Living on E-Commerce: The Politics and Ethics of E-Trading in a Chinese City
Date
2018
Authors
Qian, Linliang
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Publisher
Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University
Abstract
Based on thirteen-month fieldwork in the city of Yiwu,
an emergent e-commercial hub in Southeast China, this
dissertation looks at the making of a neoliberal e-commerce
economy and its political, economic, social, and cultural impacts
on e-traders in the locality. Despite some state developmental
endeavors, this new economy is largely fostered by grassroots
market players and facilitated by large e-platform giants, such
as the Alibaba Group. The expansion of this new economy has given
individual Chinese e-traders new opportunities to generate wealth
and cultural capital, achieve upward social mobility and
construct an enterprising subjectivity. Yet, the domination of
e-platform giants in this economy has also created a precarious
condition for the grassroots e-traders, in which they have to
adapt to the changing environment and find creative strategies
and tactics to ensure their economic security. Through
investigations of their self-reliant discourses and business
practices in opposition to state intervention in economy and in
individual life, their negotiations over independence and justice
under the hegemony of e-platform giants, their struggles for
social recognition in urban Chinese society, their moral agency
in negotiating and contesting ethics in business encounters, and
their employment of self-enterprising and self-disciplining
measures in dealing with economic and social uncertainties, this
dissertation illustrates how the ongoing formation of the digital
regime of accumulation generates an anxious yet flourishing life
for the e-traders under neoliberalism as well as speaks to the
culturally specific process of subjectivization in China.
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Keywords
E-Commerce, China, Yiwu, Taobao, Alibaba, entrepreneurial subjects, neoliberalism
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Thesis (PhD)
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