The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative
Lecture Series under the Cornell East Asia Program- The arguments and
viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker- We hope you enjoy.
I'm here to produce introduce my book manuscripts and
it's tentatively titled "Scaling the Global Supply Chains for
Fast Fashion: Transnational Migrant Entrepreneurship in Guanzhou, China".
And this manuscript explores migrants' experiences of global fast fashion
through their engagements with what I call craft-like practices of garment mass
manufacture in Guanzhou A lot of their activities take place in very small scale
sort of informal makeshift workshops that serve the global supply chains for
fast fashion And fast fashion as I define it is the speedy,
just-in-time delivery of designer-inspired garments and
accessories and as an industry it relies on the outsourcing
of manufacturing in laboring capabilities of places across the Global South.
It emphasizes the cyclical and rapid delivery of trendy low priced clothing and
in my project I'll show how various forms of mass production and
social organizations are linked across a diversity of temporal,
spatial and subjective scales and
these connections which, I'll argue from a larger perspective, are forged
through cross cultural encounters which I'll elaborate in this presentation today.
So when I first began my dissertation research back in
2010 I was really motivated with the question of why the Made in China label
is often associated with low quality low price and even counterfeit goods.
And these questions took me to this area of Guandong
in southern China particularly in the Pearl River Delta region.
And in Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton- the trading port of Canton-
which is about an hour a half two hours drive north of Hong Kong.
And this region was one of the first special economic zones
which was designated and established as part of Deng XiaoPing's introduction
of market reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
And this was the site for
the experimentation of foreign direct investment and export led industry.
In places like Shenzhen for example prior to market reforms there was nothing but
a farming form of fishing village agricultural flat lands that were largely
uninhabited or sparsely inhabited by local lineage members and
once market reforms were instituted migrants from all across all different
parts of China had migrated here and had built this city literally from the ground
in order to serve as one of the experimental sites of market economy.
In part of the long history of industrialization and
market reforms took me to this southeastern corner of Guanzhou and
today this still stands as an urban village which is locally called a chéng
zhōng cūn (城中村) which literally translates to a village within a city and
as you can see here this is a very modest type of working class enclave
which is surrounded by more modern sort of
testament to urbanization So
literally it's sort of surrounded by pressures of urbanisation.
And it's still held as an administrative site
that is not fully rural as you can see but it's not fully urban either
what's happening is that lineage members still hold the user
rights to this land and what happened before Maoist collectivization
was that this land was controlled largely through lineages.
And lineages are sort of oftentimes organized through belief in a common
ancestor or common surname and land was largely passed down through fathers and
sons Now after collectivization with the introduction of market reforms
this land was de-collectivize it got redistributed back to
lineage members and they were redistributed in individual plots based on
household based on the number of members within the household and
now with pressures to urbanize many of these urban right or
user rights to the land now have to be individually negotiated with the municipal
government in order for these user rights to be transferred back to the municipal
government of Guanzhou and be considered properly urban So
this is sort of this moment of suspension that I see it and
right now it serves as a working class migrant enclave which
offers affordable housing large scale factory community and
a gateway for newly arrived migrants in the city of Guanzhou.
As former agricultural villages they stand in the shadow of the city and
there are the results of unbridled urbanization over the past decades and
you can see that they're physically enclosed by pressures of urbanisation
into the concrete jungle so they differ from city neighborhoods which
are considered directly state owned land whereas in urban villages
lineage members still retain the user rights to this land.
So neighborhood communities still sort of manage and
regulate what's happening in these urban villages Oftentimes
there are migrant schools that open up They run clinics- medical clinics- for
migrant communities and they're often also policed by sort of semi private
officers that sort of manage the sanitation,
the fire safety and even traffic of what goes on within these urban villages.
So within this particular garment district in Guangzhou
a number of large scale factory fabric markets and factories have sort of
mushroomed in this moment of suspension while these negotiations are taking place
a lot of the former lineage members now have become rentier class
they rent a lot of their apartment houses they've erected to newly arrived migrants
who come here to experiment in different forms of entrepreneurship and
to take part in this garment clothing industry.
In this place here is the fabric market- a very sort of modern looking very large
scale fabric market that was once initially invested by collective members.
And over about a decade or so they transferred
the land and the property of this market back to the municipal government.
So right now it's directly owned and controlled by the municipal government but
as you can see, as you can imagine, there's been a windfall of profits
that's been sort of fell into the pockets of lineage members.
But in terms of everyday life and everyday activities they're driven by
newly arrived migrants from other places of China.
And we could see if you take a walk through these urban villages you could
see residues of everyday life here.
There are still ancestral temples that are still standing and
here you get sort of visual remnants of mothers taking care of their
children hanging out in these ancestral temples a lot of them are migrants
from outside of this urban village if you come here sometimes you
would see maybe a leader of a lineage or a leader of a surname
within the lineage who had just come to take care of this temple or
tell stories or to invite people tourists or other and
visitors here and tell stories about the history of this place but
they're largely sort of visited and inhabited by migrant, rural migrants from
other parts of Guandong in China.
If you also walk around if you sort of explore more into the interior of
the urban village you'll see sort of these avenues or
these alleyways where a lot of these individual store fronts have popped up to
serve the commodity chains of fast fashion.
You could see here samples of fabrics being sold,
various forms of accessories, the hustle and
bustle of traffic coming in and out according to the cycles of fashion.
And if you walked in closer behind the fabric markets
this is a also a very industrialized space.
And here this is where the manufacturing- the informal,
sort of craft-like manufacturing- takes place within these small scale workshops.
And this is these sort of workshops are often cool called jiā gōng chǎng
(加工厂) which literally means the site of added labor for
members of this industry it's usually referred to as a cut-and-sew assembly
factory where clients would, from the outside,
come into the urban villages and they are responsible of coordinating different
types of materials They bring in samples They bring in fabric specifications,
the actual fabrics the accessories that are necessary to create a garment.
And the owners of this and then the employees that the owners hire would
be responsible only for the finishing of these garments they would assemble
these garments small volumes of about a few hundred to a thousand per piece.
And then they would package it and then the clients would come in,
pick them up and then take them to wholesale markets or
other sort of retail outlets around the world.
So many of these jiā gōng chǎng (加工厂) or
assembly factories are owned and operated by one of the members of one of the first
generation of migrant workers who had come to Shenzhen, Dongguan,
Guanzhou around the 80s and 90s and over time
they would sort of work their way up along the management hierarchy
to become managers of an assembly line for example They accumulate skills
in garment mass manufacture They accumulate some modest form of capital and
then they would follow maybe a family member or a village a local villager or
to these urban villages And they would rent these small compact spaces so
that they could call themselves boss or lǎo bǎn (老板).
And this is what's very interesting to me because oftentimes
you often think of these sort of small workshops as very insignificant.
They're very small They're almost invisible.
And so what came out from these so
my encounters here were the following questions: How do these small scale
informal workshops operated by migrants from Chinese countryside become global,
like, how do these seemingly out-of-the-way and insignificant sites
anchor their relatively low tech capabilities upon the high tech
consumer driven transnational supply chains of fast fashion?
How do migrant laborers and
other market participants know the conditions of their displacement?
And what do these otherwise invisible spaces tell us about transnational
connections in general?
So there's three groups of market participants that I'm studying-
one are migrant entrepreneurs who own and operate these small scale
informal workshops, two- the temporary migrant workers
based on piece work piece-rate work of which they are hired and
oftentimes this group are not the dǎ gōng mèi (打工妹) that labor scholars often
referred to These are usually either very young maybe in the early
teens before they're they're married and they follow their parents here or
they're very old, more the elderly in their forty's
in the fifty's that are sort of their bodies have sort of been bent
sort of exhausted from the work that takes place in the larger,
more centralized Fordist factories and finally I'm also studying for
the purpose of my presentation today the Chinese agents and
wholesalers who broker the market exchanges between
the migrants entrepreneurs and migrant workers in this urban village and
the transnational clients which they serve.
Part of my argument is to lay out that the migrant
workers labor in scaling the global supply chains entails
working out of several contradictions and they work within the worlds of craft and
industry, the rural and the urban, formal- informal,
wage work-entrepreneurship and fashion and counterfeit and
I lay out the contradictions in two ethnographic stories that I present here.
And as in this labor of meeting different types of the time spaces
of craft-industry, rural-urban and fashion-counterfeit that
present competing desires and aspirations for the good life and
this in turn subjects them to various types of displacement and precariousness.
And some of those contradictions include freedom from wage work on the one hand,
entrepreneurial autonomy on the one hand and
then emplacement and feeling stuck in the factory or
the workshop on the other They also include aspirations for
global travel, engagement with transnational clients on the one hand and
then exposure to exploitation on the other and
then finally they also aspire to the fast money and
participate in that on the one hand and then participation in this hyper
competitive market for fast fashion on the other and so
in their everyday life migrants have to work out these cultural contradictions and
dynamics in order to link and scale up their entrepreneurial
practices to the transnational supply chains of fast fashion and
these the working out of this become discursive sites of misunderstanding,
difference and negotiation which really color migrants'
encounters with their transnational clients and so overall I hope that my
book project will contribute to literature on informal economies,
infrastructure to show how sort of anthropological
concepts such as cross cultural encounters, contact-zones,
frictions can inform us about what it takes to create or
forge global connections across different times and spaces so
I'm going to get into the details of craft-like modes of mass production.
So as I've said- introduced- earlier Guanzhou's garment district sort of
sort of really mushroomed during the 1990s when longtime members
of the former agricultural collectives sort of sold their user rights or
began to think of their user rights as commodities and sold them to the municipal
government and then in turn renting the sort of houses to migrant workers
in order to become bosses.
A lot of this commodity chains operate according
to craft like principles As you can see they're very small scale- the machines
are very modest -they're often secondhand machines that are brought in from larger
Fordist centralised factories from outside of Guanzhou and
they employ about eight to ten workers at a time A lot of times workers are sort of
temporarily called upon from a day at a time from the nearby bridges or
nearby avenues where they advertised based on very small sort of chalk
boards the detail the specifications of the order, you know,
how many orders are there, what specific fabrics are necessary to create these
garments and fabrics determine a lot of the skills that are involved
in the creation of this garment as well as the time that it takes for
a worker to finish their orders and to earn their wages.
This is the place where I had conducted my research, here,
and I this is owned by a migrant couple coming out from Guanxi province and
they began their lives here as wage workers in Shenzhen and
they had experimented in different types of businesses- one is in wholesaling,
selling sort of small novelties and then gradually sort of coming back into garment
industry by following a family member here.
In another site you can see then different
sort of parts of the supply chains being sort of broken up
into these individual sites here there are workers that are just responsible for
snipping loose threads of jeans in packaging.
Here we have a different site where migrants then
are sort of piecing together these individual commodities and
placing them onto belts which are then later sold to
global chains such as Forever 21 and H&M.
And if you were to become sort of a designer here
you could do that by coming here in and buying supplies and
samples, bringing them to a fabric where they're sort of constructed,
dyed, and threaded together You could also buy supplies and
accessories that are necessary here Pick up a bulk of fabrics and
then bring them through these petty cabs to these assembly sites And
so because that they're so small scale and
rely on sort of these modest second hand machines this sort of brings back to
the return of craft- like mass manufacture that some sociologists of Labor and
Industrialization celebrate but what I argue here the problem is that even
though the migrants can call themselves bosses and
enjoy some aspect of autonomy the idea of labor is no
longer politicized rather they describe their labor in terms of entrepreneurship
that they call themselves designers now entrepreneurs and bosses and
that they enjoy their freedom by either denying clients
by saying no to protect certain orders that come in, or,
and also sort of gain some social capital here because this
return to craft like principles, the idea of reputation, this masculine form of
a craftsman is now sort of being embedded in these everyday practices but
as you'll see this type of accumulation is only,
is very limited and so in terms of financial or
even social capital it feels as if there is an autonomy but
there's no meaningful form of accumulation that migrants men can
enjoy or can stake a claim to and
so I'm going to read to some what is some ethnographic
vignettes that illustrate the everyday life of this particular urban village.
So when I came here in this garment district in 2010
ABC rely primarily on working clients both domestic and
transnational who sourced garments for overseas exports.
And these clients serve the commodity chains of regions across China as
well as across East Asia, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Europe and
Latin America Oftentimes factory owners like the Wangs who operate
this jiā gōng chǎng relied on a portfolio of clients coming from different
areas of the world in order to minimize their risks of financial losses and
clients and unreasonable demands as well as seasonal fluctuations or
market slowdowns in any one region of the world Over time they had
learned that collaborating with multiple transnational clients
required the exhausting work of switching between different production rhythms and
here I underscore the role of temporality as is linked to labor
in migrant entrepreneurs' experiences and their encounters with their transnational
clients These paces often varied according to fast and slow or
between long exhausting hours and no business at all for instance when domestic
market decline during the summer months workshops rely on production requests from
Europe and North American clients who prepare for the fall season.
Periods of sustained activity are often followed by long intervals of idleness or
unemployment Unexpected periods of idleness frequently became sources
of financial concern for migrant entrepreneurs Once during a week long idle
phase between orders I suggested to Mrs Wang that she took the time to catch
up on sleep and rest She then immediately responded: "You don't know what it's like
to be in our line of work- We can't take breaks because we don't know where our
money will come from" Her statement thus reveals the challenges that she and her
workers must face in balancing demanding work schedules during garment production
hours which consume their everyday working hour with their concerns of
earning money to cover their living costs and family expenses during idle periods.
Now the work of switching between multiple temporalities of manufacture
frequently complicated collaborations with migrant entrepreneurs and their clients
This was particularly true when machines broke down, when the delivery of supplies
were delayed or when itinerant brokers simply refused to show up.
So the other aspect of this craft-like manufacture is that even though bosses
can call themselves sort of, can claim their own autonomy they
have very little control over there the workers that they employ A lot of times
workers would talk back about if there is any contestation about
a particular detail or sometimes workers just refuse to show up.
Or they simply just walk out in the middle of work.
There was one time where there was an elderly worker which we have
often called as Zhu shīfu and who came from the province of Sichuan and
he had gained a reputation for this sort of classic idea of work and
labor and everybody paid him respect within the factory and
one day he had left- - he and his wife both worked in one of these workshops and
during lunch he and his wife had stepped out to get some food and
when they returned they found a young worker sitting in his
coveted seat in his coveted position within the small factory.
And this for him was a sign of disrespect that a young worker
had taken his place within the factory and
he felt disrespected and was angry and had simply taken his wife and walked out and
the migrant workers the owners the factory couple who I became very close
friends with were disappointed that he had walked out because they relied on him
to help with their order but, again, they have very little control
over the employees that they employ and so over time
they had not they realize that they had little control of their employees as well
as little control over the temporality of manufacture that they were engaged in.
Subcontracted agents would often come and
they would and the factory migrant owners would often have to create
co-operate with multiple contractors and they would have to coordinate
time wise the multiple processes over mass production.
Disputes over quality often erupted among the workers as well as with their clients.
And the Wangs would often encounter clients from France or
U.S. or South Korea that made unreasonable demands and
they would, after having prepared their production,
the clients was simply just refuse to pay the Wangs.
The clients would just disappear even though the Wangs would prepare an order
and so quality often became a site of contestation
along these sort of multiple relationships across the supply chain.
Sometimes even these conflicts often become productive sites
in order to see then where power is being sort of located within a certain exchange.
Oftentimes because these supply chains become invisible in the sort of upstream
or downstream of these supply chains Oftentimes all you see when you're working
within these workshops are suggestions of other bosses along the chain and
it is along when these sort of disputes over equality erupt where you
realize that your boss is accountable to another boss along the chain and
so these sort of moments of these disputes and contestations become
very productive of understanding how these dynamics work but
they, at the same time, they present a lot of struggles for
these migrants in order to sustain their workshops.
So here are some other sort of scenes that one would find here
in this urban village This particular workshop takes
place within an abandoned temple and when my friend and
I came to visit it was sort of casually rented out by a South Korean boss and
had invited or hired a group of young Sichuanese migrant workers here and
you could see the sort of informal sort of set up that these
workshops take place- Migrants live here in the very same
sites of which they work and they also eat and socialize here.
So cooking activities so this is both a factory and
a home life A lot of their socialization takes place.
As you can see here the proximity of which they work is so close and
long hours sort of facilitate close ties,
sort of intimate relationships, that kind of form a bond even dating romantic
connections are made here but at the same time it's also very fluid and
very precarious Workers kind of come in and
go based on the production orders Some stay longer than others.
But it is a very highly fluid and dynamic space.
So now I take you through the wholesale market where the commodities
that are produced in this urban village are now taken here and
sold in garment wholesale markets in different places across Guanzhou.
This particular wholesale market is called shísānháng or thirteen factories and
this is the site where the sort of the British colonists would in the decades,
the years leading to the Opium War, had traded with Guanzhou merchants.
Even here you could see sort of an emblem
to those old colonial trade that taken place in the Guanzhou tree port.
And it's also a site of transnational trade and fast money.
Here you could see close by in other wholesale
markets the sort of the density of trade and traffic that these spaces attract.
And it's also a very transnational space so
each wholesale market sort of sells and specializes in a particular commodity.
There are shoes' wholesale markets, wholesale markets for
handbags, different types of shoes.
They also serve different markets- some are a Korean market,
some being a more European or North American market And
so this sort of creates different not only neighborhoods but
also different communities of which traders from different parts of China and
different parts of the world kind of settle and open up sort of small scale
trading to take place or to engage in the garment industry here.
Some of them as you could see are very transnational and
they sell different types of clothing.
Here is if you walk into one of the wholesale markets you could see the sort
of I'm sure many of you have walked into sort of markets like this
where the density of not only commodities but people is sort of overwhelming.
In this particular market for as you can see here the spatial organization of this
market is key to how migrant entrepreneurs experience the contradictions-
here the contradiction is between fashion originality and design copying.
A lot of this you could see here are, you've got a spectrum of different
trends and different designs and some look like as if they have been copied or
they're referred to as shān zhài (山寨)- sort of the gray market,
the in-between space between original and copy but what's really interesting
here is that each of these stalls are nearly individually owned and
operated by migrant entrepreneurs.
The rents here are incredibly high.
It would be over about ten thousand RMB each month to rent which is maybe four or
six times the average monthly salary of a particular, of a Guanzhou resident.
And the trends of which here cycle fairly quickly.
And because of the density of which these stalls are constructed a lot of times
competing minor entrepreneurs would say- would
claim- that their competitors are copying his or her design.
And so there's a fervent competition and
the sort of urgency for fast money that sort of characterize the space.
You could see here the different types of clothing that are sold and
a lot of them are young women often in their late teens
early twenty's who are coming from different parts of Guangdong or
different parts of China to sort of take up this
sort of entrepreneurial activity in order to be purveyors of fashion to be
part of this fashion world and to call themselves entrepreneurs.
A lot of them would have to coordinate with
different materials they would sort of scour through magazines or
internet sites and then go to the urban villages of which I introduce to you and
coordinate the materials, coordinate this mass manufacture in order to deliver these
designs here Now you could see these illustrations
that the spatial organization of these floors which is sort of the lower
part of the floors look very different from the upper parts of these floors.
This looks a lot more formalized and it looks,
and a lot of these packages have higher volumes, even the type of clothing
looks very different from the clothing that's sold down here
A lot of the stalls here serve the markets in Southeast Asia or
in the Middle East or different parts of China and
these are the competition or the cycle of competition and
the cycle of new trends in fashion operate a lot more quickly than the ones
that operate here A lot of times because the volumes are bigger they're sold to
outlets such as Japan South Korea North America Europe Africa
North America Northern Europe that the markets
along the sort of higher, higher upper hierarchies of the value chain
sort of are reflected within the spatial organizations of this market.
There's also, so this is the way I've sort of the scaling and
the cycling of this fashion is a form of which the scaling of
these clothing get sort of linked up to the transnational chains Another aspect
of this market that is very interesting here is that even
the spaces are turned over according to the cycles of fashion so
a lot of the the fashion season important fashion seasons happen in the fall and so
in the summer months this market completely closes and
the building management come here to renew leases for
those who lease these individual stalls A lot of times depending on how their
business goes a lot of the leases would not renew their contracts or
they're forced to remodel and a lot of this remodelling offers
a type of sort of collusive exchanges with the building managers.
A lot of times building managers would kind of walk through these aisles and see
if there's a business that's particularly, sort of,
particularly doing well then they would sort of extract fees based on
electrical wires or they would have to ask them to remodel a particular space and
charge them with even nailing a nail onto the wall.
And within this building there's even a construction company that serves
the sort of remodelling aspect of this economy within this building and
so the fact that there's a construction company within the building sort of shows
that and the type of regulation that takes place among building managers here and
my work shows that how the cycles of fashion
sort of coordinate with these collusive relationships that happen here and
a lot of it are sort of articulated in fashion languages and fashion cycles.
And so the key aspect of a lot of these extractive, extractive activities
competition has to do with charges of design copying for
those that work in these lower levels, when they talk about their labor or
their entrepreneur activities they are much more sort of direct or
honest that they use design copying in order to create their products.
They don't have a lot of edge there not because
they're not educated in design background.
They articulate sort of their activities by showing the processes of
garment design and their worry is to sort of basically market survival
keeping pace with the fast cycles of fashion If you talk to bosses along
these higher floors where there are more formalized boutiques,
a lot of these entrepreneurs have some sort of education backgrounds
they may even hire designers in order to operate these boutiques and
they describe their work in terms of creative labor as designs,
as legitimate designs that are based on sort of having a feel for the market or
knowing or having access to predicting future fashion trends And so
what happens here when we think about like copying fashion is that there's
a real class-based organization that is that is sort of marked by the spaces
of which this market is organized as well as to the temporalities of
which the fashion commodities come in and out of this market space.
So one female buyer who sort of frequented who frequented this market often
described confrontations that erupt when a wholesaler was fined by one of
the building managers here for selling a counterfeit garment Apparently a design
pattern used by one of her garments closely resembled a design trademark by
an internationally recognized luxury brand The wholesaler discredited- disputed-
this charge, claiming that her garment was an original design The observer sort
of remarked to me: "Of course the dispute had to do with money, kickbacks really,
we as outsiders, we don't know the types of collusive relationships and
business interests that are tied to the monthly collections of rent" Her reference
to kickbacks implied a web of social relations that structured the way in which
stalls and commercial spaces within the building were allocated and subleased.
For those who regularly visited the market, disputes such as
this over copy design and counterfeiting often flared up on a regular basis and
this particular altercation amassed the deepening divisions in wealth and
access to real estates that characterized this commercial space.
So in order to keep up with the sort of incessant movements of goods coming in and
out, oftentimes the migrant entrepreneurs really have to keep up
in terms of finding the hottest or predicting the hottest trends and
so a lot of this because of business risks they copy or
they take more direct designs from those that are proven to be successful
commodities that are sold on the market If you have a sort of particular design that
is a bit too different or too creative it would be too risky for
a migrant entrepreneur who's studying or who's struggling in this market and so
this type of the dynamics of this become very contradictory and
there are different types of cycles that are very class-based
within this market often exacerbated by the way this building is managed.
So, for those migrant entrepreneurs that operate in these lower floors,
the enormous risk entailed in running a stall poses
often relies on the pulling of family resources in hopes of striking it rich
while enjoying the independence of becoming their own boss.
I've interviewed a young migrant entrepreneur by the name of Ling
who recently closed down her five to seven foot stall
after running a business for only about two and a half years
based on savings that she had pulled in from her family in nearby Fushan.
When her wholesale business for women's beach dresses failed she decided to take
a step back from the pressures of running a stall there so she could brainstorm new
business endeavors she ultimately dreamed of resuming her business in the market
to try her luck again And oftentimes even though the sort of life the shelf
life of a business in the lower floors are often about two to three years and
so this kind of is a testament to the quick turnover of the leasees
that come here and the hyper competitiveness of this market.
With her eyes beaming she exclaimed that in this market just
before the 2008 market crash some bosses were making up to ten thousand RMB a day.
She said that if you can make it here you can make volumes of money-
the returns are huge.
The rise of rent coupled with the widespread prevalence of copying here
ultimately undercuts the vibrancy of the market as a whole she
explained that the cost of renting stalls nearly doubled over the past three years,
making her former business almost impossible to sustain Since the global
economic downturn in 2008 fewer former clients pass through these hallways and
the rising costs of cotton- another
raw material- exacerbates the struggles of maintaining a stall here.
As a way of evading these market risk then a lot of these sort of small scale
market entrepreneurs rely on copying and
ultimately there are fewer styles to choose from so
it undercuts the sort of vibrancy of this market as a whole So
even though then copying is often celebrated as a way to
sort of fuel the competition that drives a market
here there's a balance between copying and too much copying which undercuts the sort
of the trends in the styles that this market is able to offer.
When I asked her personally, whether someone had experienced
copying from her she recounted a time when a friend of hers, a wealthy local boss,
operated a boutique in one of the upper floors of the market.
The boss asked Ling to show this younger relative the ropes
of running a fashion trade and when Ling agreed and added that
her friend's cousin added her as Ling's employee Over the course
of six months the young woman learned most of Ling's business secrets and
then ultimately opened up a stall right next to hers mirroring most of
government styles and fashion aesthetics and then when Ling confronted this woman
she claimed that her look was purely of course original and
since this young woman had claimed that she has studied fashion design before her
assertion of originality and creativity tends to sort of hold
more legitimacy Ultimately Ling concluded: "What can you do- business is business and
by the time someone copies you the styles would have changed anyway".
And finally another migrant entrepreneur in these lower floors admitted to
having or described his work as relying on copying design in order to jump start his
business Since copying- design copying- was so pervasive here he said
that once a business owner become privy to a certain design or are style
that sold well competitors would quickly then copy that design within two or
three days they would either take an entire look and mirror or
modify very minor, make very minor modifications and
simply sell it as their own By then one could see that and
that several stall owners would sell almost the same design.
But he said according to his point of view that having somebody copy your design was
a testament to business success that copying was advantageous
to wholesalers because the practice of design copying signals some form of public
recognition So in his view, success of a wholesaler secures financial
freedom while soliciting acceptance and admiration from others.
He then further reasoned that the preponderance of copying in this market
bore witness to the fact that whole selling within a market such as
this should have a slow reflective response to the market The volumes of
fashions rotated in and out move too quickly to nurture and
facilitate the necessarily timing creative space for
struggling entrepreneurs in my migrant workers.
And even retailers often complain that neighboring competitors would
often try to attempt to copy their designs as theirs.
Oftentimes I would even overhear a young seller comparing
her clothing style with a competitor and at one point.
One wholesaler would sort of complain to a friend by saying
you know how competitive this market is and
that how difficult it is to have a competitor take your design as theirs.
In one conversation I've heard friends sort of cool,
sort of relieving the stresses of her friend by saying yes
the clothes you picked up depending on discerning eyes and
having a feel of fashion Don't worry about it You know you have a good eye for
design as if creativity was in doubt as a particular talent or
a skill cultivated by years of learning and experience And
so in here in this particular site what the contradictions that
migrants would often face are the sort of blurry lines between fashion and
counterfeit that I lay out here.
So, overall by way of summary,
as you could see here in sort of these sort of contradictions between craft
industry fashion and counterfeit we see these commodity chains as value chains
that are anchored in different time spaces and they're often
linked with sort of different pressures of urbanization and development as a whole.
And that these commodity chains these often
referred to as value chains are dynamic.
They change frequently according to the fluctuations of the market and
they're subject to larger spatial political transformation
such as urbanization and development here so
what's key because of this dynamicism is that it's very
difficult to locate one particular node of accumulation So
as you can see in the urban village that I present it's very,
because of the lack of control that migrant
entrepreneurs can assert on the market as well as upon their employees and
the conditions of their labor, financial accumulation or
accumulation of social capital is very difficult for them to pursue.
Here in this market it becomes clear then that the market entrepreneurs are going
through some sort of what I call a treadmill effect that these sort of cycles
come in and out so quickly they encounter building managers that extract different
types of fees or rent seeking activities so that these sort of these quick
cycles that's characteristic of fast fashion poses a sort of elusive to them.
It's very difficult for them to accumulate any form of, sort of capital,
from which they can establish themselves properly as entrepreneurship
Ultimately this lies to the question of what entrepreneurship in autonomy
means when there is no meaningful means of accumulation for them.
And one sort of classic example is that as we
speak this urban village now of which I introduced here in the beginning of my
talk is now the target of mass eviction and
it's sort of this ripple effects
from the mass evictions that we have seen in Beijing back in November.
And they're sort of right now in this urban village at least fifty six
small garment factories the jiā gōng chǎng I introduced here
have been ordered to shut down based on fire safety and hazard.
As of April 14th over the weekend
there's been some unrest and protest because of these evictions And
what's really interesting here is that because lineage politics play
a more important role in southern China in places like Guanzhou than in Beijing
it's interesting to see how the politics of urbanization and
land transfer rights will be played out, considering that lineage collectives has
such a powerful hold over the administration of this land We don't
you know we still don't know how this will play out but in this moment at the one
hand the sort of suspension of negotiation has opened up this informal economy.
And in this wholesale market it becomes clear where rent seeking activities and
extraction takes place.
And here I sort of underline the importance of studying
fashion in terms of the cyclical type of coming in and out,
where the timing of the market becomes sort of the timing of governance and
rent extraction that migrants often encounter.
So with that I guess I'll close my presentation and
open it up for questions.