Who wants 9-to-5 jobs? Precarity, (in)security, and Chinese youths in Beijing and Hong Kong

In this article I examined how “slash” and startup careers have been promoted in the recent call for mass entrepreneurship to further advance the interests of the state; and how the initiatives in Mainland China have provided Hong Kong ideas for tackling its governmentality crisis resulting from youth disgruntlement with deteriorating socio-economic conditions and loss of political autonomy. I adopt the inter-referencing Asia approach to facilitate a conversation between the research on precarity in Beijing and Hong Kong contexts and the large body of literature on precarity that derives mainly from the Western experiences. I base my analysis on discourse analysis and visual analysis of three corpora of textual and visual materials, including materials from interviews and ethnographic research.