Uncertainty is one of the most profound characteristics of the rubber futures market. Petty entrepreneurs in China’s southwestern borderland engaging in rubber business usually gather around large-scaled business entrepreneurs to discuss about the trends of futures market. They had functioned in the past as ‘brokers’, importing standard rubber from neighboring countries to serve larger rubber factories and state-owned companies locating in Xishuangbanna, Southwestern China to manufacture the standard rubber products.
Faced by Covid-19 in 2020 onward, however, these petty entrepreneurs have gained more risk due to a massive increase of rubber products made of latex instead of standard rubber usages in the rubber market. Within this economic context, this paper explores a case study of Tai Lue female entrepreneurs in how such situation has led them to a moral dilemma, and how they cope with it. This paper applies ‘weakness’ to conceptualize as a weapon of Tai Lue female entrepreneur in facing with business risk situation and especially the moral issue. Based on one-year ethnographic fieldwork in Xishuangbanna, I found betrayal emotion occurred among petty entrepreneurs towards either former customers or former suppliers which were caused by a change of engaging in latex production with larger entrepreneurs outside Xishuangbanna. To cope with this emotion and business survival, Tai Lue entrepreneurs have utilized the narrative of weakness rooted in Chinese discourse when referring to Chinese women and ethnic minorities as ‘unimportance’ to rationalize their own actions and protect themselves from such guilt feeling. Hence, the narrative of weak and unimportant women and ethnic minorities can allow Tai Lue entrepreneurs to break certain rules of Chinese society since such economic actions are such a small thing, not a big deal for societal changes.
