This article elaborates on the unmaking of the peasant classes among the tu er dai 土二代 (peasant l... more This article elaborates on the unmaking of the peasant classes among the tu er dai 土二代 (peasant landlords), with a particular focus on their claims to contested wealth through rent-seeking and other accumulative practices in Guangzhou's urban villages. E. P. Thompson's classic text, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), demonstrates the formation of class consciousness as historically embedded within cultural meanings, qualitative conditions of industrialization, and agency of the working people. The case of the tu er dai, however, lays bare how the historical unmaking of the Maoist peasant classes entails the emaciation of rural populations, as Yan Hairong has described, through the intensified extraction and exploitation of the migrant classes. The tu er dai is a place-based group of former peasants who have quickly elevated to the rentier class thanks to their collective possession of use rights to village land. By remaining suspended between the spatial and subjective designations of the rural and the urban, village members find themselves strategically stalling negotiations with the municipal government in the selling of their use rights via the corporate lineage. Meanwhile, they intensify the predatory extraction of rent and fees from migrant laborers so as to navigate the dilemmas associated with state-endorsed projects of displacement and development. The seemingly paradoxical identifications of the peasant landlords as both rural and urban citizens, though not wholly one or the other, cast light on their patchy, place-based strategies of accumulation, as they increasingly sever their sources of livelihood from their collective land and become incorporated into the urban core.
This special issue highlights a range of cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of China’s ch... more This special issue highlights a range of cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of China’s chengzhongcun 城中村 (urban villages). We take urban villages, or “villages surrounded by the city,” as a method in thinking about the contradictions, contestations, and transformations that underlie the processes of postsocialist transformation in China. While a number of inter-disciplinary scholars have conducted studies on urban villages in China,particularly in Shenzhen and Guangzhou (Siu 2007; He and Wu 2009; Bach 2010; Al 2014; O’Donnell, Wong, and Bach 2017; Buckingham and Chen 2018), fewer works have taken a historical and cross-regional perspective of urban villages across multiple Chinese cities. To this end, we take a broader, critical look at several urban villages across Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Zhengzhou, and Guangzhou.
This article introduces South China's jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of affect... more This article introduces South China's jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of affective and industrial labour, which are produced by migrant women's yearnings for people and places far away. Temporary sites and precarious forms of low-wage production serve as fragmented and provisional resources of sociality and labour as migrant workers and urban villages gradually become incorporated within the urban fabric. The unrequited longings of migrant women who work in factories and as caretakers demonstrate how marginal hubs are created through disjunctures of emplacement and mobility, which are intensified as these women attempt to bridge the contradictions entailed in care work and industrial labour across the supply chains.
In Guangzhou’s fast fashion sector, creativity operates as practices in boundary-making, which em... more In Guangzhou’s fast fashion sector, creativity operates as practices in boundary-making, which emerge in spaces within the blurred boundaries that delineate original and copy production. Using the Xi Fang Hang market as a case study, I demonstrate how the quick turnover of fast fashion commodities compels different groups of market participants to claim contesting definitions and practices of creativity. While building managers and wealthy entrepreneurs mobilize techniques of rent extraction and claim originality as rightful sources of creativity, less established migrant entrepreneurs use design copying as a tool for market survival. With limited resources and formal education in fashion and merchandising, migrants claim success in delivering the right styles and trends at the right time and in keeping their businesses afloat. Together, these competing practices constitute what I call ‘paradoxes of creativity’, dynamics that highlight creativity as a fluid cultural category that is always subject to tensions and contestations.
This article examines the historical emergence of “craft-like” manufacture and labor along the gl... more This article examines the historical emergence of “craft-like” manufacture and labor along the global commodity chains for fast fashion in southern China. Using Guangzhou’s garment district as a case study, I analyze how intensification of transnational subcontracting practices across the Pacific Rim has facilitated a synergistic melding of craft and industrial production that is often described as a post-Fordist model of mass manufacture. Craft-based organization of production and work life has melded with industrial principles of transnational subcontracting and garment mass manufacture in urban villages that serve as China’s “workshops of the world.” While conventional ideas of craft in the contemporary period tend to project an aura of authenticity upon objects and ways of making, flexible mass manufacture in this age of intensified mechanical reproduction has increasingly relied on small-scale, craft-based practices that complicate migrants’ experiences of labor across divergent historical and geographical contexts. The mobility of people, objects, and practices in China and beyond has destabilized the categories of industry/craft, rural/urban, and wage worker/entrepreneur by blurring the divisions of land and labor that once organized centralized modes of industrial and craft production.
As dusk cast dark shadows along the narrow alleyways of Guangzhou’s garment district in the south... more As dusk cast dark shadows along the narrow alleyways of Guangzhou’s garment district in the southeast corner of the city, Mrs. Wong packaged the last of the folded garments into flat cellophane bags. She remained silent, despite feeling exhaustion, anger, and resentment toward her husband after another bitter argument had exploded earlier that day. Moments later, she received a phone call from Carmen, a 28-year-old wholesaler whose business the Wongs relied on to keep their small-scale operation afloat. After Mrs. Wong updated Carmen on their progress with the next shipment of little girls’ dresses, Carmen told her that the Thai client had seen a picture of one of the dresses that was not quite ready for shipment. The client had requested a second, last-minute shipment for the next day, pushing the deadline for the original order up by two days. Despite explaining to Carmen that she and the workers were exhausted from working overtime the previous night to meet a prior deadline, Mrs. Wong reluctantly agreed to another sleepless night of labour.
Critics and pundits in China and abroad described the population-control measures of China’s zero... more Critics and pundits in China and abroad described the population-control measures of China’s zero-Covid policy as the ‘return’ of an all-encompassing state control akin to that of the Maoist period. While that claim is dubious, such assumptions tend to obscure the ways in which the rollout of the zero-Covid policy throughout 2021 and 2022—particularly the use of grid management (网格化管理) as a tool of population control—relied on capitalist mechanisms, such as the mobility of people, commodities, and capital.
Video of full lecture with presentation slides edited into the video.Cornell East Asia Program1_8... more Video of full lecture with presentation slides edited into the video.Cornell East Asia Program1_83f3vot
GUANGZHOU, China — As I walked through the narrow alleyways of the garment district here in China... more GUANGZHOU, China — As I walked through the narrow alleyways of the garment district here in China’s third-largest city one afternoon, I saw a woman I’ll call Wong Yip sitting beside a large worktable by the tall front gates of her factory. In 2012, Wong Yip and her husband, who I’ll call Wong Zi, moved here from neighboring Guangxi Province to experiment in the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship. They own and operate their own small-scale industrial workshop, colloquially known as a jiagongchang, situated in a garage-like den that facilitates the mass assembly of low-cost garments bound for transnational traders and ultimately exported as fast fashion to overseas markets around the globe.
With her eyes cast downward, she took a stack of thick elastic bands and placed them beside a ruler before cutting them into narrow strips. Piles of carefully measured loose fabric strands gathered on the table in front of her. I sat on a wooden stool beside her and said hello. She returned a smile, but it looked tired and forced, seeming to hide a flood of emotion brewing inside of her. When I told her I had the next few days off from teaching, she remarked how wonderful a scholarly life must be.
A lanky man in a white t-shirt and fitted khaki pants cropped right above his ankles emerged out of the factory and stood beside me. Wong looked up at him and spoke angrily. “You must understand,” she said, “it takes money to pay for the electricity and to pay our workers. … We’ve been waiting for over a month now and you owe us more than 10,000 RMB. We refuse to hand over the finished garments until you pay us the money!”
This chapter analyzes how Chinese rural migrants’ participation in the global commodity chains fo... more This chapter analyzes how Chinese rural migrants’ participation in the global commodity chains for fast fashion in Guangzhou intersects with their geographic imaginaries of the “global.” Specifically, it examines how migrants come to know the extent of their displacement as low-wage laborers in one of China’s “workshops of the world.” Through ethnographic description, this chapterreveals how migrant laborers’ geographic imaginaries inform the ways in which Chinese migrant laborers come to understand the conditions of their class-based labor and displacement vis-à-vis other market participants along the wider commodity chain. Migrant laborers create mental maps of the commodity chains in which they participate, while they situate their class-based roles along the transnational production chains.
Author(s): Chu, Nellie | Advisor(s): Rofel, Lisa | Abstract: This dissertation examines how rural... more Author(s): Chu, Nellie | Advisor(s): Rofel, Lisa | Abstract: This dissertation examines how rural migrants' experiments with small-scale entrepreneurship serve as the intermediary links through which global commodity chains for fast fashion are anchored in post-socialist China. While anthropologists of transnational capitalism have examined the diversity through which market participants determine the movement of labor and capital across vast geographic distances around the globe, their works tend to rely on the stability of categories of people, objects, and practices. They overlook the ways in which people's identities shift and move within ongoing conditions of ambivalence and uncertainty. Based on 22 months of fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, this dissertation underscores the shifting qualities of experiences among migrant entrepreneurs as they craft the transnational links of commodity production and exchange. I show how the global commodity chains for f...
Engendering Laoban: The Masculinisation of Bosshood and Uncertainty in Transnational Guangzhou, China, 2022
In southern China, small-scale factory owners have forged cross-cultural collaborations with tran... more In southern China, small-scale factory owners have forged cross-cultural collaborations with transnational brokers, suitcase traders and subcontracted agents, to create the cross-border partnerships that comprise the transnational supply chains on a global scale. In turn, the forging of these cultural and economic links has generated a platform upon which small-scale subcontractors, as well as other agents across the supply chains, call themselves “boss” by taking on the risks and rewards of entrepreneurial self-enterprise, while they embed their economic activities within the global economy.
In the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, gendered enactments of “bosshood” and other figures of capitalist accumulation are expressed through divergent performances of male mobility, as articulated and expressed through entrepreneurial and masculine “freedom” across various class groups. These enactments, in turn, are linked to specific labour practices, organisation of kin relations, and manipulation of transnational citizenship. The story of Mr. Cai, a forty-something successful real estate investor and owner of several garment factories based in Guangzhou, offers a glimpse into the cultural significance of the “boss” as an aspirational figure in contemporary China. More specifically, the accumulative strategies of Mr. Cai and his family highlight how the scaling of capitalist networks across provincial and national boundaries entails spatial and subjective transformations through which patriarchal figures emerge within transnational families.
In the mega-metropolis of Guangzhou in southern China, millions of migrant youths arrive in the c... more In the mega-metropolis of Guangzhou in southern China, millions of migrant youths arrive in the city’s wholesale market for “fast fashion”—to try their luck at becoming bosses of their own labor. Ultimately, however, their participation in the fast-paced market heightens their sense of emotional and financial insecurity, even as they strive to achieve wealth and social mobility.
In recent years, rising labour costs and unstable market conditions characteristic of China’s gar... more In recent years, rising labour costs and unstable market conditions characteristic of China’s garment manufacturing sector in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region have prompted former migrant workers and small-scale entrepreneurs to move their wholesaling and informal manufacturing activities to interior provinces. Their entrepreneurial activities restructure global supply chains by using logistical and transport systems that connect interior regions to major industrial and trading hubs historically built along the coastal Special Economic Zones. These transregional linkages, as I will show, have been accompanied by an expansion of informal entrepreneurship and manufacturing, practices that are primarily driven by early generations of migrant workers who arrived in Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou in the early 1980s, and who have relocated back to their native places in smaller cities or in the countryside. After relocating, they typically establish satellite factories and small-scale warehouses that support the manufacturing capacities of larger factories in the metropolitan regions and traditional manufacturing areas.
In the summer of 2014, I returned to Guangzhou to conduct follow-up research on the global commod... more In the summer of 2014, I returned to Guangzhou to conduct follow-up research on the global commodity chains for fast fashion garments and accessories. That year, when I revisited the wholesale markets and factory workshops where I began my study in 2010, I was surprised to learn that some of the migrant entrepreneurs whom I met during the course of my research had gradually expanded their businesses. As they slowly accumulated modest amounts of wealth, I witnessed how their material conditions improved. For example, a migrant couple who ran a small-scale workshop in the city's garment district considered opening another factory in their native place in Guangxi province. The wife, Mrs. Wong, was prepared to manage their new factory in Guangxi, while her husband Mr. Wong planned to remain in Guangzhou in order to oversee their primary operations. At the same time, the couple had renovated their living quarters on the second floor. Rather than having their eighteen year old son sleep on the wooden floor underneath the industrial table, the family expanded their living space. They added a new sofa and TV, where their son could lounge and entertain relatives and friends. The Wongs also added a gas water heater in lieu of a makeshift light bulb. Every evening when the couple cooked dinner, they added more meat and fish to their meals, while they made sure that every temporary worker that day had their fair share of the food. They also rented a modest room in an apartment nearby, so as to provide temporary housing for their migrant employees. Though, in many ways, the material conditions of their lives had improved, the migrants' sense of financial and emotional security remained uncertain. The Wongs admitted that a main reason that they considered opening another factory in their native place was that they anticipated that many of the factories in and around Guangzhou would eventually close due to rising costs in labor and standards of living across the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region. In addition, migrant workers frequently complained to me about the worsening safety and sanitary conditions around the urban villages that comprised Guangzhou's garment district. The Wongs' temporary employees informed me that the husband of a garment factory nearby had apparently murdered his wife when he suspected that she was unfaithful to him. This case added an aura of criminality and violence that people, including migrant residents and urbanized outsiders, projected onto Guangzhou's urban villages. Meanwhile, the spatial boundary that separated the land owned by the village collectives from the urban core was increasingly regulated and patrolled by the police and other traffic officers. I had seen officers indiscriminately confiscate pedi-cab bikes, depriving some undocumented migrants from their primary source of living. Other police officers had also begun to patrol the alleyways during the night in order to regulate or to discourage young, fledgling migrant entrepreneurs from informally selling garments and other commodities to pedestrians on the street. Yet, despite the precarious conditions under which they often find themselves, I am amazed by the sense of resilience migrants are able to maintain in face of circumstances that are
In Guangzhou, China, the arrival of transnational migrant entrepreneurs from countries across Af... more In Guangzhou, China, the arrival of transnational migrant entrepreneurs from countries across Africa has captured the attention of a growing number of scholars, artists, and documentary film makers. Their works have described in rich detail the complexities of these migrants’ experiences as they labor to establish their work and family lives in the post-socialist nation. While most studies have focused on the broader socio-economic ramifications of African migrants’ activities in China, few works have analyzed how the structural dynamics of transnational outsourcing of labor and manufacturing capacities shape the everyday encounters between African migrant entrepreneurs and Chinese manufacturers.
This article elaborates on the unmaking of the peasant classes among the tu er dai 土二代 (peasant l... more This article elaborates on the unmaking of the peasant classes among the tu er dai 土二代 (peasant landlords), with a particular focus on their claims to contested wealth through rent-seeking and other accumulative practices in Guangzhou's urban villages. E. P. Thompson's classic text, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), demonstrates the formation of class consciousness as historically embedded within cultural meanings, qualitative conditions of industrialization, and agency of the working people. The case of the tu er dai, however, lays bare how the historical unmaking of the Maoist peasant classes entails the emaciation of rural populations, as Yan Hairong has described, through the intensified extraction and exploitation of the migrant classes. The tu er dai is a place-based group of former peasants who have quickly elevated to the rentier class thanks to their collective possession of use rights to village land. By remaining suspended between the spatial and subjective designations of the rural and the urban, village members find themselves strategically stalling negotiations with the municipal government in the selling of their use rights via the corporate lineage. Meanwhile, they intensify the predatory extraction of rent and fees from migrant laborers so as to navigate the dilemmas associated with state-endorsed projects of displacement and development. The seemingly paradoxical identifications of the peasant landlords as both rural and urban citizens, though not wholly one or the other, cast light on their patchy, place-based strategies of accumulation, as they increasingly sever their sources of livelihood from their collective land and become incorporated into the urban core.
This special issue highlights a range of cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of China’s ch... more This special issue highlights a range of cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of China’s chengzhongcun 城中村 (urban villages). We take urban villages, or “villages surrounded by the city,” as a method in thinking about the contradictions, contestations, and transformations that underlie the processes of postsocialist transformation in China. While a number of inter-disciplinary scholars have conducted studies on urban villages in China,particularly in Shenzhen and Guangzhou (Siu 2007; He and Wu 2009; Bach 2010; Al 2014; O’Donnell, Wong, and Bach 2017; Buckingham and Chen 2018), fewer works have taken a historical and cross-regional perspective of urban villages across multiple Chinese cities. To this end, we take a broader, critical look at several urban villages across Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Zhengzhou, and Guangzhou.
This article introduces South China's jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of affect... more This article introduces South China's jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of affective and industrial labour, which are produced by migrant women's yearnings for people and places far away. Temporary sites and precarious forms of low-wage production serve as fragmented and provisional resources of sociality and labour as migrant workers and urban villages gradually become incorporated within the urban fabric. The unrequited longings of migrant women who work in factories and as caretakers demonstrate how marginal hubs are created through disjunctures of emplacement and mobility, which are intensified as these women attempt to bridge the contradictions entailed in care work and industrial labour across the supply chains.
In Guangzhou’s fast fashion sector, creativity operates as practices in boundary-making, which em... more In Guangzhou’s fast fashion sector, creativity operates as practices in boundary-making, which emerge in spaces within the blurred boundaries that delineate original and copy production. Using the Xi Fang Hang market as a case study, I demonstrate how the quick turnover of fast fashion commodities compels different groups of market participants to claim contesting definitions and practices of creativity. While building managers and wealthy entrepreneurs mobilize techniques of rent extraction and claim originality as rightful sources of creativity, less established migrant entrepreneurs use design copying as a tool for market survival. With limited resources and formal education in fashion and merchandising, migrants claim success in delivering the right styles and trends at the right time and in keeping their businesses afloat. Together, these competing practices constitute what I call ‘paradoxes of creativity’, dynamics that highlight creativity as a fluid cultural category that is always subject to tensions and contestations.
This article examines the historical emergence of “craft-like” manufacture and labor along the gl... more This article examines the historical emergence of “craft-like” manufacture and labor along the global commodity chains for fast fashion in southern China. Using Guangzhou’s garment district as a case study, I analyze how intensification of transnational subcontracting practices across the Pacific Rim has facilitated a synergistic melding of craft and industrial production that is often described as a post-Fordist model of mass manufacture. Craft-based organization of production and work life has melded with industrial principles of transnational subcontracting and garment mass manufacture in urban villages that serve as China’s “workshops of the world.” While conventional ideas of craft in the contemporary period tend to project an aura of authenticity upon objects and ways of making, flexible mass manufacture in this age of intensified mechanical reproduction has increasingly relied on small-scale, craft-based practices that complicate migrants’ experiences of labor across divergent historical and geographical contexts. The mobility of people, objects, and practices in China and beyond has destabilized the categories of industry/craft, rural/urban, and wage worker/entrepreneur by blurring the divisions of land and labor that once organized centralized modes of industrial and craft production.
As dusk cast dark shadows along the narrow alleyways of Guangzhou’s garment district in the south... more As dusk cast dark shadows along the narrow alleyways of Guangzhou’s garment district in the southeast corner of the city, Mrs. Wong packaged the last of the folded garments into flat cellophane bags. She remained silent, despite feeling exhaustion, anger, and resentment toward her husband after another bitter argument had exploded earlier that day. Moments later, she received a phone call from Carmen, a 28-year-old wholesaler whose business the Wongs relied on to keep their small-scale operation afloat. After Mrs. Wong updated Carmen on their progress with the next shipment of little girls’ dresses, Carmen told her that the Thai client had seen a picture of one of the dresses that was not quite ready for shipment. The client had requested a second, last-minute shipment for the next day, pushing the deadline for the original order up by two days. Despite explaining to Carmen that she and the workers were exhausted from working overtime the previous night to meet a prior deadline, Mrs. Wong reluctantly agreed to another sleepless night of labour.
Critics and pundits in China and abroad described the population-control measures of China’s zero... more Critics and pundits in China and abroad described the population-control measures of China’s zero-Covid policy as the ‘return’ of an all-encompassing state control akin to that of the Maoist period. While that claim is dubious, such assumptions tend to obscure the ways in which the rollout of the zero-Covid policy throughout 2021 and 2022—particularly the use of grid management (网格化管理) as a tool of population control—relied on capitalist mechanisms, such as the mobility of people, commodities, and capital.
Video of full lecture with presentation slides edited into the video.Cornell East Asia Program1_8... more Video of full lecture with presentation slides edited into the video.Cornell East Asia Program1_83f3vot
GUANGZHOU, China — As I walked through the narrow alleyways of the garment district here in China... more GUANGZHOU, China — As I walked through the narrow alleyways of the garment district here in China’s third-largest city one afternoon, I saw a woman I’ll call Wong Yip sitting beside a large worktable by the tall front gates of her factory. In 2012, Wong Yip and her husband, who I’ll call Wong Zi, moved here from neighboring Guangxi Province to experiment in the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship. They own and operate their own small-scale industrial workshop, colloquially known as a jiagongchang, situated in a garage-like den that facilitates the mass assembly of low-cost garments bound for transnational traders and ultimately exported as fast fashion to overseas markets around the globe.
With her eyes cast downward, she took a stack of thick elastic bands and placed them beside a ruler before cutting them into narrow strips. Piles of carefully measured loose fabric strands gathered on the table in front of her. I sat on a wooden stool beside her and said hello. She returned a smile, but it looked tired and forced, seeming to hide a flood of emotion brewing inside of her. When I told her I had the next few days off from teaching, she remarked how wonderful a scholarly life must be.
A lanky man in a white t-shirt and fitted khaki pants cropped right above his ankles emerged out of the factory and stood beside me. Wong looked up at him and spoke angrily. “You must understand,” she said, “it takes money to pay for the electricity and to pay our workers. … We’ve been waiting for over a month now and you owe us more than 10,000 RMB. We refuse to hand over the finished garments until you pay us the money!”
This chapter analyzes how Chinese rural migrants’ participation in the global commodity chains fo... more This chapter analyzes how Chinese rural migrants’ participation in the global commodity chains for fast fashion in Guangzhou intersects with their geographic imaginaries of the “global.” Specifically, it examines how migrants come to know the extent of their displacement as low-wage laborers in one of China’s “workshops of the world.” Through ethnographic description, this chapterreveals how migrant laborers’ geographic imaginaries inform the ways in which Chinese migrant laborers come to understand the conditions of their class-based labor and displacement vis-à-vis other market participants along the wider commodity chain. Migrant laborers create mental maps of the commodity chains in which they participate, while they situate their class-based roles along the transnational production chains.
Author(s): Chu, Nellie | Advisor(s): Rofel, Lisa | Abstract: This dissertation examines how rural... more Author(s): Chu, Nellie | Advisor(s): Rofel, Lisa | Abstract: This dissertation examines how rural migrants' experiments with small-scale entrepreneurship serve as the intermediary links through which global commodity chains for fast fashion are anchored in post-socialist China. While anthropologists of transnational capitalism have examined the diversity through which market participants determine the movement of labor and capital across vast geographic distances around the globe, their works tend to rely on the stability of categories of people, objects, and practices. They overlook the ways in which people's identities shift and move within ongoing conditions of ambivalence and uncertainty. Based on 22 months of fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, this dissertation underscores the shifting qualities of experiences among migrant entrepreneurs as they craft the transnational links of commodity production and exchange. I show how the global commodity chains for f...
Engendering Laoban: The Masculinisation of Bosshood and Uncertainty in Transnational Guangzhou, China, 2022
In southern China, small-scale factory owners have forged cross-cultural collaborations with tran... more In southern China, small-scale factory owners have forged cross-cultural collaborations with transnational brokers, suitcase traders and subcontracted agents, to create the cross-border partnerships that comprise the transnational supply chains on a global scale. In turn, the forging of these cultural and economic links has generated a platform upon which small-scale subcontractors, as well as other agents across the supply chains, call themselves “boss” by taking on the risks and rewards of entrepreneurial self-enterprise, while they embed their economic activities within the global economy.
In the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, gendered enactments of “bosshood” and other figures of capitalist accumulation are expressed through divergent performances of male mobility, as articulated and expressed through entrepreneurial and masculine “freedom” across various class groups. These enactments, in turn, are linked to specific labour practices, organisation of kin relations, and manipulation of transnational citizenship. The story of Mr. Cai, a forty-something successful real estate investor and owner of several garment factories based in Guangzhou, offers a glimpse into the cultural significance of the “boss” as an aspirational figure in contemporary China. More specifically, the accumulative strategies of Mr. Cai and his family highlight how the scaling of capitalist networks across provincial and national boundaries entails spatial and subjective transformations through which patriarchal figures emerge within transnational families.
In the mega-metropolis of Guangzhou in southern China, millions of migrant youths arrive in the c... more In the mega-metropolis of Guangzhou in southern China, millions of migrant youths arrive in the city’s wholesale market for “fast fashion”—to try their luck at becoming bosses of their own labor. Ultimately, however, their participation in the fast-paced market heightens their sense of emotional and financial insecurity, even as they strive to achieve wealth and social mobility.
In recent years, rising labour costs and unstable market conditions characteristic of China’s gar... more In recent years, rising labour costs and unstable market conditions characteristic of China’s garment manufacturing sector in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region have prompted former migrant workers and small-scale entrepreneurs to move their wholesaling and informal manufacturing activities to interior provinces. Their entrepreneurial activities restructure global supply chains by using logistical and transport systems that connect interior regions to major industrial and trading hubs historically built along the coastal Special Economic Zones. These transregional linkages, as I will show, have been accompanied by an expansion of informal entrepreneurship and manufacturing, practices that are primarily driven by early generations of migrant workers who arrived in Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou in the early 1980s, and who have relocated back to their native places in smaller cities or in the countryside. After relocating, they typically establish satellite factories and small-scale warehouses that support the manufacturing capacities of larger factories in the metropolitan regions and traditional manufacturing areas.
In the summer of 2014, I returned to Guangzhou to conduct follow-up research on the global commod... more In the summer of 2014, I returned to Guangzhou to conduct follow-up research on the global commodity chains for fast fashion garments and accessories. That year, when I revisited the wholesale markets and factory workshops where I began my study in 2010, I was surprised to learn that some of the migrant entrepreneurs whom I met during the course of my research had gradually expanded their businesses. As they slowly accumulated modest amounts of wealth, I witnessed how their material conditions improved. For example, a migrant couple who ran a small-scale workshop in the city's garment district considered opening another factory in their native place in Guangxi province. The wife, Mrs. Wong, was prepared to manage their new factory in Guangxi, while her husband Mr. Wong planned to remain in Guangzhou in order to oversee their primary operations. At the same time, the couple had renovated their living quarters on the second floor. Rather than having their eighteen year old son sleep on the wooden floor underneath the industrial table, the family expanded their living space. They added a new sofa and TV, where their son could lounge and entertain relatives and friends. The Wongs also added a gas water heater in lieu of a makeshift light bulb. Every evening when the couple cooked dinner, they added more meat and fish to their meals, while they made sure that every temporary worker that day had their fair share of the food. They also rented a modest room in an apartment nearby, so as to provide temporary housing for their migrant employees. Though, in many ways, the material conditions of their lives had improved, the migrants' sense of financial and emotional security remained uncertain. The Wongs admitted that a main reason that they considered opening another factory in their native place was that they anticipated that many of the factories in and around Guangzhou would eventually close due to rising costs in labor and standards of living across the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region. In addition, migrant workers frequently complained to me about the worsening safety and sanitary conditions around the urban villages that comprised Guangzhou's garment district. The Wongs' temporary employees informed me that the husband of a garment factory nearby had apparently murdered his wife when he suspected that she was unfaithful to him. This case added an aura of criminality and violence that people, including migrant residents and urbanized outsiders, projected onto Guangzhou's urban villages. Meanwhile, the spatial boundary that separated the land owned by the village collectives from the urban core was increasingly regulated and patrolled by the police and other traffic officers. I had seen officers indiscriminately confiscate pedi-cab bikes, depriving some undocumented migrants from their primary source of living. Other police officers had also begun to patrol the alleyways during the night in order to regulate or to discourage young, fledgling migrant entrepreneurs from informally selling garments and other commodities to pedestrians on the street. Yet, despite the precarious conditions under which they often find themselves, I am amazed by the sense of resilience migrants are able to maintain in face of circumstances that are
In Guangzhou, China, the arrival of transnational migrant entrepreneurs from countries across Af... more In Guangzhou, China, the arrival of transnational migrant entrepreneurs from countries across Africa has captured the attention of a growing number of scholars, artists, and documentary film makers. Their works have described in rich detail the complexities of these migrants’ experiences as they labor to establish their work and family lives in the post-socialist nation. While most studies have focused on the broader socio-economic ramifications of African migrants’ activities in China, few works have analyzed how the structural dynamics of transnational outsourcing of labor and manufacturing capacities shape the everyday encounters between African migrant entrepreneurs and Chinese manufacturers.
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With her eyes cast downward, she took a stack of thick elastic bands and placed them beside a ruler before cutting them into narrow strips. Piles of carefully measured loose fabric strands gathered on the table in front of her. I sat on a wooden stool beside her and said hello. She returned a smile, but it looked tired and forced, seeming to hide a flood of emotion brewing inside of her. When I told her I had the next few days off from teaching, she remarked how wonderful a scholarly life must be.
A lanky man in a white t-shirt and fitted khaki pants cropped right above his ankles emerged out of the factory and stood beside me. Wong looked up at him and spoke angrily. “You must understand,” she said, “it takes money to pay for the electricity and to pay our workers. … We’ve been waiting for over a month now and you owe us more than 10,000 RMB. We refuse to hand over the finished garments until you pay us the money!”
In the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, gendered enactments of “bosshood” and other figures of capitalist accumulation are expressed through divergent performances of male mobility, as articulated and expressed through entrepreneurial and masculine “freedom” across various class groups. These enactments, in turn, are linked to specific labour practices, organisation of kin relations, and manipulation of transnational citizenship. The story of Mr. Cai, a forty-something successful real estate investor and owner of several garment factories based in Guangzhou, offers a glimpse into the cultural significance of the “boss” as an aspirational figure in contemporary China. More specifically, the accumulative strategies of Mr. Cai and his family highlight how the scaling of capitalist networks across provincial and national boundaries entails spatial and subjective transformations through which patriarchal figures emerge within transnational families.
With her eyes cast downward, she took a stack of thick elastic bands and placed them beside a ruler before cutting them into narrow strips. Piles of carefully measured loose fabric strands gathered on the table in front of her. I sat on a wooden stool beside her and said hello. She returned a smile, but it looked tired and forced, seeming to hide a flood of emotion brewing inside of her. When I told her I had the next few days off from teaching, she remarked how wonderful a scholarly life must be.
A lanky man in a white t-shirt and fitted khaki pants cropped right above his ankles emerged out of the factory and stood beside me. Wong looked up at him and spoke angrily. “You must understand,” she said, “it takes money to pay for the electricity and to pay our workers. … We’ve been waiting for over a month now and you owe us more than 10,000 RMB. We refuse to hand over the finished garments until you pay us the money!”
In the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, gendered enactments of “bosshood” and other figures of capitalist accumulation are expressed through divergent performances of male mobility, as articulated and expressed through entrepreneurial and masculine “freedom” across various class groups. These enactments, in turn, are linked to specific labour practices, organisation of kin relations, and manipulation of transnational citizenship. The story of Mr. Cai, a forty-something successful real estate investor and owner of several garment factories based in Guangzhou, offers a glimpse into the cultural significance of the “boss” as an aspirational figure in contemporary China. More specifically, the accumulative strategies of Mr. Cai and his family highlight how the scaling of capitalist networks across provincial and national boundaries entails spatial and subjective transformations through which patriarchal figures emerge within transnational families.