Introduction

Since the mid-2000s, China has experienced an e-commerce boom (Yue 2017). Almost at the same time, in countries where there is a significant presence of Chinese migrants, the phenomenon of daigou has developed. The daigou-ers (literally ‘proxy buyers’) are commercial agents who buy local products to resell them to their customers in China. As daigou has become a global system, the transnational transaction in each country has developed its own specialization (Wang 2021). In France, where the migratory flows from China have been diversifying and becoming feminized for two decades, Chinese migrant women (students, spouses of French citizens, wage workers, etc.) have massively engaged in daigou activities. Infant milk, cosmetics and luxury accessories are the products most commonly sold through the daigou channel (Wang 2017).

The explanation for the rise in popularity of foreign-made infant formula among Chinese consumers lies in the multiple food safety scandals that have occurred in China over the past decade. These scandals include the highly publicized Sanlu melamine infant formula incident, which in 2008 led to six deaths and 54,000 hospitalizations (Keck 2009; Yan 2012). These scandals have significantly undermined consumer confidence in locally produced products and have created an unprecedented market for infant food that daigou-ers can purchase outside China (Martin 2017a, 2017b).

This chapter examines the experiences of Chinese migrant women in France who are involved in the e-commerce of infant formula. Although its traders are not limited to migrant women, the resale of infant formula via Taobao (an e-commerce platform of the Alibaba Group) and WeChat (a popular Chinese social media application) is perceived as a typically female activity among Chinese migrants in France. By focusing on trade on an online platform in the infant formula sector, my study aims to understand the tension and fusion between online and offline realities in the making of daigou-ers’ practices and experiences.

A central debate in the existing literature on women's entrepreneurship is about the complex relationship between entrepreneurship carried out in digital spaces and women's empowerment (Yu and Cui 2019) in the material reality in which they live and act. Does the internet serve as a web of opportunity for women?