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Abstract
In this article I examined how “slash” and startup careers have been promoted in the recent call for mass entrepreneurship to further advance the interests of the state; and how the initiatives in Mainland China have provided Hong Kong ideas for tackling its governmentality crisis resulting from youth disgruntlement with deteriorating socio-economic conditions and loss of political autonomy. I adopt the inter-referencing Asia approach to facilitate a conversation between the research on precarity in Beijing and Hong Kong contexts and the large body of literature on precarity that derives mainly from the Western experiences. I base my analysis on discourse analysis and visual analysis of three corpora of textual and visual materials, including materials from interviews and ethnographic research.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the organizers of the conference ‘The industrial revolution 4.0: Preparing for disruptive technologies in 21st century Asia’, held on 26-27 October, 2017 at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. I am grateful to Eric Thomas Kerr, Rich Ling, Dong Hyun Song as well as the anonymous reviewers for their support and helpful comments.
Notes
1 The original phrase in Chinese is 大众创业、万众创新.
2 This term was coined by Marci Alboher (2007) and introduced to China by Susan Kuang on WeChat in 2013.
3 Precarization refers to transformations in employment conditions such as irregular, unstable, and temporary jobs with low wages and no benefits compounded by limited or no social protections. Precarity causes material, existential and social insecurity in life and shatters individuals’ sense of well-being (Allison Citation2012; de Goede 2004; Helberger, Pierson, and Poell 2018; Jokinen Citation2016; Vosko, MacDonald, and Campbell 2009; Webster 2016).
4 Financial Services Development Council (2017), for example, references China in this manner: “Mainland China is already the global FinTech leader in terms of scale. Hong Kong, despite its large financial sector, as yet has only a modest showing in the FinTech space” (1); “Mainland China is by the world’s largest and most established FinTech market” (15).
5 This article is derived from my ongoing research in China since 2015, first on the aspiration of good life among Chinese youth in Beijing and Hong Kong till 2017, then followed by two other ongoing studies on technology and smart living among youth in Beijing since 2019. In total, I have interviewed 117 young people in Beijing and 30 young people in Hong Kong.
6 Jones and Wallace (1992) pinpoints out that the concept of youth is often determined by political and cultural contexts.
7 Even those had 9-to-5 jobs expressed interests in having start-up in the future.
8 The majority of informants during the interviews around 2015–2017 were unaware of the term of “slash”.
9 Laurent Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2012) captured how late capitalism has worn people down by giving them a false promise of the good life.
10 Foucault (1991) pointed out that the survival and the limits of a state should be examined by how well it guides people to govern the self.
11 Self-media requires subjects to use their creative energies, ability to think independently, a form of immaterial labor (Heaton and Proulx 2015).
12 This informant is a rising star exemplifying this “slash” subjectivity. He graduated in 2017 and got a stable job in a state enterprise. Because of his small wages, he started writing self-help posts on WeChat. Once he reached around 100,000 followers/subscribers, he received requests and offers for other new media assignments, earning a monthly salary of RMB40,000 (roughly USD5,600) in 2018. He was also invited to respond to questions on Zhihu. He has received so many freelance jobs now that he has had to hire an assistant to help manage his work and even write shorter blog posts for him. The successful ones would often publish their posts in book. A few informants have been trying to write their posts hoping to become a successful self-media.
13 There is an increase in salary after the first few months of probation, which is usually around 50% to 100%, but raises thereafter are small. Many choose to work for state organizations for the opportunity to gain household registration and remain in Beijing, but the prospect of material or career growth is not satisfying. In addition, breaking a contract (after acquiring a hukou) with these organizations results in a heavy fine.
14 Informants revealed that given Kuang’s popularity, she probably has a team of photographers and other assistants working to create her autonomous feminine images. That is, it is likely that she is not the carefree slash that she appears to be.
15 Two illustrative examples are, first, the changing policies regarding internal migrants in Beijing, for example, in the winter of 2017, the Beijing Government forcefully removed and evicted the “low-income” population from temporary housing, and second, irregularities in rental contracts in the heated housing market, in which landlords and agents can increase the price of or cancel rentals easily without much legal protection for tenants.
17 The Commission on Youth, led by a leading Hong Kong tycoon’s son, Lau Ming Wai, has been working to promote this “slash” subjectivity in the city.
18 Hong Kong’s fading competitiveness is signaled by China’s booming platform development (e.g. cashless payment (Chong 2019) and its strong purchasing power, especially in property and tourism sectors.
19 News about destroyed shared-bikes (a sharing economy idea that was imported from China to the city) was not rare and often read as a rejection of China.
20 For instance, in addition to JUMPSTARTER, Alibaba Entrepreneurial Fund also funds the Young Founders School, a registered charity that offers entrepreneurial bootcamp trainings for youths aged 12 to 17 years.
21 The Freeter phenomenon in Japan seems to share some striking similarities with precarity. Freeter first appeared in 1988 to refer to young part-time workers who sought a different lifestyle by exploring alternative ways of living, a work-life balance that diverged from a lifetime of employment in corporate businesses as embodied by the “salarymen” (Inui 2009; Yoshitaka 2005, 2009). Yoshitaka (2009) argued that the idea of creativity helped reorganize the labor force of freeters, inspiring young people who worked part-time (enduring labor precarity) to explore opportunities in creative industries while service industries benefited tremendously from these flexible labors in the post-Fordist changing economy. The freeters’ search for “autonomy” was initially well-received; however, the recession since then has forced many to be freeters, with little hope of securing employment. The freeters are blamed for their precarious condition. A failure to acknowledge their condition as “an effect” of a changing economy has exposed a crisis of governmentality, and, consequently, these young people are rising up to resist and challenge governing practices (Yoshitaka 2005).