In Dalian Software Park, China's centre for IT-enabled outsourcing and offshore services, knowledge workers find themselves on the 'assembly line' of information processing, carrying out highly routinized, de-skilled, and poorly paid work for which they are vastly overqualified. Following the recent attention to culture and personhood in studies of global capitalism, I argue that these knowledge workers are motivated by two forms of cosmopolitanism: corporate cosmopolitanism, the capacity to reconcile the supra-territorial values of 'global' corporate culture with local values; and nationalist cosmopolitanism, whereby individual workers see the performance of cultural openness as a way of contributing to China's national project of modernization. As well as providing a rare account of cosmopolitanism in the workplace, this article demonstrates the significance of cosmopolitanism for the global economy. The pursuit of cosmopolitanism creates a productive friction between individual projects of self-making, corporate projects of disciplining labour, as well as national projects of pursuing modernity and development. Dalian Software Park (DLSP) is one of the many information technology (IT) hubs that have been set up in China in the last twenty years as part of a concerted effort to shift China's economy 'up the value chain' , away from a reliance on manufacturing, towards industries driven by science and innovation. An abundance of IT graduates and a raft of economic incentives have seen DLSP attract well-known technology companies such as IBM, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP. Yet, not all the activities in the software park could be classed as 'high-tech' or 'high-value'. As well as coding and software programming, there are service centres dedicated to back-office work. In pursuit of cost savings, multinational companies have looked to offshore business processes, especially those of support functions, thereby creating new spaces of the global economy. Inside low-rise buildings of glass and steel, Chinese knowledge workers find themselves labouring on the 'assembly line' of information processing. Highly specialized and repetitive, their daily work may involve uploading timesheets, scanning résumés, or calculating insurance contributions. Flows of capital, information, and labour converge, demonstrating the power of information and communication technologies.