Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. viii, 252 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.50, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-50610-4.
The World in Guangzhou begins with a thought-provoking claim: certain cities in certain eras capture the imaginations of people across the globe. Whereas New York has long been a destination for dreamers, today Guangzhou can also be considered a global city: a new home to aspiring individuals from across the world.
As an ethnography of this city and its global ties, based upon long-term fieldwork by three researchers—Gordon Mathews, Linessa Dan Lin, and Yang Yang—over the span of four years from 2010 to 2014, The World in Guangzhou focuses on the lives of developing world entrepreneurs, particularly African traders, in Guangzhou. The book is structured around two main themes. The first is how these traders engage in “low-end globalization” in a city that is at once global yet also decidedly mono-cultural. The second theme looks beyond trade to culture, asking whether China might one day become a multicultural country, even possibly producing, in the authors’ words, “a Chinese Barack Obama” (206).
The introduction presents these initial themes and brings readers on a tour of the main research site of Xiaobei, a centre of African business and culture in Guangzhou. Chapter 2 then revealingly narrates the stories of eight international residents of Guangzhou. Here we meet a Nigerian visa over-stayer avoiding the police, an American educational consultant helping the children of wealthy families enter US universities, an upper-class female Ethiopian trader who sources top-quality goods for her clients, and an Iranian IT professional freed from the burdens of theocracy. The individual stories are fascinating, although at times too brief for this reviewer. Yet they come together to highlight the true diversity of international residents in the global city of Guangzhou today.
Chapter 3 focuses on the opportunities and challenges in African-Chinese business relations. On the one hand, African traders visiting Guangzhou can easily expect to earn multiple times the average annual income in their home countries during their usually brief stays. On the other hand, African traders also face markedly unsubtle racism: people holding their noses when they walk by, rubbing Africans’ skin to see if the pigmentation wipes away, or conspiring with “compatriots” to cheat “outsiders” in trade (as one Chinese assistant casually comments to a Chinese supplier: “This guy is black and this isn’t his country. Keep his money!” (61)) This intersection of profit and discrimination provides fertile ground for trade disputes, which are recounted through colourful ethnographic vignettes.
The next three chapters profile the day-to-day processes of “low-end globalization.” In contrast to the familiar multinational companies, big-money contracts, and high returns of high-end globalization, the authors define low-end globalization, the way most people around the world experience globalization, as characterized by considerably more legally ambiguous practices: counterfeiting, bribes, cash transactions, and the primacy of reputation and trust over contracts. Chapter 4 traces the step-by-step processes of sourcing and supplying, payment, and shipping, with all of the complex negotiations and compromises involved in each step. Chapter 5 examines the major dividing line among Guangzhou traders: legal vs. illegal. While almost all traders enter China legally, a series of challenges and delays in trading, funding, and even the general elusiveness of success can leave traders hesitant to return home, and thus at the mercy of an increasingly aggressive police force. Chapter 6, meanwhile, examines the work of logistics agents who, thanks to their role in overseeing this trade, serve at once as commercial middlemen and cultural brokers: facilitating rapid trade beyond mutual misunderstandings and mistrust. Each of these three chapters closes with a series of powerful personalized portraits of low-end globalization in action, revealing the tensions inherent in Guangzhou’s position as a globalized yet mono-cultural city through unforgettable personal narratives.
Chapters 7 and 8 examine moments of cross-cultural difference and commonality. Chapter 7 provides fascinating ethnographic details on the greatest cultural divide between African traders and local residents: deep religious faith, typically in either Christianity or Islam. Chapter 8, by contrast, examines moments of cross-cultural unity: dating, marriage, settling down, and forming families. The researchers ask their interlocutors whether there may one day be a “Chinese Barack Obama.” Although they conclude that this seems very unlikely in the short term, particularly considering the increasingly constrained political and cultural environment in China today, such real multiculturalism could be a possibility in the long term: not in the next decade, certainly, but perhaps in the next century. These contradictory relations between homogeneity and diversity, or opening and closure, are precisely what make China today such a fascinating place, and make its future direction a question of such great interest to us all.
Compared to most anthropological manuscripts, this book stands out for its directness and accessibility. The World in Guangzhou is highly readable and would be an ideal addition to undergraduate courses on China and globalization. At the same time, the issues that it addresses are also sufficiently complex to merit careful review and discussion in graduate-level courses on Chinese society and culture.
My sole criticism is the book’s reproduction of the Chinese terminology of “foreigners.” I have long been frustrated by the tendency of scholars of China, who would typically remain critically distanced from such loaded language in other contexts, to casually refer to all non-Chinese as foreigners (waiguoren). Mathews’ book reveals to us the sheer diversity of backgrounds and experiences of those labelled foreigners, highlighting the fundamental meaninglessness of this label. At the same time, the authors’ repeated use of this label faithfully, yet in my opinion unfortunately, reproduces the exclusionary frames that they rightly criticize throughout this book.
My minor disagreement with commonplace terminology, however, should not detract from the thought-provoking insights on globalization and cross-cultural relations portrayed so vividly in this book: anyone who wants to think through and begin to understand a globalizing China should read The World in Guangzhou.
Kevin Carrico
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia