UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS OF DESIRES AND RISKS: THE CRAFTING OF MIGRANT ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN GUANGZHOU, CHINA A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in ANTHROPOLOGY by Nellie Chu June 2014 The Dissertation of Nellie Chu is approved: ________________________________ Professor Lisa Rofel, chair _________________________________ Professor Gail Hershatter _________________________________ Professor Melissa Caldwell _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Nellie Chu 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ...................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements and Dedication....................................................................... viiii Introduction: The Paradoxes of Entrepreneurial Freedom.................................... 1 Contributions to the Literature ................................................................................ 14 Re-scaling Rural and Urban Spaces ........................................................................ 27 Scaling Spaces, Scaling Subjectivities: Blurring the Distinctions between the Rural and Urban, Migrant Entrepreneur and Wage-Worker ............................................ 40 Situating Ethnographic Practice .............................................................................. 51 Chapter Outline ....................................................................................................... 56 Chapter 1: Corporatizing Urban Villages: The Re-spatialization of Rural and Urban Inequalities in Post-socialist China ............................................................. 61 Communist Land Reform and Collectivization in Nanjing Village ....................... 68 Rural-Urban Divides: The Hukou Household Registration System ....................... 75 Urbanization and the Emergence of Fast Fashion Production during Market Reforms ................................................................................................................... 76 Decentralization and the Household Responsibility System .................................. 81 Industrializing Nanjing Village ............................................................................... 83 Social Cleavages along the Crossroads of Village Collectives and Export Manufacturing ......................................................................................................... 90 Chapter 2: The Flexible Factory: Space and Temporality in the Age of Fast Fashion Production ................................................................................................... 99 Uneven Processes of Fast Fashion Production ..................................................... 107 Factory Living ....................................................................................................... 111 The Factory Space................................................................................................. 114 The Uneven Processes of Flexible Production ..................................................... 116 Coordinating Materials ......................................................................................... 121 iii Coordinating Workers ........................................................................................... 124 The Fashion Cycles’ Broader Strokes of Time ..................................................... 127 The Irregular Pace of Factory Work ..................................................................... 133 Temporal Materiality ............................................................................................ 135 When Machines Fail ............................................................................................. 137 Labor Discipline through Techniques of Quality Control .................................... 139 The Incommensurable Contours of Flexible Production ...................................... 142 Suzhi (Human Quality) and Growing Ambivalence toward Factory Labor ......... 147 Chapter 3: Charting Desires and Risks: A Walk through Guangzhou’s Wholesale Markets.................................................................................................. 157 Market “Jobbers”: The Intermediary Links between Production and Consumption ............................................................................................................................... 161 Dimensions of “Just-in-Time” Delivery of Fast Fashion ..................................... 164 Tracking the Temporal Cycles of Fast Fashion .................................................... 170 Calculating and hedging of risk ............................................................................ 173 Chaohuo: Speculating on Commodities and Market Spaces ................................ 179 Speculating Time, Speculating Spaces ................................................................. 184 Imagining Spaces, Global Encounters on the Shop Floor .................................... 189 Charting Possibilities and Risks of Small-Scale Enterprise through Garment Manufacture .......................................................................................................... 190 Mapping Places through the Discourse of Styles ................................................. 196 Mapping Limits: Charting Guangzhou’s wholesale markets................................ 199 Charting Losses: The Discourse of zou dan and Conflicts Over Quality ............. 205 Chapter 4: Engendering Freedom: Performing Masculinity and Uncertainty in Post-socialist China ................................................................................................. 213 Performing “The Boss” ......................................................................................... 223 “The Boss” as a Spatialized Mode of Capital Accumulation ............................... 227 iv Performing Freedom in the Factories ................................................................... 232 Freedom and Its Reverberations ........................................................................... 241 Chapter 5: Global Commodity Chains of Risks and Desires .............................. 250 “Going Out into the World”: Eliciting Emplacements and Desires ..................... 261 Desires Unhinged … ............................................................................................. 271 The Cost of Entrepreneurial Success: Managing Envy in an Age of Flexible Production ............................................................................................................. 275 Doubly-Displaced Rural/Urban Displacements .................................................... 280 When “Money Changes People” .......................................................................... 288 The Politics of Money and the Ethics of Migrant Entrepreneurship .................... 298 Love in a Time of Low-wage Labor? ................................................................... 305 The Market Risks of Romance ............................................................................. 311 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 316 Coda: Migrants as Half City People ..................................................................... 320 Looking Ahead...................................................................................................... 325 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 330 v Dissertation Abstract: Global Supply Chains of Desires and Risks: The Crafting of Migrant Entrepreneurship in Guangzhou, China by Nellie Chu 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 fast fashion link and de-link through the building and destruction of social spaces, through the production and challenges to social subjectivity, and through the intensification of gender and class- based inequalities. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with intermediary traders, migrant factory owners, and wage workers, this project asks: how do migrants in China negotiate the paradoxes of entrepreneurial freedom as they vi work through the political implications and affective dimensions of becoming entrepreneurial citizens? vii Acknowledgements and Dedication This project would not have been possible without the wisdom, generosity, and patience of many people who have contributed to its development. I offer my heartfelt gratitude