Oligopolistic suppliers,symbiotic value chains and workers' bargaining power: labour contestation in South China at an ascendant global footwear firm

In this article, I analyse changes in the power relationship between lead firms, manufacturers and workers by examining a strike that took place in South China in 2014 among workers at the Taiwanese footwear giant, Yue Yuen. In the process, I demonstrate that there is a link between increased labour costs, capital consolidation and greater value capture at the bottom of the global supply chain. I argue that footwear value chains are seeing a falling level of monopsony power and the emergence of enormous oligopolistic suppliers, which are transforming the power imbalances of global supply chains towards a more mutually dependent ‘buyer–producer symbiosis’. The Yue Yuen strike shows a maturing industrial working class, facing pressures on social reproduction in China, adapting its bargaining strategies vis‐à‐vis the developmental state. Influxes of profit raise the ceiling for what can be demanded of employers, stimulating those same employers to pursue more aggressive means of holding onto their profits. The example of the Yue Yuen strike is an indicator of what are fundamental changes in the production process, dynamics within the value chain, and power and agency of workers in labour‐intensive production. The strike demonstrates that consolidation is playing a decisive role in shaping the power relationship between domestic manufacturers and transnational brands, which, in turn, is directly affecting the bargaining power of workers.     

Seeking identity: the transborder lives of mainland Chinese families with children born in Hong Kong

Between 2001 and 2013, Hong Kong regulations permitted pregnant women from mainland China to travel to Hong Kong to deliver their babies. In this article, based on 30 in‐depth interviews, I explore the transborder lives and identities of these mainland Chinese families who, motivated by cost considerations, citizenship and anticipated benefits for their children, chose to give birth to their babies in Hong Kong. In some cases, family networks providing flexible residential practices and family care, supported these transborder activities. However, the complexities of transborder life reveal the diverse ‘identifications’ within Hong Kong society and mainland families. Because neither administration totally accepts them, they are not full members of either society and so the identities they form are both plural and fragmented.     

Rethinking the informal and criminal economy from a global commodity chain perspective: China–Paraguay–Brazil

The criminalization of Chinese counterfeit goods in the global market calls for a fresh approach to understanding well‐established binary distinctions such as legal/illegal, licit/illicit, and formal/informal. Based on a multi‐sited ethnography in China, Paraguay and Brazil, I examine five commodity chains of two products – toys and watches – and their regulatory frameworks in terms of merchandise status, business formality, and international transaction legality. Certain merchandise produced in the formal economy has no legal definition a priori, but legal variability starts when goods leave the factory. A great interchangeability of a product's legal status existed along its chain according to governance structures, legal cultures, geographical domains, and power relations. These findings suggest that the illicit is a relational category and the so‐called criminal economy is not a segmented market, but part of a global process integrated with formality and marked by great legal variability within and between nations.     

The Role Structure of Chinese Managers

The study investigates the role structure of managers in China's Henan province. The results produce a two-facet classification consistent with Shapira and Dunbar's findings for North American managers, yet displaying a number of unique features attributed to the Chinese business environment. The leader's role of the Chinese manager splits into task-related and relationship-oriented activities, and the monitor role is plotted across the informational and decision facets. An addition to this study, the political role is also found across the two facets, providing integration across the various managerial activities. An open system model of the Chinese managerial role is proposed.     

Not a Silk Road: trading networks between China and the Middle East as a dynamic interaction of competing Eurasian geographies

This article offers a different theorization of the commercial geographies and economic networks that connect China to the Middle East from those associated with the metaphor of the ‘Silk Road’. Many accounts of the recent and ongoing internationalization of the Chinese trade in small commodities through the well‐known market city of Yiwu describe the increasingly significant flows of commerce between China and the Middle East in these terms. In this article, I propose an alternative theoretical frame, arguing that the commercial geographies fashioned by Arab traders in Yiwu are, rather, formed through a dynamic relation of competition and cooperation between a series of distinct but overlapping Eurasian political geographies which have been in process from the 1970s onwards. Analysts have also often highlighted the Muslim and Arab ethnic nature of the transnational economic networks that connect Yiwu to markets across the Middle East. But rather than adopting a network governance approach, which sees these networks as embedded in a shared culture or ethnicity that furnishes the possibility of trust, I adopt a structural analysis approach in which traders act as brokers, moving and mediating between different geographies. I argue that they act strategically to keep several contexts in play at once because they are faced with an unforeseeable future and marginal citizenship rights.     

New trade formations: precarity,pragmatic cosmopolitanism and long‐distance trade in the Caucasus

For many ordinary people responding to ongoing post‐Soviet precarity, domestic and transnational trade has become a common choice of livelihood. This article is about the small and medium sized traders who deal in cheap Chinese commodities in the Caucasus –particularly in Georgia and Armenia. It introduces the notion of ‘trade formations’ to account for the multiple ways in which cross‐cultural trade and microfinance practices, as well as stereotypes about national and regional groups and trading minorities, highlight the role of trust, reputation and everyday diplomacy in long‐distance commercial networks. While current trade networks are rooted in the cultures of trade practised under the Soviets, dispositions of pragmatic cosmopolitanism and defensive nationalism often determine who may or may not respond to post‐Soviet precarity by turning to transnational trade, embracing political and religious diversity, and overlooking hostilities, past and present.     

天地苍茫一片心重炼浑朴古炉意——《古炉》十人谈

当代作家贾平凹叙写文化大革命的长篇小说《古炉》面世之后，在文学界和普通的读者中，引起强烈反响，包括一些争议。如何来阅读和评判这部作品，可谓是见仁见智。更为重要的，也许是这部作品所引发的对于当代文学及其美学观念的思考。     

Raising cosmopolitans: localized educational strategies of international families in Shanghai

This qualitative research documents the educational strategies of international migrants to Shanghai who are attempting to raise their children as cosmopolitans through immersion in local Chinese schools. We distinguish this localizing educational strategy from the established network of international schools designed to serve the families of corporate expatriates. Instead, our research subjects consist of self‐initiated expatriates, or ‘middling transnationals’, who have chosen to prioritize immersion in the language and culture of China by sending their children to local schools. This localized, or Sinocentric, model exposes non‐Chinese children to a challenging and nationalistic Chinese curriculum. Our analysis of these practices as a form of cosmopolitan education challenges both the goal of teaching a universal and placeless ethical cosmopolitanism and the assumption that a meaningful cosmopolitan education must take place in the idealized setting of a liberal cosmopolitan school system. We also highlight the difficulties families face in this approach, describing this as an ‘entangled cosmopolitanism’, an enriching but uncomfortable engagement with both local and home‐country educational cultures.     

“一带一路”机遇下中外铁路运输公司的合作博弈论策略

通过白俄哈铁路联盟的背景介绍和中欧铁路的发展现状,分析亚欧大陆的物流行业之间激烈竞争的现状,引入豪泰林价格竞争模型分析并根据完全信息静态博弈纳什均衡理论,发现博弈双方存在着价格战的可能性。为了避免价格战,双方可以尽力降低运营成本和销售成本,加大各地分社的投入和建设,根据自己的本地优势开发新的站点,增加回程货物运输量,统一行业谈判力量等。建议国内外铁路运营公司和物流运输公司明确能够增强自身的竞争博弈条件,力争取得市场良性化发展的双赢的博弈结果而不是简单的零和博弈。     

The digitization of diaspora engagement: managing extraterritorial talent using the internet

In this article, I examine how the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) seeks to manage its skilled emigrants in the information age; I investigate the rationales, techniques and imageries underlying the use of the internet by the state. For the research, I used interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis to explore the case of London‐based Chinese professionals and their contacts with the PRC government. The findings demonstrate that two modes of internet use mainly manage these skilled emigrants. First, digitized diasporic associations play a key role in brokering the influences of the government among the diaspora. Second, the PRC government has set up websites to collect and manage information on skilled emigrants pertaining to their labour market potential. A nationalistic discourse of a caring and protective state of origin surround both governing practices. Nevertheless, some emigrants resist these internet‐mediated governing practices, through distrust and a calculated rationality underscored by a neoliberal logic.