To be fair, the living conditions of everyone involved in such entrepreneurial experiments often improve, from the top of the chain to the bottom. But it’s not the rosy egalitarian picture state actors and Big Tech like to paint. In fact, entrepreneurship seems to selectively benefit people with a certain background. In rural villages, it’s the young people who have learned how to use the internet in cities; in Beijing, it’s the startup founders with prestigious university educations or employment experience at state-owned firms; for luxury resellers, it’s the people who already have the privilege to move across borders freely and have the fashion sense to build personal brands.

So while entrepreneurship in China can at times break down barriers between genders, classes, and other social backgrounds, it also reinforces other boundaries—like how Taobao sellers double down on the idea that internet-based innovation skills are more valuable than the gendered, manual labor of manufacturing products.

I also found another takeaway from the book fascinating: As these experiments blur the definitions of worker and entrepreneur, it’s increasingly difficult to apply the traditional approaches of labor rights and organizing. 

Rural Taobao sellers are simultaneously managers and laborers: they do intellectual work and physical work, and they exploit others but they also self-exploit. These individuals typically don’t have a clear class consciousness, either; are the sellers middle-class professionals or working-class laborers? Even Zhang is unsure. These are just some of the reasons why labor organizing is difficult in China today.

As the platform economy in China has pulled back in the last three years, due to both the country’s general economic downturn and a specific focus on taming Big Tech, the preoccupation with entrepreneurship has cooled a bit, too. “That kind of optimism about tech entrepreneurship is already normalized in a way. It’s not like in the beginning, right after 2008, when you had all these people talking about co-working space, innovation, and all that,” Zhang says. “Innovation… has to be subjected to all these political imperatives now. We’re definitely in a new era.”

The market itself is also changing constantly, making some of the entrepreneurs in the book already out of fashion. Being a rural e-commerce owner is no longer the splashy job it was 10 years ago. While the book doesn’t cover the most recent dynamics, Zhang told me she’s noticed new forms of entrepreneurship sprouting from the ones she studied. Some tech founders in Beijing have moved on to crypto ventures, and many e-commerce sellers and luxury resellers have embraced livestreaming to become influencers. These new jobs will surely create their own distinct social effects, for better or worse. 

It can be hard to identify these consequences as we live through the reinvention cycle, but it’s nevertheless important to understand them, as we’re all affected. In fact, it’s happening directly to us—to Zhang, to me, and probably to you.