Social factory as prosaic state space: Redefining labour in China’s mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign

Abstract

This study examines China’s mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign, with particular attention to the community of maker-entrepreneurs in the new techno-political ordering of society and their social territories. This raises the question of the subject-making of maker-entrepreneurs on a massive scale through what we call the new education–incubatory assemblage. How does the new education–incubatory machine assemble a new participatory community, form a production–communications–consumption circuit to imagine the new economy and re-territorialise the techno-political ordering of society? Our study stresses two differences in the social factory. First, by forging a fragmented pattern of production and an individualised society, mass entrepreneurship emphasises social networking. The exploitation of social relations in production has been brought to the foreground. Second, a participatory mass is not only shaped by the new mentality, but also constitutive of the very formation of the new mentality. Such a mass is a collection of actors, from the government, cooperatives, start-ups and individuals. In addition, their agencies vary, from those with a more reified form of power, such as policy, to the mundane, unrehearsed actions of individuals. This process entails the reconfiguration of political apparatus and bio-political power.

Keywords

Mass entrepreneurship social factory prosaic geography China

Introduction

In 2015, China launched a national campaign on mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship to reshape the large pool of manufacturing labour for the smart shift of China’s economy (SCC, 2015b). As stated by President Li Keqiang in the annual policy address, the overall objective of China’s smart shift is to restructure the manufacturing sector until ‘[the mushrooming] small enterprises blot out the sky and the land, and [a few] gigantic corporates stand tall’ (SCC, 2015b). Highly appraising the rich innovative resource in the society, President Li urged for measures and actions from all to nurture a culture of mass entrepreneurship that will benefit all of society.

The construction and promotion of mass entrepreneurship is not limited to China, but has an extensive range of promoters across the Global North and the Global South (Blundel et al., 2018).¹ Since the emergence of entrepreneurial culture in several advanced economies in the late 1970s (Parker, 2001), the new addition of ‘mass’ to entrepreneurship expands its target population to the masses and, correspondingly, the massive scale of the reorganisation of work that affects people’s everyday lives. The rise of mass entrepreneurship has material consequence for the politics of production, which concerns the labour process and the political apparatus of production. Compared to the fruitful studies on the shop floor in highly industrial Fordism (Burawoy, 1982; Chan et al., 2015; Lee, 1998), studies on mass entrepreneurship based upon post-Fordist production are still emerging, given that major structural changes have challenged traditional wisdom.

First, although entrepreneurial culture is closely related to the restructuring of production organisation (Beck, 1992, 2014), studies on entrepreneurship barely situate entrepreneurship in the labour process. The introduction of entrepreneurship blurs the boundary between the capitalist and the worker, as if entrepreneurs are special species beyond class relations in production (Read, 2009). On the other hand, the vertical disintegration or fragmentation of production (Christopherson and Storper, 1989; Rossi and Di Bella, 2017) has brought to the fore accessibility to commissions (Christopherson, 2008) or opportunities (Kloosterman and Rath, 2001), which has forced start-ups into the arduous task of networking. Nevertheless, mainstream economists usually consider networking as a special skill rather than a form of labour that can be exploited (Wittel, 2016).

Second, entrepreneurship has expanded far beyond the four walls of factories (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hardt and Negri, 2017; Lazzarato, 1996; McRobbie, 2002b). It operates through ideological transformation that transcends old boundaries among the domains of work and life, economy and governance (Read, 2009; Rose, 1990). Integrating mass entrepreneurship requires attention to the ‘many voiced’ nature of the new ideology (Painter, 2006: 760), which is narrated not only by the government, cooperatives, official policies and programmes, but also by individuals with their bio-political powers. In other words, various voices rather than a single authorised voice define mass entrepreneurship. In this light, we need an approach that goes beyond the usual binary perception of entrepreneurship, such as those deployed in studies on self- and state-entrepreneurialism, and one that moves further to attend to their mutual penetrations and interplays.

This paper proposes what we call a new education–incubatory assemblage to address the emerging cultural frame of mass entrepreneurship as a constitutive component in the politics of production in the social factory, drawing insights from autonomist Marxism (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 2017; Lazzarato, 1996) and the prosaic state by Joe Painter (2006). The social factory argues for a diffusive society in which the entire society and its daily life are subordinated to the logic of production (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 2009), whereas the prosaic state provides a methodological lens that attends to various actors and their unrehearsed practices (Baker and McGuirk, 2019; Painter, 2006). The questions we ask are as follows. How do we understand the mass entrepreneurial culture in a way that attends to various actors, voices and practices, and how is the new organisation of work imagined and materialised by the mass entrepreneur culture? In response to China’s campaign on entrepreneurial education, how does the education–incubatory machine assemble a participatory community to imagine the new organisation of work and a techno-political societal order?

Our concern dwells on the overall political form of production (Burawoy, 1982). Nevertheless, we stress two differences in the social factory driven by the new ideology of mass entrepreneurship. First, by forging a fragmented pattern of production and an individualised society, mass entrepreneurship emphasises connecting with others (Wittel, 2016). The exploitation of social relations in production has been brought to the foreground (Hardt and Negri, 2005). Second, a participatory mass is not only shaped by the new mentality, but also constitutive of the very formation of the new mentality. Such a mass is a collection of actors, from the government, cooperatives, start-ups and individuals. In addition, their agencies vary, from those with a more reified form of power, such as policy, to the mundane, unrehearsed actions of individuals (Collier, 2009). This process entails the reconfiguration of political apparatus and bio-political power (Painter, 2006), which is of particular interest in studies on the ‘illiberal’ East Asia (Chua, 2017).

This study examines the nationwide campaign of mass entrepreneurship, particularly its implication in the city of Shenzhen. Data were derived from semi-open interviews and participatory observations in training programmes from September 2015 to December 2018, along with secondary data from government archives and webpages of various organisations participating in the promotion of mass entrepreneurship and the innovation campaign in Shenzhen. In-depth interviews were conducted with 32 Chinese informants, including maker-entrepreneurs, would-be entrepreneurs and civic officials involved in incubators. Moreover, most informants had dual identities as start-up runners and full-time employees of IT enterprises, young graduates of local universities or mentors and/or mentees of entrepreneurship training programmes. The interview questions focused on the informants’ personal working and enterprising experiences, reasons and expectations for entrepreneurship and the education–incubatory programmes. Each interview lasted one to two hours. In addition, participatory observations allowed one of the authors to experience daily life in the maker studios and incubators and to attend two main training programmes run by the local universities and Tencent.

The following three sections are organised as follows. After a brief literature survey on entrepreneurialism to identify research gaps, the first section attempts to set up the framework with the social factory and the prosaic state space. The second section details the new education–incubatory assemblage, two major entrepreneurship training programmes that foster two loops: one of producer-consumer and the other of entrepreneur and would-be entrepreneurs. This section is followed by our demonstration of the prosaic state effect of the education–incubatory assemblage and conclusion.

Social factory as prosaic state space

Entrepreneurship studies and the usual binary treatment of the state and society

Entrepreneurial culture has witnessed a profound resurgence since the late 1970s (Beck, 2014; Neff, 2012a; Parker, 2001), after many capitalist economies conducted structural changes in the organisation of work. Entrepreneurs starting their small business in the new economy, which favours flexible specialisation, blur the boundary between the capitalist and the worker (Read, 2009). Mainstream economists largely treat entrepreneurs as a new social group, endeavouring to define their characteristics and the sustainability of their start-ups (Cohen et al., 2016). However, sociologists argue for the new technology of governmentality through the cultural frame of entrepreneurialism (Neff, 2012a). As such, the ‘virtues of responsibility, initiative, competitiveness and risk-taking’ (Mallett and Wapshott, 2015: 251) actually serve the ‘shaping of the private self’ (McNay, 2009; Rose, 1990). Subject-citizens in the neoliberal society are governed by a new mentality of self-improvement, self-responsibility and self-exploitation (Foucault, 1991; Rose et al., 2006).

This contestation is also evident in the entrepreneurial governance of cities. Management studies promote the idea of the city laboratory for innovation (Moisio, 2018). Bureaucratic regulations that fail to respond to the innovative entrepreneurship emerging from the bottom are considered as problems, based on which advice is proposed for those at the top, such as mayors and policymakers, to foster conducive urban ecology (Cohen et al., 2016). The shift in urban governance, as insightfully pointed out by David Harvey (1989), is a transformation from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. Thinking like an entrepreneur has become the new logic of governments in policymaking, from constructing national/regional champions, privatising formerly unmarketable sectors, to workfare policies and programmes. The entrepreneurialism of urban governance has guided numerous studies on the changing nature of the state from Keynesianism to Neoliberalism.

Although we acknowledge the wisdom of self-entrepreneurialism and state entrepreneurialism, we argue that the two concepts start from opposing ends of the state–society spectrum but do not account for the interplays of both agencies. The new ideology of mass entrepreneurship does not operate separately in the two clear-cut domains of the state and the individual. Instead, it moves through a diffusive enterprise society where people are both governed and self-governing (Collier, 2009; Lazzarato, 2004; Read, 2009). In his essay to pay tribute to David Harvey’s work 30 years later, Peck (2014: 397) points out that understanding ‘life on the neoliberal plateau’ requires us to probe ‘the prosaic churn of routinized, “everyday” entrepreneurialism’. The mushrooming of start-ups (Rossi and Di Bella, 2017), vertical disintegration and fragmentation of production (Christopherson and Storper, 1989) and the increasingly individualised society (Beck, 1992; Rose, 1990) challenge the binary treatment of the state and the individual. Studies on migrant entrepreneurship have revealed mixed embeddedness of individual agency in their social networks (Jones and Ram, 2007; Kloosterman and Rath, 2001; Rath and Kloosterman, 2000) in a similar vein to that observed in runaway production of motion pictures (Coe, 2000). The vertical disintegration of the motion-picture industry has giving birth to a new sector of agency that bridges the demand and supply of labour (Christopherson, 2006; 2008). ‘Entrepreneurial projects always rely on collective effort’ (Rose et al., 2006: 1), all of which are assembled into a whole.

Social factory: immaterial labour and the organisation of production

The social factory, in a conceptual framework first described by Italian operaisti Mario Tronti (2010 [1963], 2013 [1962]), is an attempt to chart a collective expanding of the capitalist rule over the whole of society, which sought to organise circulation on a broad scale, such that ‘the whole of society is turned into an articulation of production’. That is, ‘the whole of society lives a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society’ (Tronti, 2010 [1963]). The reorganisation of circulation has been explored by operaisti-influenced scholars, mostly by Lazzarato (1996, 2004), who believes that immaterial labour is not the output of the dichotomy of manual labour and intellectual work, but rather represents those living in a new mode of production premised upon an extended circuit that encompasses production, communication and consumption. Cognitive capitalism ‘is not only a mode of production but a production of a world’, in which the formerly disparate sections of communication and consumption are now part of production (Lazzarato, 2004: 187).

Immaterial labour must exploit its own subjectivity to produce the principles of valuation through which consumers value and appreciate their products (Lazzarato, 2004). The temporal sequence of production and consumption is now reversed, or at least placed in parallel, as the new principle of valuation first indicates, constructs and promotes particular imaginary cultural and artistic standards, fashions and consumer tastes before the production of specific products that satisfy such tastes (Bauman, 2011; Pang, 2009; Ritzer et al., 2012; Terranova, 2000). Forming the production–communication–consumption circuit requires hard labour to assemble ‘a heterogeneous arrangement that entails a multiplicity of subjects who are involved in multiple activities both inside and outside the firm (workers, consumers, public)’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Lazzarato, 2004: 197). In this context, immaterial labour combines numerous working skills: (a) intellectual skills to create innovative, cultural and informational content; (b) manual skills for material ideas and technical and manual labour; and (c) entrepreneurial skills to manage social relations. In the words of Lazzarato (1996: 133), immaterial labour is a ‘transformation of working-class labour into a labour of control, of handling information, into a decision-making capacity that involves the investment of subjectivity’ in ‘the post-Taylorist mode of production defined by putting subjectivity to work’. Immaterial labour produces a social relationship of the previously disparate stages of innovation, production and consumption – a relationship that commands proactive communication towards a guaranteed economic value of products. In the social factory, the method of extracting surplus value in post-Fordist capitalism involves valorising the unity of the labour process and invading the network of social relations (Gill and Pratt, 2008).

Social factory as prosaic state space

It is necessary to attend to the gap between Tronti and Negri on the conceptualisation of the social factory for methodological purposes (Campbell, 2018; Tampio, 2009). For Tronti (2013 [1962]) and his fellow operaisti, the social factory is enacted by ‘the machinery of the political state’. In this account, the social factory urges scholarly attention on the interconnected state institutions that condition production, thereby interrogating policies on housing, social welfare, education, policing and infrastructure development (Campbell, 2018). For Hardt and Negri (2005), who turned to Michel Foucault for the study of bio-political population regulation, what is crucial in the social factory is the subjectivity of individual immaterial labour in decentralised projects (Tampio, 2009). While we concur with the innovative application of the Foucauldian concept of ‘entrepreneur of the self’ (Burchell et al., 1991; Foucault, 2007) to studies on that economisation of life, we argue that social factory is first of all a political project (Tronti, 2013 [1962]). This is particularly imperative in studies of the Global South (Datta, 2018; Ho, 2016; Wang and Chen, 2019). Aside from that, the attempt to attend to the many-voiced nature of the cultural framework of entrepreneurialism is of particular interest in studies in East Asia. The context of ‘illiberal democracy’ (Chua, 2017) cultivates as much as the technology of Foucauldian governmentality as that of ‘a direct, statist “disciplinarity”’ (Wee, 2010: 990). The concept of a prosaic state is of methodological utility to attend to the interplay of the government and the individual and, further, to bring forward the political project of labour governance.

The prosaic state space does not consider the state as a distinct domain that is separable from the entity of society nor does it regard the state space as a completely and perfectly even distribution of power that is reflected by the conduct of individual subject-citizens (Abrams, 1988; Mitchell, 2002). Instead, state space is enacted by praxis rather than merely determined by the existing position/rank in the administrative system or power relation in material circuits. That said, prosaic state space is socially constructed, but periodic moments of relational hierarchies can exist in the state space, such that political authorities are able to exercise more direct and perhaps even coercive societal regulation (MacKinnon and Shaw, 2010).

Painter (2006) borrowed the concept of ‘prosaic’ from the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to stress the significance of ordinary and unremarkable events, instead of well-rehearsed poetics, in revealing the chain of causality. Prosaicness emphasises the many-voiced nature of agency and the mundane, unsystematic, indeterminate and unintended ways that the state is effaced through daily life practices (Painter, 2006). Actors involved in the prosaic state space include a wide variety of factors, from individuals to institutions such as ‘courts, police, schools and councils’, and from discourses to material practices (Painter, 2006: 758; Allen and Cochrane, 2010; Aiken, 2016; Wang, 2019). Thus, the prosaic state entails a non-rehearsed ensemble of ‘social practices, discourses, rules, power and symbolic and material forms of governance and institutions’ (Moisio and Paasi, 2013a, 2013b).

Drawing upon the two concepts of social factory and prosaic state, we will investigate: (a) the agency on the production–communication–consumption circuit and the subsequent restructuring of organisation of production; (b) the many-voiced nature of agency, from political apparatus to bio-power, from policy, discourse to bodily performance in the construction of mass entrepreneurial culture; and (c) the economic restructuring of labour as re-territorialisation of state space.

Assembling the education–incubatory programme

In his annual policy address in 2015, President Li Keqiang first introduced the concept of mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship as the new national strategy for economic growth.² One week later, almost all major national newspapers circulated the article entitled ‘The Maker of Li Keqiang’,³ which revealed how Li had drawn inspirations from three sources – namely, a group of grass-root makers in Shenzhen, the bibliography of Steve Jobs, and the Nobel Prize Laureate Edmund S. Phelps’s ‘Mass Flourishing’. The article further urged readers’ attention to the subtitle of Phelps’ book, How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. Calling it the new economic engine, Li underpins how the amalgamation of grass-root makers and entrepreneurship would matter to the country.

The amalgamation of mass innovation and mass entrepreneurship was then written into the policy entitled ‘Opinion on Several Policies and Measures for Vigorously Advancing Mass Innovation/Entrepreneurship’ (MIM 2015, hereafter; SCC, 2015b). The policy introduced the official agenda for smart economy in China, which aims to boost a start-up economy that integrates the growing technological power and the real economy. In the policy, the Double Mass is a situated strategy for China to address the pressing issue of employment creation and an efficient approach to ‘tap into the inner pool of resources – innovation and entrepreneurship – of the entire society’ (SCC, 2015b). Therefore, regulatory reforms are called for to place entrepreneurship training on the priority agenda:

[to] let capable, determined people with dreams [graduates, migrant workers and the unemployed] become entrepreneurs and start their own business … [the government must take actions to] integrate training on both the spirit and quality of entrepreneurs into national education system and to systemise and institutionalise an entrepreneurship education that is diffusive to the entire society. (SCC, 2015b)

This programme was expanded to another sectoral policy, entitled ‘State Council’s Views on Deepening Education Reform for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Colleges and Universities’. The two national policies were then transferred to the city of Shenzhen, resulting in two official documents: ‘Shenzhen Government’s Views on Vigorously Advancing Entrepreneurship-driven Employment’ (MGS, 2016) and ‘Shenzhen University’s Views on Deepening Education Reform for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ (SU, 2016).

The national government prioritised regulatory reform to facilitate local practices in order to assemble the education–incubatory assemblage on three scales: (a) in the education system of universities, vocational schools and technical schools; (b) project-based training programmes that ‘penetrate’ into campuses, neighbourhoods and factories; and (c) individual mentors for entrepreneurship (SCC, 2015b). Measures on entrepreneurship training were intended to garner support from the City Education Bureau, City Human Resource Bureau, City Finance Bureau, district governments, street committees, All-China Federation of Trade Unions, Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL), All-China Women’s Federation and China’s Disabled Persons’ Federation. Special budgets were set aside to encourage universities, incubators and tech companies to offer training programmes and to reward individual mentors for their participation in these programmes. Regulations on human-resource management were relaxed and combined with generous financial support to boost actions towards entrepreneurship, practice-based mentorship and a cross-fertilisation of the incubators and companies. Lucrative local programmes demonstrated their catalytic effect in almost no time, triggering a swirl of actions by a plethora of actors.

The local universities published their vision as ‘creativity changes lives, entrepreneurship fulfil visions, innovation shed lights on the path to the future’ (SU, 2016). The goal required the universities to reach out to the industry and experiment with reciprocal collaborations on special zones, knowledge and human resources, investment and industrial chains. In 2015, universities established a new School of Entrepreneurship. Securing initial financial support from the Coast Group, a firm run by one university’s alumni, the school immediately expanded its collaboration to numerous local financial and tech enterprises, such as the Merchants Union Consumer Finance Company Limited, XIVO design and NepQD (quantum dot), for a consortium entitled the ‘Specialised Makers’ Tribe of Shenzhen Universities’.

The local IT tycoon Tencent provided a series of social training programmes under the national campaign of ‘Empowering Youth with Entrepreneurship in Incubation Centres’, with assistance from state-supported quasi third sectors such as the CCYL, United Front (the union of Chinese democratic parties), local industrial associations and the local liaison office of transnational maker space. In a similar vein, the University–Town Creative Park launched its transnational training programme, the Shenzhen–Brisbane International Innovation Incubation Centre, supported by the Shenzhen Bureau of Culture and Sports, Shenzhen Office of Foreign Affairs and the Brisbane Convention Bureau. The creative park F518 hosted the Shenzhen–Edinburgh International Creative Industries Incubation Centre, providing tailored support from a network of the Shenzhen Bureau of Culture and Sports, Bao’an District Government and Creative Edinburgh.

A survey of the courses by the local universities and Tencent revealed the cross-fertilisation of the education system and the industry, along with the intensive involvement of individual entrepreneur mentors (please see Table 1). The training workshop in Tencent engaged professors from various universities in disciplines from economics, public administration, sociology and psychology to cultural industries. Instead of hosting their own teaching faculties, the School of Entrepreneurship operated as a platform on which practicing maker-entrepreneurs, (senior) managers and professionals from IT companies were invited to teach various subjects. In addition to established tech companies such as Tencent, Apple, Amazon (China), iFlytek and Shenzhen Fablab, numerous mentors themselves were maker-entrepreneurs who were exploring how to run their own start-ups in the new era of Double Mass. Qiang, one of our informants, was an industrial designer who had won numerous international awards and was a certified tutor on design thinking. After graduation, he attempted to start his own business twice and was on his third attempt. In addition, David, James and Xiao, among others, were overseas returnees who run their own maker space or start-ups in Shenzhen after gaining experience in Silicon Valley.

Table 1.

Courses offered by Shenzhen universities and Tencent.

Sectors	Organiser	Courses offered	Mentors
Technology	the universities	Open-source hardware–software and maker activities	Mr X (maker)
		IoT-based maker and entrepreneurship
		iOS development training
		Hardware design: design thinking and innovative practice	Qiang (CTO, D+M)
		Introduction to Blockchain	Mr Z (research fellow of World Blockchain Foundation
		Innovative application of Blockchain	Mr C (former Tencent coder for social media)
		VR/AR applications
	Tencent	What is a good product?	Mr X (Product Manager from a local successful start-up)
		Tech-innovation and the global future	Luke (an Australian start-up runner from HK)
		Innovation and development of information technology	Mr Q (Boss of an IT company)
		Creative industry and cultural economy	Prof. H (School of Cultural Industry, Shenzhen University)
Management, finance, marketing	the universities	Entrepreneurship and investment	Mr X (Cybernaut Investment Group)
		Equity design and corporate governance
		Marketing strategy and psychological application in entrepreneurship
		Entrepreneurial training for innovation tutors in primary and middle schools	Chaihuo makerspace, Shenzhen University
		E-commerce: actual practices on Taobao	Senior shop owner on Taobao
		E-commerce: actual practices on Alibaba	Mr W (former CEO of B2B transnational trade, Toshiba)
		Practices for marketing directors/managers
		Game distribution: practices
		IP business in the time of cultural economy	Mr C (David & Raymond Patent Group)
	the universities and Tencent	Start-up organisation and management	Prof. C (Department of Public Management, Shenzhen University)
	Tencent	Start-up management in America
		The good characteristics of entrepreneurs today	Mrs H (Vice Secretary of district-level Communist Youth League)
		New economy, new China	Prof. C (Department of Economics, Sun Yat-sen University)
		Mass marketing and niche marketing	Prof. L (Department of Marketing, Guangzhou University)
		Commodifying the scarcity of the market	Prof. L (Department of Marketing, Guangzhou University)
		Doing market research: methodology and practice	Prof. X (Department of Marketing and Industrial Studies, Shenzhen University)
Networking on social media	the universities	Operation of new media
Networking on social media	the universities	Wechat operation and entrepreneurship
Performance	the universities	Performance guidance	Prof. C (Shenzhen University)
	Tencent	Philosophy of ‘knowing yourself’	Prof. C (Shenzhen University)
		The art of introducing yourself	Mrs L (Vice Manager of Human Resource from Tencent.com)
		The art of telling a good story	James (maker-entrepreneur from Silicon Valley)
		Doing market research and writing a draft project proposal
		Selling your product from your writing
		Revising the draft of commercial proposal, and preparing an English version
		Find your style and clothing	Mrs X (fashion designer)
Dine and wine	the universities	Food safety supervision and operation	Enlife Service
Dine and wine	the universities	The career of a barista
Activities	Tencent	Visiting ten famous local start-ups in high-tech park
		Visiting four new ‘incubation centres’ as the future working space of start-ups
		Visiting City Museum, and watching a documentary about the local practice of reform and opening policy in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone
		Visiting Qianhai Free Trade Zone, and learning registration policies in the Free Trade Zone
		Buying a suit and having a haircut

Programmes for entrepreneurship training followed a similar mode as that in Silicon Valley: social volunteerism. The programmes were therefore inclusive to those who envisioned themselves as would-be entrepreneurs and volunteered to improve themselves accordingly. Rather than targeting only their own students, the university programme relaxed their rules several times to extend the eligibility of applicants to students in all universities in Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau, to their alumnus and even to all students who had a Shenzhen hukou in the latest phase. As indicated by the course entitled ‘Entrepreneurial Training for Innovations Tutors in Primary and Middle School’, the programme was expected to disseminate their impact on students in primary and middle schools. Indeed, most of the trainees involved in the programme by Shenzhen Fablab were high-school students. Trainees from the other programmes, such as the Tencent programme, included both full-time professional workers in the tech industry and full-time undergraduate students at nearby universities.

Performing ‘Entrepreneurship: An Actual Combat’

Moulding the quality and spirit of maker-entrepreneurs

The university programme, entitled ‘Entrepreneurship: An Actual Combat’, attempted a straightforward reaction to the state council’s call to ‘mould both the quality and spirit of maker-entrepreneurs’ in the policy of MIMB 2016 (SCC, 2015a). A survey of the curriculum design of these programmes helped us to understand the spirit and quality imagined by the education–incubatory assemblage in Shenzhen. In the local Universities and Tencent (please see Table 1), courses offered in the two programmes largely overlapped in three areas: (a) technologies that are necessary for makers, from product design, iOS and Blockchain to virtual reality and augmented reality; (b) corporate governance that encompasses management, finance and marketing; and (c) performance.

The quality of a maker-entrepreneur evidently rests in one’s capability of combining intellectual, manual and entrepreneurial skills (Lazzarato, 1996). The spirit of maker-entrepreneurs is tacit knowledge that must be sensed on training sites. For instance, the Tencent programme divided the trainees into different roles, such as ‘product managers’ in red T-shirts and ‘IT professionals’ in green T-shirts, for a role-playing exercise. Then the concept of shequ (literally, community) stood out in their exercise for collaborations. During our lunch at a dumpling stall, Qiang, mentor for the universities programme, explained his interpretation of Shequ and the Double-Mass slogan that amalgamated the two concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship:

Do you know the difference between Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong? Chen was a person with innovation, vision, whatever you call it … he talked a lot of Communism, Marxism, so what? Nobody cared. Mao was different. He simply put forward a plan: Da tuhao, Fen tiandi [combating local tyrants and distributing land]. That worked! [It was] Feasible! Practical! [It] promised everyone a share [in the revolution] … vision or innovation [alone] is vague … of course Mao has his vision as well, but most importantly, he converted it to something feasible, [because that plan was] able to mobilise everyone … that’s what we call shequ [in the maker-economy]. (interview, 11 December 2017)

In Qiang’s view, the slogan of mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship is a feasible plan that promises everyone a share in the new economy. The slogan is an explanation on a participatory community, the shared common, which has been maintained by the growing literature in communicative capitalism. The two layers of shequ are crucially embedded in the Chinese discourse: the formation of the material conduit of production–consumption in communicative capitalism that promises everyone a share (Dean, 2009a) and the governance of a maker-entrepreneur community (Rose, 1990; Wang and Li, 2017).

The loop of passionate producers-cum-sophisticated consumers

A comparative study of both training programmes by the universities and corporations reveals a common tendency on increasing efforts on marketing, from understanding the market to searching for a niche market and, more importantly, to inventing a niche market in the absence of one that is ready for appropriation. In addition, another large portion of modules focus on performance training. The last strategy echoes the observed changing requests upon the performance of managers in late capitalism (Thrift, 2000), in which businesses are framed in shorter and shorter time frames. Therefore, performance becomes necessary at all times, deploying various tactics from creative writing to a tasteful but down-to-earth outlook that lures followers in an open-to-participation tone. The local universities stressed the construction of a virtual image on social media, such as WeChat, while Tencent devoted more attention to performance in the discursive and real world, such as proposal writing and personal outlook design.

One of the author’s observations at the training workshop held by Tencent confirmed the heavy engagement of performance. The section ‘Linking venture investment’ (see Table 1) appears to be a pitch presentation in which mentees compete to obtain the first ‘bucket of gold’ before they actually register and start their business. However, winning takes more than presenting one’s project; it is also a display of all-encompassing self-image. The programme includes several training opportunities, such as psychological lectures by university professors for a journey of inside-out self-understanding, creative writing training by experienced pitch winners to explain how to write touching stories that create niche projects in the competition for venture capitals, lectures on outlook and taste by professors from the fashion industry, demonstrations on body language by professional body trainers and even lessons on hairstyle by professionals in public relations.

The representation method of performing is not enough; material practice is crucial. A proportion of the lectures on market explorations placed emphasis on how to nurture constant passion of techno-product consumption by makers/mentees themselves. Given the fact that an increasing number of young Chinese professionals are searching for imagined middle-class lifestyles, makers’ own consumption of tech products is the best way to create a fashion and invent a niche market, as we were told in the training programme. This niche marketing stimulates urban consumers’ sophisticated notions of consumption in the name of ‘buying for a better life’ (interview, 2016). In this sense, the sustainability of start-ups in China seems to be premised upon a large pool of domestic producer-cum-consumers; both are constitutive of the same participatory community.

In what Dean (2009a: 30) terms ‘communicative capitalism’, the ‘networked communication’ constructed an imagined participatory community in which everyone contributes, participates and is heard. The term shequ, in its first layer, is to be situated as the maker-economy in a material sense (Lazzarato, 1996, 2004). Shequ refers to an ever-expanding group, each of which produces for each other and consumes each other’s products. In this account, a stably expanding community promises profit for everyone. The politics of the maker-entrepreneur identity in the global post-industrial society is to be understood in the hybrid identity of a maker-consumer. For a person claiming an identity as a maker-entrepreneur, what is crucial is not to demarcate a clear-cut boundary that is exclusive, but rather to stress the possibility of a hybrid, ever-changing and perhaps always-mingled identity – innovative producer-cum-sophisticated consumer (Ahmed, 2004; Shin and Lee, 2017; Wang and Li, 2017). A down-to-earth attitude to engage others in a community in a manner that channels the supply-and-consumption chain is the key to forming the material conduit of the real economy. The affective networks that our informants want to cultivate between the ‘passionate producers’ and ‘sophisticated customers’ requires both performative actions of the passionate producer and the material practice of a sophisticated consumer (Hochschild, 2015). In Shenzhen, these training programmes move beyond representational tectonics that construct and disseminate fantasies but perpetrate into everyone’s material life of daily consumption in a direct, coercive way.

The loop of entrepreneurs and would-be-entrepreneurs: ‘Bian dagong, bian chuangye’ (working for others whilst starting up)

We tracked 32 informants from the training programme on their daily work experiences, which revealed a common practice of ‘part-time’ entrepreneurship. Mentees enrolled in the Tencent programme comprised mostly full-time workers in IT companies and fresh graduates, whereas those in the university programme were students in their third and fourth year of undergraduate studies and, at the same time, start-up runners. For mentees in the universities Programme, the Innovative/Entrepreneurship Scholarship provided grants for them to develop their prototypes into commodities. One of the conditions for the students to be enrolled into the programme was to register their start-ups. Among the 32 informants, 24 were full-time workers in two jobs: their formal job referred to employment in established IT companies and their informal job referred to their work on their own start-ups. As they envisioned:

A ‘formal job’ is necessary to earn a higher salary to cover basic living expenses and that also lets me accumulate the initial investment for my start-up. The ‘informal job’ is completely different. It will liberate me from my formal job such that I can embark on the journey towards my dreams. (interview, 2017)

The practice that overlapped the two identities of worker and entrepreneur was known as ‘bian dagong, bian chuangye’ (working for others whilst starting up) – a catchy slogan that spread widely among our informants.

Given the preferential policies that provided various kinds of support to entrepreneurship, start-ups mushroomed. The year 2016 witnessed an explosive growth of new start-up runners, which occupied 10% of the entire population (GEM, 2017). Census data revealed that 26,390 start-ups were registered in 2018, recording a growth rate of 5.6% from the figure in 2017 (GEM, 2017). The mushrooming of start-ups implied an instant surge of tech-product suppliers in the market. Nevertheless, the majority of these start-ups failed to transform their prototypes into commodities,⁴ and thus had to search for other ways to support themselves. On the one hand, numerous start-ups found that selling services to established IT companies was crucial for their survival. On the other hand, established tech companies also increasingly favoured buying projects from the service market rather than cultivating their own projects in-house, given that task segmentation in the IT industry had allowed services to be outsourced at a lower cost (interview, 2017; please also see Xiang, 2007).

In this context, numerous struggling start-ups and established IT companies formed a new working relationship: start-up runners worked for the IT company as full-time external employees (waipin yuangong), with the hope of seeking commissions from the latter in return. Unlike formal employees who signed labour contracts with the company, external employees signed service contracts, which were not protected by the Law of Labour or by the government-supported social security net. More often than not, external employees received lower wages than formal employees. However, both were viewed as full-time workers and were requested to assume similar obligations to the working project and to contribute to the company culture of working overtime. Similar to the set-up observed in the IT industry in India (Xiang 2007: 55), would-be tech-entrepreneurs moved back and forth between self-employment and full-time employment. The issue of survival transformed start-ups into a complementary informal labour force for IT tycoons.

Nevertheless, several of our informants viewed this as a valuable opportunity to secure continuous outsourced projects. Yang, a start-up runner who also worked for Tencent as an external employee, asserted:

We gained more opportunities to sell our start-up projects to those big IT tycoons. My team manager in Tencent even supports what we are doing. She said she would recommend our start-up projects to higher-level managers in Tencent, until my own business gets mature. (interview, 21 May 2016)

In this context, the training sites served as the place of encounter where mushrooming start-ups communicated with IT tycoons for access to the informal supply chain of service, wherein mentors serve as the ad hoc agency. Indeed, mentors are encouraged to use parts of real projects from their companies for in-curriculum practices, such that the training programme will match its title of ‘actual combat’. As a matter of fact, quite a few mentors envisaged the training programme as a ‘useful venue’ to discover potential partners and peers. As one mentor on mobile games explained to us:

The main story is certainly classified … But we are happy to collect ideas on figures that are not so important, or scenarios that are, we suppose, less popular … you know, actual practice is the best way to tap into the ‘sparks’ in their heads, as they can see the future of actualizing it [the idea] … and we are also open to identify future fellow workers. (interview, 12 March 2019)

The second layer of shequ relied on subjectivity appropriation, which must be performed by individuals and their networking behaviour. The requests for trainees to transform themselves from would-be entrepreneur to entrepreneur with subjectivity actually naturalise the responsibility of trainees to speak, communicate, cooperate and so forth. Enveloped by the holy aura of innovators, entrepreneurial start-up runners envisage themselves free from traditional capitalistic relations of class, welcoming a decentralising logic of work that complicated the meaning of ‘bosses’ and ‘workers’ and the meaning of work. However, the very action of maker-entrepreneurs, as start-up runners, to establish cooperation with the IT companies, subordinates themselves to the command of the latter. This action was contradictory to ‘the antagonism between hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and command’ that Lazzarato (1996: 134) predicted. IT corporations redistributed power by recognising and enabling ‘the autonomy and freedom of labour as the only possible form of cooperation in production’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 134). This new labour relation was based on the subjective maker-entrepreneurs and their networking behaviour to weave together an informal service supply chain without formal protection. Calling their entrepreneurial practices ‘informal’ jobs that will ‘liberalise’ them from the ‘formal’ jobs in the IT companies, mentees give more weight to self-actualisation than to economic calculation in their effort of practising entrepreneurship. The romanticisation of entrepreneurship has lured workers to conceive the new working relationship as an egalitarian project (Chen and Sonn, 2017; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). The entrepreneurial labour internalised the risk of market failure to the workers themselves (Merrifield, 2014; Neff, 2012b) and contributed to the decline of workplace democracy in a wider context of socio-spatial constructions of the work regime (Hochschild, 2003; McRobbie, 2002a).

Re-territorialising the prosaic state space: the education–incubatory assemblage

Fragmentation and individualisation of production makes the issues of trans-sector communication the most pressing one, for which the social territory of production breaks through the four walls of factories and stretches across all social space (Lemke, 2001; Read, 2009). Note that mass entrepreneurship is situated in the national visionary of Made in China 2025. The proposed economic restructuring depends on a massive transformation of labour in the national pool through the production of new subjectivity that penetrates each everyday relation. In that sense, endeavours to grasp the politics of neoliberalism must probe into all everyday relations to discern how ideas of entrepreneurship, human investment and risk have been naturalised. The mass entrepreneurship campaign unfolds reconfigurations of both political apparatus and bio-power, both of which constitute the education–incubatory assemblage. The re-territorialisation of prosaic state space leads to its new patterns of unevenness, which are both diffusive and territorial.

Diffusing the state space

National policies frame mass entrepreneurship in a benevolent manner that encompasses everyone—from graduates, migrant workers to those unemployed, such that the mentality of mass entrepreneurship is ‘diffusive to the entire society’ (SCC, 2015b). The imperativeness of a diffusive mass, as illustrated by President Li and the major national newspapers, is a situated strategy to tap into the innovative power from the whole of society, as has been demonstrated by the grass-root makers in Shenzhen. It is not surprising, then, that the analogy made to Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong by the mentor for entrepreneurship training indicates the socialist legacy of mass mobilisation. In Qiang’s analogy, Mao is depicted as one of the two voices that must prove his way through practices as well, just like anyone else. Promising a share for everyone, in the context of China, has been deliberately coloured with the socialist concern of collectivism – a collection of anonymous mass with imagined equal access to the new economy. Unlike talent-oriented policies common in Chinese cities, the Double-Mass campaign has made an explicit move to engage both elites and formerly marginalised groups, from migrant workers to the unemployed, in its regulatory reforms.

The nationwide campaign to promote mass entrepreneurship thus calls for new constellations of government and non-governmental power for subject making on a massive scale (see Table 2). It is no wonder, then, that it may be difficult to pin down any singular central state organisation responsible for drawing the specific top-down training plan in this process. Instead, policies command a coming together of a variety of governmental departments, institutions, and non-governmental organisations to ‘solve problems that entrepreneurs have in education, funds, information, policies, technologies and services, among others’ (SCC, 2015b). What is at the core of entrepreneurship is a package of human quality, including the spirit of being the subject of one’s own life, and the quality of an immaterial labour that combines intellectual, manual and entrepreneurial skills. The attention to the human quality of maker-entrepreneurs explains the involvement of governmental departments on budget allocation and human-resource management, public universities, as well as the state-supported quasi third sector such as the Chinese Communist Youth League, United Front, All-China Women’s Federation and China’s Disabled Persons’ Federation, among others. The mass entrepreneurship campaign in China is concerned with forming a new system to revalue existing labour and to mobilise their self-transformation (Wang and Y. Li, 2017; Wang and Y. Li, 2018; Wang and M. Li, 2019). The new constellation of political apparatus operates to objectify the ‘mass’ in the construction of mass entrepreneurship and, more importantly, to move further to unleash actions at the body level.

Table 2.

Typology of agents involved in Made in China 2025 and the Double Mass campaign in Shenzhen (2015–2016).

Type of agent	Number of agents involved
Community actors (e.g. incubation platforms)	447
Education system (e.g. middle schools, local universities)	83
District-level government sectors	12
Non-government public sectors	26
Non-enterprise sectors (e.g. NGOs, industrial associations)	22
Local media	14
Private sectors (e.g. legal/financial service companies)	46
Local government policies and strategies (e.g. talent projects)	11
District-level events of Made in China 2025 and the Double Mass campaign	17

Indeed, the mass is not merely the object of governance in this process, but also constitutive of the very formation of the mass entrepreneurship. The focus on market and performance in the curriculum design creates an affective micro urban fabric for a community of interdependent individuals (Dean, 2009a), mentors and mentees included. The interdependence of individuals renders the issue of networking and socialisation crucial. Therefore, everyone is required to deploy his/her own subjectivity and to demonstrate his/her competence to transcend boundaries in both the loop of producers and consumers and the loop of entrepreneurs and would-be-entrepreneurs (Lazzarato, 1996). As such, mentors perform the down-to-earth attitude to lure followers when they humbly frame the training programme a venue to meet peers and potential partners. The performance of mentees demonstrates a manner of more than conformity. In order to gain accessibility to the social relations with IT tycoons and their agent, the mentors and mentees appreciate and advocate the new working relationship of apprentice-entrepreneurs, as illustrated by the popular moto of Bian dagong, bian chuangye (working for others while starting up). The very proximity between mentors and mentees renders the hierarchy dissolvable, forming a loop of entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs in their constant conversion, upon their variegated performance in mastering the quality and spirit of entrepreneurship.

Re-territorialising the state space

The diffusive landscape of mass entrepreneurship has its territorial nodes. The policy of MIM 2015 invented three new scales for its implementation: the education system, the training projects and individual mentors (SCC, 2015). The three new scales are diffusive in a way but might also rest on particular social territories. In June 2016, the state council published another policy entitled ‘Implementing Opinions of the State Council on Construction of the Mass Innovation/Entrepreneurship Demonstration Bases’ (MIMB 2016, hereafter; SCC, 2015a). The policy of MIMB 2016 demarcated special areas for the two scales: universities for the education system and IT companies for the training projects, given that the two entities of universities and IT industry host the two largest population segments – students and existing techno-labours – that are to be transformed. The third scale on individual mentors released human power from universities and encouraged cross-fertilisation between the education and the IT industry through relaxed human-resource management. A new collection of flexible mentors was formed, but it is anchored to the territories of education and the IT industry. In this circumstance, the collaboration initiated by the universities and the IT companies territorialises the three new scales and legitimises the education–incubatory sites as the new strategic state space. State power is dispersed to the myriad of constituting actors of the education–incubatory assemblage (Lestrelin, 2011), so that the latter becomes the new territory where the technologies of domination and the technologies of self-regulation juxtapose and meet.

Both universities and IT companies frame the mass entrepreneurship programmes, expressed by the slogan of ‘creativity changes lives, entrepreneurship fulfil visions, innovation shed lights on the path to the future’ in the local universities and ‘empowering youth’ in Tencent. The future-oriented articulation not only justifies the cross-fertilisation between the local universities and the industry, but also garners support from the social sectors such as the Chinese Communist Youth League. Nevertheless, both universities and the IT industry also underpin the special territories, in which the mass entrepreneurship education programme are rooted, such as ‘Specialised Makers Tribe’ in the universities and the ‘Empowering Youth with Entrepreneurship in Incubation Centres’.

The education–incubatory sites serve as the node of communication, as if a space of agency in a vertically disintegrated production (Christopherson and Storper, 1989). This new node of communication is critical for accessibility to information, commissions, to positions of external employee at the IT tycoons via the mentor or other mentees. As would-be entrepreneurs attempt to construct new social relations in the new economy, joining these training programmes is seen as a direct path to starting up. Moreover, their work as external employees and their contribution in the in-class assignments are valued as one necessary step to build up personal relationship with the team leaders or the mentors, who actually play the role of contractors. These training programmes are regarded as necessary preparation for participants to complete a rite of passage in their entrepreneurial career (Gennep, 1960). On these training sites, both mentors and mentees appropriate their subjectivities. The interactive agency of the two converge to the organising power that assembles formerly disparate processes of learning, apprenticing, working, managing and marketing, each of which feeds into the others. Former segmented territories for schooling, producing and consumption now concentrated on the training sites, which become the actual battlefield, just like the name of university program indicates, function as a temporally and spatially compressed parcel in the social factory.

The Chinese mass entrepreneurship largely dwells on the participatory shequ on the sites of training programmes that enable the gathering of mentors and mentees, and in return, their dynamic, discursive and performative interactions foster new social relations that bounds individual members in the community. The reconfiguration of political apparatus channelled the flow of capital, idea and population to the new strategic state space, and forms the platform for community building, but it is through experience and performance of mentors and mentees in the affective micro-fabric of urban that the ideology of mass entrepreneurship is disseminated, sensed, learned and practiced. The new education–incubatory assemblage is to be understood as one compressed parcel of the social factory in time and space, which constructs a diffusive territory stretching over various functional sectors of a society, such as schooling, producing, enterprising and consuming, which produces the need for social networking and, in return, harvesting the networking endeavours of a wide range of organisations, regulatory reform policies, individual maker-entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs.

Concluding thoughts

This paper interrogates the emerging mass entrepreneurship as a new ideology that penetrates everyday relations. Drawing upon insights from the conceptions of the social factory and prosaic state space, we seek to unravel the process of constructing the culture of mass entrepreneurship, which imagines a new organisation of work and a new techno-political order of society, and which unfolds unrehearsed reconfiguration of both political apparatus and bio-power.

Situating mass entrepreneurship in the politics of production, the new labour relation does not simply ‘efface the fundamental division between worker and capitalist’, but also ‘curtail(s) the powers of labour that are distributed across all of society’ (Lemke, 2001; Read, 2009). The imaginary massive transformation of labour in the national pool depends on the dissemination of the new subjectivity to everyday relations. Using the mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign in China, we argue that the culture frame of mass entrepreneurship is an attempt to establish a new value in the politics of production in a manner to unleash bodily actions of existing labour to transform themselves.

Mass entrepreneurship advocates for a participatory community, which is shaped by the two layers of shequ: the formation of the material conduit of production–consumption in communicative capitalism that promise everyone a share (Dean, 2009b) and the governance of a maker-entrepreneur community by exploitation of subjectivity (Rose, 1990; Wang and Li, 2017). The participatory community of maker-entrepreneurs are comprised of highly individualised maker-entrepreneurs with interdependent interests. Therefore, each must exploit his/her own subjectivity to connect with others. The political transformation of production rests on exploitation of social relations that stretches to all social sectors, leading to a reordering of society (Hardt and Negri, 2005; Lazzarato, 1996).

In this sense, the mode of production and the order of society become mutually constitutive, which requires methods that move beyond the usual binary domains of the state and the individual. We argue that the construction of the new education–incubatory assemblage is a dynamic re-territorialisation of the prosaic state space. It is a process that involves a wide variety of governmental apparatus, the interconnected institutions such as policies on social welfare, education and infrastructure development, as well as the private self with bio-power, their work, education, leisure activities, friend-making and so on. In this process, the discursive, performative and material practices of both the political apparatus and bio-political individuals are constitutive of the re-territorialisation of prosaic state space, while they themselves are affected by the dynamic human–space relations.

The prosaic state space in the illiberal society of China unfolds ‘old’ coercive forces of policies, official programmes and administrative commands, as well as the non-rehearsed discourse and practices of individuals. The power relationship in this many voiced constructions of mass entrepreneurship is uneven. The re-territorialisation of the state space does not result in a perfectly diffusive landscape of individuals, but rather forms a new strategic state space in which the constellation of political apparatus and bio-power is concentrated. Therefore, the process mingles indirect governmentality, through the population and the space, with a direct, statist disciplinarity. Correspondingly, the prosaic state space of the maker-entrepreneur community and the new tech economy takes a patchwork pattern which is both diffusive and also territorial.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to our informants, who gave a lot of assistance during the fieldwork. We are in debt to Ugo Rossi, Alan Smart, and the three reviewers who have offered extremely valuable comments and suggestions. Responsibility for these arguments remains our own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research is supported by two grants awarded by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CityU 247713 and CityU 21613815); and China Scholarship Council (CSC) Grant.

ORCID iDs

June Wang

Yujing Tan

Notes

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