In Precarious Accumulation, Nellie Chu tells the story of the migrant entrepreneurs at the heart of Guangzhou’s fast fashion industry—one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of transnational commodity production. Chu shows how rural Chinese migrants, West African traders, and South Korean jobbers navigate the high-speed, low-margin world of just-in-time garment production that fuels the constant accumulation of wealth via global supply chains. Drawing on fieldwork in Guangzhou’s urban villages and household workshops, Chu outlines how these entrepreneurs’ dreams of economic freedom clash with the reality of precarity and the exclusions of emigre status. Migrant bosses operate within a highly competitive, informal economy where they are both agents and target of exploitation, as they must evade rent collectors, endure racialized policing, and mitigate extortion from security officers and competitors. Chu crucially demonstrates how their efforts generate novel forms of migratory labor, commodity production, and cross-cultural exchange in postsocialist China.

Nellie Chu is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Migrant Bosshood and the Making of Global Fast Fashion  1
1. Made in China, Just in Time  32
2. Stalled Mobility  60
3. Surveillance and Regulation in the Shenfen (Identification) Economy  99
4. Speculative Real Estate and Flexible Appropriation  130
5. Transnational Migrant Bosshood  162
Conclusion. The Dilemmas of Migrant Bosshood and Supply Chain Capitalism in the Era of COVID-19  196
Notes  215
References  233
Index  253