Constructing a new precarious elite group: transnational entrepreneurs in Shenzhen's high-tech scene

Keywords: China; entrepreneurship; Shenzhen speed; precarity
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 61

Abstract

Startup entrepreneurs are not a traditionally established elite profession in China. Only in 1988, the legitimacy of private enterprises was recognized by the Chinese Constitution. Since then, China’s increasingly open regulatory and institutional environment has allowed market entry and private sector growth (He, 2009). On the one hand, the state’s desire for industrial upgrading through international communities and high-tech entrepreneurship is nothing new. However, what appears particular in Shenzhen’s startup world is the overlap between the “best” interests of the state and the self-narratives that most transnational entrepreneurs embrace in their pursuit of success. These narratives appear completely divorced from their precarious socio-economic and labour conditions. While the primary mission of the state is understood to be the rapid industrial upgrading from “made in China” to “created in China”, the institutional culture of the “Shenzhen speed” (Shenzhen sudu) that values speed and efficiency, influenced by the state’s goals for industrial upgrading, helps create a context where high-tech startup entrepreneurs are under the moral pressure of having to make all sorts of efforts in the pursuit of entrepreneurship success, leading to precarious conditions. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Shenzhen's high-tech scene in 2020 and 2021, this study sheds new light on the tension of this new precarious elite group in Shenzhen, their motivations, experiences, and perspectives when struggling to make their born global startups succeed.