The Art of Performing Affectation: Manufacturing and Branding an Enterprising Self by Chinese E-Commerce Traders

Professional training in self-branding in Western societies usually emphasises the need for authentic self-representation and individual uniqueness. This study explores an equivalent practice in contemporary China called zhuangbi. Although it also invokes a sense of self-enterprise, this practice is openly presented as including pretence or exaggeration, which is why I translate it as “performing affectation”. Chinese e-traders are categorised by the public and themselves as professional zhuangbi performers. The practice works, I argue, as a technology for the e-traders to refashion themselves into enterprising subjects who embody certain dispositions that may establish their status in the Chinese business world. These dispositions, basically concerning how to behave as successful modern internet entrepreneurs, include the appropriate ways to earn or sustain economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital. As influenced by Chinese cultural traditions, e-traders often perform affectation in a homogeneous form, which reflects that they have experienced only partial individualisation. By examining how they generate different forms of capital to build their self-enterprises, this article also shows that the flow of different forms of capital can sometimes transcend class boundaries and that lower classes may also contribute to the construction and diffusion of certain types of cultural and symbolic capital.