Binary Dreams: An Ethnography of the Digital Economy in China

Abstract

As Chinese economic growth slowed and production numbers fell following the world financial crisis of 2008, the digital economy in China became a site of renewed hope both for the modernizing ambitions of the Chinese government and the entrepreneurial aspirations of its citizens. However, just as the Internet in China appeared to affirm economic opportunities, it also provided a platform for young Chinese to express anxieties about their futures. When a national debate about the lack of socioeconomic mobility took over social media in 2012, it became evident that the success of China’s digital economy paradoxically depends on an online market populated by increasingly disillusioned Internet users. By examining the contradictory ability of the Chinese Internet to sustain hopes and reveal anxieties simultaneously, this dissertation explores how internet technologies mediate contemporary Chinese aspirations. This examination focuses on ethnographic research with two high-profile projects. Building on data collected during thirteen months of fieldwork as an intern at a government-supported startup cluster and as a production team member for two comedy shows financed by the online media provider Sohu, I argue that each of these projects uses the Internet to address issues of aspiration. Analyzing this process as the digital mediation of aspiration, I explore the complex ways in which Internet professionals address and negotiate aspirational possibilities and impossibilities to reach Internet audiences, customers, and entrepreneurs. This ethnography draws on and contributes to scholarship in Internet and media studies, feminist theory, philosophy, and anthropology to investigate the digital mediation of aspiration—the problematization, articulation, and materialization of aspirational issues through the Chinese Internet—in the digital economy in China. Building on data gathered through qualitative methods such as online and offline participant observation and semi-structured and biographical interviews, I analyze how Internet technologies come to invest aspirational projects with a sense of possibility, mediate between the needs of personal and national aspirations, and articulate aspirational imaginaries. At the startup cluster, entrepreneurs and the government articulate their economic hopes primarily as the digital potential of a vast online market. However, this widespread digital optimism, which sees the Internet as a nearly unlimited economic opportunity, tends to bracket more corporeal dimensions and limitations of aspiration, especially those related to gender. The importance of gender to understanding contemporary Chinese aspirations is further explored in the production of the two popular online comedy shows. I consider how these online media formats highlight the personal and embodied side of contemporary Chinese middle-class aspirations by addressing gendered experiences of getting “caught up” in societal norms and expectations. Together, I argue, these two sites reveal how economic and political efforts to capture the potential of the Chinese Internet depend on mediations of success and failure that draw on gendered difference to attract and captivate audiences.