Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TRODITIES (Trust, Global Traders, and Commodities in a Chinese International City)

Teaser

Yiwu, a city of 2 million in China’s commercially vibrant Zhejiang province, is known by traders from countries including Afghanistan and Syria, Ukraine and Mexico, and the UK and Russia as the world’s hub for the wholesale of ‘small commodities’. Despite the clear...

Summary

Yiwu, a city of 2 million in China’s commercially vibrant Zhejiang province, is known by traders from countries including Afghanistan and Syria, Ukraine and Mexico, and the UK and Russia as the world’s hub for the wholesale of ‘small commodities’. Despite the clear insights into globalisation and the significance of trade for forging relations between cultures offered by a study of a modern trading node such as Yiwu, the city has yet to be the focus of sustained research. ‘Trust, Global Traders, and Commodities’ (TRODITIES) is an integrated comparative programme of research that will provide new empirical data and comparative analysis on the global trade in low-grade Chinese-made commodities. Its focus is on the ways in which transnational trading activities are conducted in the cosmopolitan and dynamic city of Yiwu. This project’s in-depth investigation of Yiwu, and its connections to the wider world through networks and flows of people, commodities, and knowledge, will yield ground-breaking perspectives on the precise ways in which trade facilitates the simultaneous exchange of commodities, practices, ideas, and identities. The project is multi-sited and interdisciplinary, engaging researchers and theoretical approaches in anthropology, area studies, business studies, and history.
There is growing recognition in the social sciences of the importance of commodity trade and traders to so-called ‘bottom-up forms of globalization’ (Mathews, Lins Ribeiro, and Alba Vega 2012). Furthermore, scholarship in this vein and across a range of disciplines has explored the shifting nature of China’s relations to the world (e.g. Laruelle and Peyrouse 2012). Much rarer, however, are empirical accounts of the ways in which China’s relations with the wider world are mediated through the lived experiences of commercial personnel (merchants, traders, financiers, and businesspeople) from diverse backgrounds who travel to and reside in China in order to procure commodities for export and sale. Those studies that do exist tend to focus on old and established imperial centres of circulation and commerce such as Hong Kong (Matthews 2011; Constable 2014). Work exploring increasingly international trading centres in mainland China document the significance of trade and trading communities to economic globalisation yet lose sight of the broader social, cultural, and intellectually interactive dimensions of these processes, and of the role that particular commodities play in them (e.g. Bodomo 2012; Haugen 2011; Li Zhang 2008; Lyons et al. 2008; Yang Yang 2012). Historians of China and the so-called Silk Road, by contrast, have debated the significance of global trade routes not only to economic expansion and the development of capitalism but also for cultural and technological innovation (e.g. Lewis 2009; Perdue 2005; Westad 2012). The Silk Road and other trading routes that connected China to the wider world between the seventh and fourteenth centuries propelled cultural innovation through forging contacts between cultural regions, and allowing the circulation of people, technologies, and artefacts (Hall et al. 2009).

The project has four overarching objectives:

Aim 1: To provide a comparative and connective investigation of the global commodity trade in low-grade goods.
Yiwu is one of the world’s most important sites for the wholesale purchase of low-grade commodities (Pliez 2012). Traders from all over the world, especially Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, travel to Yiwu to provision goods and export these to the markets in which they work. A focused study of Yiwu and the trading communities, networks, and individuals that operate in the city offers therefore an unprecedented opportunity for a pioneering and truly global investigation of the geographies, practices, and communities that make-up the global commodity trade in low-grade goods. The data gathered will be analysed in r

Work performed

1. ASSEMBLY OF THE TEAM: During the first three months of the reporting period, the PI assembled the research team, oversaw the establishment of two project websites and appointed Team Members and POSTDOCS named on the application. During this period, there were two minor departures from the plan laid out in the proposal. A named POSTDOC was not able to join the project (having been employed elsewhere): the PI recruited, selected and appointed a new POSTDOC with the relevant qualifications. The POSTDOC joined the project on May 1, 2016. A further POSTDOC delayed their joining the project until month 12. The POSTDOC was included in all pre-fieldwork training and preparation activities and therefore there was no delay in commencing work on taking up appointment (August 1st, 2016).

2. ACADEMIC MEETINGS AND WORKSHOPS: The project team has held five meetings since the project launch. An Ethics and Security Workshop was held at the University of Sussex on 26th – 27th November 2015. Project members deliberated on ethical issues relating to the project; the PI to coached members of the team on issues relating to security and ethics. A launch meeting was held on May 25 2016 at Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College (China): the project’s aims and goals were conveyed to local officials, as well as to project partners in China (Yiwu and Commercial College and China International Electronic Commerce Centre). A result of the meeting was official approval for the project from Yiwu’s municipal authorities. An end of Phase 1 milestone workshop was held at University of Copenhagen on 20th Jan 2017 at which team members reported on their fieldwork activities. A workshop was organised in relationship to the project’s findings regarding relations between West and East Asia and held at the University of Sussex on May 16th, 2017. A workshop was held at the University of Cambridge on 23rd February 2018. It addressed the importance of the family and collective and individual reputation to the activities of Yiwu trading networks.

3. PARTNERSHIPS: The project has developed close relationships with a range of institutions in order to facilitate fieldwork and to ensure that the project extend its intellectual reach as wide as possible. Two institutions in China (The Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College and the China International Electronic Commerce Centre) were recruited as the projects partners in China through MoUs with The School of Global Studies (University of Sussex). Additionally, the PI initiated and signed MoUs with the Koc University Asia Centre (Istanbul) and has consulted with leading academics in relevant disciplines at The European University (St Petersburg), the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, The Afghanistan Institute of Strategic Studies, and the Asia Research Institute/Middle East Institute (National University of Singapore). Finally, with a view to forming a long-lasting consortium of universities engaged with activities relating to the project, the PI initiated an ERASMUS exchange agreement between the University of Copenhagen Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies and the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. The PI has also secured funding for an Inter-Asia Research Dynamics Network in order to further extend intellectual and research engagements relating to the project: the partner institutions of this network include (Koc University Asia Centre, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore, and the Afghanistan Institute of Strategic Studies). Several scholars have also joined the network as associated academics.

4. FIELDWORK: All team members whose time is accounted for by the project have conducted either intensive fieldwork in Yiwu, China or in the city’s connected outposts. In several cases individual researchers have conducted fieldwork in both types of locale. PI (Professor Magnus Marsden) conducted fieldwork in China for 4.5 months, where he set up project lin

Final results

Over the course of the past 2.5 years, the project has made important progress in its aims to contribute thematically and empirically to major fields of investigation, including the historically-informed study of migration to China, inter-Asian dynamics, globalisation-from-below, as well as capitalism, trade and inter-cultural exchange more generally.

Yiwu – Empirical study of an International trade city

The project is making excellent progress in terms of its overarching aim to deliver an empirically rich analysis of Yiwu city and its role in the international trade in low-grade commodities. Having conducted intensive fieldwork with communities in the city from Russia, Ukraine, the Central Asian Republics, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and Turkey, as well as with Chinese traders who are based in the city, the assembled team is developing a unique and multi-perspectival understanding of the functioning and dynamics of this hitherto poorly understood global city. While it has been tempting for scholars to treat Yiwu as a one-dimensional space of commerce – a ‘global super-market’ – the project’s team has come to recognise that both foreign traders and local entrepreneurs emphasise the role that their work and effort has contributed in shaping Yiwu’s development and place in China and the wider world today. This finding points more broadly to the way in which the forms of global capitalism on display in Yiwu are embedded in a specific locale and the activities of the networks found there, rather than simple arising one-dimensionally from a universal maximising search for profit. For example, the project has revealed that the entrepreneurial networks active in Yiwu depend for their vitality on access to the labour of migrants and aspiring traders displaced from zones of conflict and instability elsewhere in Asia, for whom ideals of mobility, endurance and masculinity are as important as profit in their conceptualisations of trade and the kinds of future that trading in China offers them.

International migration in China to incorporate relations to commercial networks

A further critical area of scholarship to which the project contributes concerns the study of international migration to China. An expanding body of literature has documented the increasingly important role that migration to China is having in various parts of the world, especially the Global South. The findings of TRODITIES bring new insights to this body of work by addressing not only the experiences of migrants in China or their negotiations with Chinese legal systems. The project addresses, rather, the specific nature of the commercial practices of international migrants in China, as well as the modes through which they create and sustain transnational ties not only with their home countries but also with the various parts of the world in which they work. Although the TRODITIES project focuses on networks of traders that connect Yiwu to other Asian settings (especially in West and Central Asia, and Eurasia), the data collected also demonstrates that many such networks cut-across and connect Asian sub-regions, while also extending to settings beyond them, especially in Europe, the Americas and Africa. A focus on such trading networks is leading the project to theorise the connections and disconnections between different parts of Asia and the world beyond. Theoretically, this has resulted in an empirical critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ and a call for the development of geographic categories and scales that better reflect the geographical imaginations and experiences of the project’s research participants. An especially insightful category for example is ‘West Asia’: this geographical scale makes possible an analytical focus on connections between East and West Asia and also opens up post-soviet Eurasia to comparative and connective scholarship. Such analytical themes and empirical studies were severely constrained in