Duke University Press Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou

"Precarious Accumulation is an ethnography of migrant entrepreneurs from across China, West Africa, and South Korea participating in fast fashion commodity chains in Guangzhou, China. These entrepreneurs generate new forms of migratory labor, commodity production, and cross-cultural exchange in a globalizing China. Rural migrants from China's countryside collaborate with South Korean jobbers and West African traders as they collectively bridge the transnational supply chains of fast fashion. In their attempts to escape poverty, wage work, and unemployment in their home countries and native places, these migrant entrepreneurs aspire to become good, even godly, model-entrepreneurs by improvising novel forms of subcontracted labor and cross-cultural collaboration. Their attempts, however, engender a world of labor exploitation, racialized policing, and extortion. In this predatory "bust economy," peasant landlords, private officers, and market competitors extract fees and siphon profits from the migrant bosses. Nellie Chu follow the world of this just-in-time production through family based piece-work, where the bosses are both exploited and exploiters, dodging rent collectors and collecting fees. Precarious Accumulation offers a unique close-up of emergentChinese liberal capitalism at the ground level, through the lives of the migrant bosses."-- Nellie Chu tells the story of the migrant entrepreneurs at the heart of Guangzhou, China’s fast fashion industry as they navigate the high-speed, low-margin world of just-in-time garment production while confronting their dreams of economic freedom with the reality of precarity and daily exploitation and marginalization. In Precarious Accumulation, Nellie Chu tells the story of the migrant entrepreneurs at the heart of Guangzhou’s fast fashion industry—one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of transnational commodity production. Chu shows how rural Chinese migrants, West African traders, and South Korean jobbers navigate the high-speed, low-margin world of just-in-time garment production that fuels the constant accumulation of wealth via global supply chains. Drawing on fieldwork in Guangzhou’s urban villages and household workshops, Chu outlines how these entrepreneurs’ dreams of economic freedom clash with the reality of precarity and the exclusions of emigre status. Migrant bosses operate within a highly competitive, informal economy where they are both agents and target of exploitation, as they must evade rent collectors, endure racialized policing, and mitigate extortion from security officers and competitors. Chu crucially demonstrates how their efforts generate novel forms of migratory labor, commodity production, and cross-cultural exchange in postsocialist China. Autorid: Nellie Chu