A01=Nellie Chu
accumulation
appropriation
Author_Nellie Chu
capitalism
Category=JBSD
Category=JBSL
Category=JHMC
China
counterfeit
COVID-19
deferment
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnicity
exploitation
fast fashion
global commodity chains
global supply chains
Guangzhou
household workshop
immobility
industrialization
informal labor
labor
migrant boss
migrant entrepreneurship
migration
nationalism
policing
postsocialism
precarity
prosperity doctrine
racial capitalism
rent-seeking
social inequality
spatial imaginaries
speculation
stalled mobility
subcontracting
supply chain capitalism
surveillance
urban villages
urbanization
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033097
- Weight: 376g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
