Open Sesame? The Paradoxical Development of C2C E-commerce in China

Ju Li

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2021, vol. 53, issue 2, 266-280

Abstract: In this article, I analyze the paradoxical development of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce in China by investigating three dimensions in its ecosystem: the rent extraction of the platform capital, the labor-intensive mini-enterprises under the demand-driven supply chain of e-commerce, and the widespread commodification and dispossession. I argue that its development has deepened and broadened the exploitative relationship among various forms of labor and capital. To a great extent, although the largely unregulated development of e-commerce has created more employment and provided opportunities for some previously marginalized places and social groups, especially during the early stage, it has quickly engendered malicious competition, notorious counterfeiting, and shrinking profits and bankruptcy for mini-merchants and mini-entrepreneurs, while on top of that a few huge monopolistic e-commerce platform companies have arisen and expanded rapidly. JEL classification : O11, O33, O53, P21

Keywords: C2C e-commerce; rent extraction; demand-driven supply chain; commodification; accumulation by dispossession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0486613420964164 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:53:y:2021:i:2:p:266-280

DOI: 10.1177/0486613420964164

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().