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Accepted Paper:
Selling rurality: the entrepreneurial-subject making on the platform and new discourses of the tourist gaze in China
Weijing Wang
(Bielefeld University)
This paper focuses on how rural residents have been shaped into platform-based entrepreneurial subjects by the tourist gaze in the process of platformization in the Chinese countryside and contends the government constructs a bridge between political ambitions and the aspirations of rural people.
Paper Abstract:
This paper focuses on how rural residents have been shaped into platform-based entrepreneurial subjects by the tourist gaze in the process of platformization in the Chinese countryside. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the tourist gaze, mass tourism in modern society emerges the tourist gaze, seeking the “out of the ordinary,” a “departure” from the routine and everyday (Urry and Larsen, 2011). The platform-based entrepreneurship in rural China has been encouraged in the context of “rural vitalization”. Therefore, the online entrepreneurial subject in the Chinese countryside, making use of the tourist gaze, has been constructed by the government a connectedness between political action and personal conduct, through its way of equating the happiness of its individual subjects with the state’s strength (Burchell et. al, 1991; Foucault et al. 2007).
This paper argues that: 1) governments, collaborated with platform giants, launched a series of mechanisms for manufacturing the entrepreneurial subject; 2) the local peasants and return migrants engage in e-commerce of agricultural products based on advocating the tourist gaze authorized by discourses such as health on the platform; 3) a large number of rural residents exhibit the rural authenticity on the platform for the expectation to become the entrepreneurial-subject that policies required, so as to make profits. In conclusion, this paper contends that the new platform-based entrepreneurial-subject is building during rural platformization in China. Accompanying new discourses of the tourist gaze such as rural vitalization, the government tacitly constructs a bridge between its political ambitions and the aspirations of rural people.