Living on E-Commerce: The Politics and Ethics of E-Trading in a Chinese City

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.