Financialization
• entrepreneurship
• platform
• digital economy
• state/market relation
• China ICT

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Despite efforts to recruit more female informants, only four out of 42 startup entrepreneurs interviewed for this research were women, which revealed the stark gender inequality in ZGC’s startup scene. However, a thorough discussion of gender issues is beyond the scope of this essay, and one coauthor discussed gender inequality in IT entrepreneurship in China at length elsewhere (Zhang, 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lin Zhang

Lin Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She has a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, and a MA from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication. Focusing on the Global South and China in particular, she studies information capitalism from a global perspective, with emphasis on intersectionality and social justice. She is author of the forthcoming monograph, Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurialism and the Remaking of China after 2008 (Columbia University Press) [email: [email protected]].

Elaine Jingyan Yuan

Elaine Jingyan Yuan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has a PhD in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University. Her research interests focus on social implications of new forms of communication and media technology. She is author of the book ‘The web of meaning: the Internet in a changing Chinese society’ (University of Toronto Press) [email: [email protected]].