Chapter 1 - Digital Work, the Compressed Individual, and Emotions in China

Summary

Compressed Modernity, the Compressed Individual, Migration and Digital Work

Over the past 40 years in China, the effects of the accelerated economic transition, increased economic competition and an upsurge in geographic mobility between rural and urban labour markets have transformed employment opportunities for migrants as well as their social relations in the workspace. This means that an economy of enrichment (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017) is built on the rapid growth of the Chinese labour market, which has rapidly spread to various sectors of the national and global economy, particularly with the development of digital economies.

The recent emergence of a platform economy in China needs to be understood in the frame of China's ‘compressed modernity’, characterized by a juxtaposition of ‘pre-modern, modern, and post-modern regimes’ (Roulleau-Berger 2016), which implies novel social, economic and emotional contradictions in migrant workers’ daily experience in the workplace. As such, the contemporary Chinese platform economy appears to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has generated new working opportunities for the contemporary generation of migrants from the periphery, in many cases from inner Chinese provinces, who arrive in industrial cities and who are able to make use of digital tools to be employed in the digital economies, performing digital work on digitized economic platforms. On the other hand, such a novel performance of digital work brings about new forms of exploitation, subalternity and violence.

Crucially, the digital economy has taken on an important status in the production of ‘non-Western’ global markets, notably Asian ones (Wen and Liu 2021). The platform economy emerged in China as a new industry, or a new myth, against the backdrop of the global technological revolution. Originally launched by Amazon, microtask crowdsourcing is now practised by Chinese giant Alibaba Group. In platform capitalism (Chen 2018; Chen and Qiu 2019), the organization of labour and tasks is increasingly fragmented. Young migrant workers from rural origins have increasingly been employed by the Chinese digital economy, yet their freedom and autonomy at work are often challenged by the capitalist culture which characterizes these digital workspaces (Jia and Dwayne 2018). To reframe Ilana Gershon's (2017) understanding of neoliberalism, in contemporary China, migrant workers are ‘reviewed’ and rated by consumers; they are encouraged by their employer to ‘always work more’ in order to participate in this platform capitalism (Wu et al. 2020).