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This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC in the history of its decades-long transformation. We highlight two new ways in which the state has become intertwined with the market in the ICT sector. First, state agents at various levels have transformed themselves into ‘market agencies,’ acting through the market instead of governing it at a distance. Second, the state has increasingly taken a financialized approach to ICT governance, assuming the role of a capital investor to guide and facilitate rather than directly managing a market-driven entrepreneurial economy. We show how these macro political economic shifts have shaped mezzo level institutional changes and the micro, lived experiences of entrepreneurs variously situated along the elite-grassroots spectrum in ZGC, who rode waves of ‘mass entrepreneurship and innovation’ under the current Xi-Li administration.

Entrepreneurs in China’s ‘Silicon Valley’: state-led financialization and mass entrepreneurship/innovation