From click to boom: the political economy of E-Commerce in China

Lizhi Liu. From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China LiuLizhi. From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China. Princeton University Press, 2024. 328 pp. $29.95, paper.

This study examines the recalibration of local-level rural e-commerce in China’s New Era political economy. Drawing on fieldwork in three Yunnan counties, this study explores the effects of recalibration on China’s platform giants. We find that the dysfunctional local developmental state—shown as a shift in a diminished developmental drive mainly focused on noneconomic goals, the preferential treatment of local state-backed firms over private platform giants in industrial policy, the digital literacy-poor local bureaucracy, and the alienation of e-commerce firms of all sizes—leads to the misalignment between China’s increasingly security-centric state capitalism and profit-driven platform giants. This misalignment partly contributes to the deceleration of China’s platform economy.

From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China

马克思主义政治经济学视角下的 我国农村电子商务发展研究

This article employs a feminist political economy perspective to explore the connection between e-commerce, entrepreneurship and gender in rural China. It discusses gendered engagement with, and discourses of, the new digital economy represented by Taobao villages, and asks: how has the success of rural e-commerce impacted the evolving gender mandate and hierarchy in a competitive market economy in rural China? Has rural women's participation in digital economic activities changed their gendered roles and the patriarchal structure in their family and village? This article argues that women's socioeconomic enablement does not necessarily translate into cultural and political empowerment. The enabling potential of female entrepreneurship is tempered by traditional constraints on women and digital capitalist exploitation of their cheap, flexible and docile labour.