Working closely with data: Aspirations and constraints of Chinese data scientists

This study examines how data scientists, locally known as suanfa gongchengshi , employed by major Chinese infotech companies navigate their professional identities and aspirations amid the expansive process of datafication within and beyond the tech industry. Drawing on interviews with 23 data scientists from leading firms such as Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, alongside a critical discourse analysis of dominant narratives surrounding the profession, we identify three key dynamics. First, data scientists cultivate a datafied professional habitus through continuous algorithmic experimentation, model optimization, and real-time feedback interpretation, resulting in an “alchemy-like” engagement with data. Second, they derive immediate professional and emotional rewards from high salaries, technical achievements, and adaptability, which sustain resilience and meaning in daily work. Third, their long-term aspirations for innovation and transformative roles are systematically constrained, as monopolized access to computational resources, research opportunities, and creative autonomy by tech giants reduces them to implementers of preexisting models. These findings highlight how data scientists both shape and are constrained by the data-driven infrastructures they sustain, revealing the complex interplay between professional achievement, structural limits, and the reproduction of technological hierarchies.