This presentation draws on an eight-month ethnographic study in a rural community in Southeastern China to examine the socio-economic transformations brought about by the digital age. With limited entrepreneurial opportunities following the decline of the family workshop model of earlier industrialisation eras, younger generations face a stark dissonance between the opulent lifestyles portrayed on social media and their own constrained realities. Many individuals have turned to informal economies and even cyber fraud as strategies for survival and profit-making, engaging in practices such as deceptive live-streaming, Ponzi schemes, and speculative commodity trading. These activities, embedded in the informal economy, reveal a complex interplay of digital entrepreneurship and moral flexibility.

The study also explores how local and transnational clan networks facilitate these practices and mediate interactions with local governance, which is negotiated through traditional mechanisms such as donations, participation in business or civil associations activities, and visible support for government-led initiatives, reflecting a model rooted in traditional practices rather than modernisation. Furthermore, clan ties and local religious beliefs provide moral frameworks that rationalise exploitative practices, often justified by targeting ‘outsiders’. This research situates these phenomena within broader historical trajectories of economic and the status of merchants shifts in China and provides a nuanced understanding of identity, wealth, and moral fluidity within the evolving dynamics of integration into the digital economy in contemporary rural China.

Peng Wu is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is currently visiting the University of Oxford as a Recognised Student.