Description
Diasporic traders in lower-end sectors, particularly those from the global South, are becoming ‘out of place’ in Asia. They are earning less profits as many Asian countries strive to upgrade their economies and phase out low-end production niches. One of these groups is Indian textile traders in southeast China. Based on my ongoing anthropological fieldwork that started in 2009, this talk traces the entrepreneurial engagement of Indian textile traders in and beyond China. I summarize the vicissitudes of their engagement as taking place in two stages. First, throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, the traders rapidly expanded their transnational business through hypermobility between different parts of China, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia while intentionally skipping over their home country of India. This growth was largely driven by a China-centric mentality of “getting rich no matter the cost,” which was one of their various tactics in global trade and migration. The second stage started around 2015, when the decline in low-cost production in China coincided with the global decrease in demand. Despite facing steady a decline in business, the traders cannot see alternatives to China as their supply center because China’s production capacity is hard to replicate. The traders thus hang on to their business in China as long as they can without a sense of the future. As the talk will explore, the current stagnancy of this diasporic economy may indicate an end to the tide-like developmental pattern of “racing to the bottom” that spreads from more advanced countries to less developed countries in Asia, which characterized the economic rise of Asia, especially of China, in the 20th and early 21st centuries.| Period | 31 Mar 2020 |
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| Held at | Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China |
| Degree of Recognition | International |