New Books In Economics

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia UP, 2023) by Lin Zhang. You’ll hear about: A history of the book and Zhang’s entry into the fieldwork through family stories; How to understand entrepreneurialism as a dominant ideology in the global neoliberal labor economy and China’s positionality in the world; Why and how the book is organized based on three types of spaces – rural, urban, and transnational – across China and beyond; The similarities and differences between the elite and the grassroot entrepreneurs in Beijing; The e-commerce entrepreneurship as “platformized family production” in rural China and the roles played by government and large tech companies like Alibaba play in shaping the new rural production model; The limit and possibility of reinvention through “shanzhai” (copycat) e-commerce production; The gendered inequal