Orange bras, petit capitalism and e-entrepreneurs. On the backroads of globalisation between China and Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Through a multi-sited physical and virtual ethnography of Chinese migrant women's entrepreneurship in Taiwan, this paper illuminates the role of digital migrant entrepreneurship in the making of globalisation. In the digital age of gendered migrant entrepreneurship, it challenges the long-lasting dichotomy between ‘bottom-up' and ‘top-down' globalisation and contributes to the theoretical debate about migrant transnational entrepreneurship, elucidating how capitalism and globalisation can take multiple forms. Drawing on Chinese women's migratory biographies and the commercial geographies of the objects they trade between China and Taiwan, it shows how our global economic system is simultaneously forged by supply-chain capitalism and migrants’ digitalised petit capitalistic practices. Chinese migrant workers firstly manufacture goods whilst working for multinational companies in China, then, after marriage-migration, they commercialise the products in Taiwan via WeChat. Findings illustrate the link between ICTs, migrant entrepreneurship, gendered social networks, and border transgressions in shaping a mutable globalisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant digital entrepreneurship
• digital platforms
• globalisation
• capitalism
• commodity chain
• WeChat

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Beatrice Zani

Beatrice Zani received her Ph.D in sociology from Lyon 2 University (2019). She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of East-Asian Studies, McGill University. She was awarded the Young Author’s 1st Award from the journal Sociology of Work (2021), the Christian Ricourt Prize of the Yong Researcher in Taiwanese Studies by AFET (2017) and the 11th Prize for Human Rights (2017) by Lyon’s League of Human Rights. She is Board Member of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) and Board Member of the thematic network ‘Migration’of the French Sociological Association. Her research interests include migration, emotion, intimacies, ICT entrepreneurship and globalisation. She has recently published her first monograph Women Migrants in Southern China and in Taiwan. Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions (Routledge, 2022).