Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou [Hardcover]

InPrecarious 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.USNellie 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.Nellie Chu is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University.“Precarious Accumulationis a rich ethnography and analytically sharp book that outlines the aspirational dimensions of entrepreneurial efforts at accumulation and the ways these aspirations chafe against everyday structural constraints. Nellie Chu’s examination of the struggles of different migrant entrepreneurs who gather at a central hub of the ‘fast fashion’ global supply chain is intimate and eye-opening.”Julie Y. Chu, author of