Rural spaces of digital labour: Taobao villages and new cycles between tradition and platformisation

This essay examines ‘Taobao Villages’ as a lens through which to interrogate the new spatial and labour formations produced by the platformisation of rural China. Focusing on Junpucun in Guangdong Province, it argues that these villages exemplify a process of recursive ruralisation: the cyclical return of capital and technology to the countryside. The article positions the rural not as a peripheral residue of urban modernity, but as an active terrain where global capitalism is absorbed, reworked, negotiated, and contested.