‘Successful Baby Mama’: How Entrepreneurship Motivates Consumption Among Baby Mamas (Bao Ma) in China

The strategy of 'short-video entrepreneurship' has been perceived as an alternative for economically and socially disadvantaged individuals in China to turn their lives around (fan shen). Women, particularly mothers, frequently encounter disadvantages in various aspects of life, including marriage, family relations and the labour market, as well as in policy-making. The accelerated growth of short-video platforms and new media has promoted the emergence of the Baby Mamas as a subject of consumption and, meanwhile, as an entrepreneurial subject. Using digital ethnography and interview as methods, this study explores how the propagation of the 'successful Baby Mama' entrepreneurial myth on Kuaishou has contributed to the consumption of the Baby Mama community. Based on the fieldwork conducted with one Baby Mama entrepreneurship group, this study indicates that, rather than the women's self-empowerment alleged by this group, it presents an exploitation among Baby Mamas in the name of entrepreneurship via emotional management and manipulation. Through in-group trainings, the members were made to believe that consumption was the price for learning how to make money and show loyalty to the group leaders. The transformations of the seller-consumer relationship into a teacher-student relationship, and subsequently into an executive (gao ceng)-human resource (ren mai) relationship, resulted in the stratification of this entrepreneurial group. This stratification served to justify and reinforce the emotional rituals and power relations that existed within the group. Nonetheless, a resistant movement emerged but failed four months later. This resistance employed traditional gender roles to challenge the neoliberal ideology of the entrepreneurial Baby Mama, but finally proved unsuccessful. This suggests the need for developing a new theoretical framework to counteract the negative impact of neoliberalism on collective activism.