Includes bibliographical references and index.

"From start-up entrepreneurs in China's equivalent Silicon Valley to the booming phenomenon of e-commerce rural villages, IT and new internet-based industries are shaping ideas and practices regarding labor and identity in China. Digital entrepreneurship was seen as a way to energize China's slowing economy after the 2008 global financial crisis-but its implementation and practice, while successful in some respects, has also reinforced traditional ideas about state power, gender, and what it means to be Chinese. Lin Zhang argues that these new digital initiatives have simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Through her examination and critique of the new media economy in China, Zhang highlights the historical ruptures, continuities, and contradictions of entrepreneurial labor of self-reinvention in China. In The Labor of Reinvention, Lin Zhang examines digital entrepreneurship in three different areas of Chinese society to provide a multifaceted and ground-level view of how the Chinese are grappling with the new digital economy. She recounts the story of how one U.S.-educated IT entrepreneur's initial application of Google's "people-centric" management style gave way to nationalist discourse to ensure state funding for his crypto-chip startup. Far from Beijing, Zhang considers the mixed success of new ventures in rural areas that combine modern e-commerce with centuries-old practices of familial production. Finally, she discusses a group of internationally mobile upper-class Chinese women whose ability to create a space for themselves in the new digital economy selling luxury goods was curtailed by the patriarchal Chinese state"-- Provided by publisher.