The entrepreneurial labor of reinvention in Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech district

Abstract

Deploying the concept of the entrepreneurial labor of reinvention, this article contrasts the experiences of elite and grassroots IT entrepreneurs as they navigated China’s post-2008 economic restructuring centered around IT innovation and entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech district, also known as China’s Silicon Valley. By situating the changing labor practices and subjectivities of a new generation of Zhongguancun IT entrepreneurs in the history of the post-Mao evolution of IT labor and entrepreneurship, this article emphasizes the specificities of digital work that both continue from and reinvent historically situated local labor practices. It also deconstructs the universalism of the state-led entrepreneurialization campaign to highlight its regime of inequalities and persisting politics of exclusion.