Nellie Chu, "Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou" (Duke UP, 2026)

Mar 28, 2026

Nellie Chu, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University, studies migrant entrepreneurs and fast fashion in southern China. She explores migrant 'boss' identities, Guangzhou’s urban village markets, transnational traders from Korea and West Africa, and how pandemic platformization reshaped just-in-time garment production. Short, vivid stories trace mobility, precarity, and informal accumulation.

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INSIGHT

Guangzhou Is A Tangible Fast Fashion Ecosystem

Guangzhou's urban landscape is literally a garment commodity chain with wholesale markets, raw-material stalls, and household workshops embedded in city neighborhoods.
Nellie Chu observed zippers, buttons, fabrics, and semi-assembled goods clustered together, making production and retail physically contiguous and visible.

INSIGHT

Laoban Is A Hybrid Identity Of Status And Labor

Laoban or 'boss' identity among migrants sits between wage worker and entrepreneur and is widely claimed as a marker of status.
Chu found subcontracting niches let single migrant bosses control parts of supply chains while still laboring long hours in family-run workshops.

INSIGHT

Aspiration For Freedom Reconfigures Class Identity

Aspirations for entrepreneurial freedom (the China dream) reshape class identity, making flexibility and autonomy primary aspirations over stable wage labor.
Chu links this shift to fluid time/space of work and the contradiction that accumulation requires fixity while commodity chains demand flexibility.

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In Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou (Duke UP, 2026), the cultural anthropologist 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 (email here) is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on transnational and domestic migrant entrepreneurs across the global supply chains of fast fashion in southern China. She has papers published in leading academic journals, including positions: east asia critique, Modern Asian Studies, Culture, Theory, and Critique, and Journal of Modern Craft. Her work can also be found in Made in China Journal, Youth Circulations, and Noema Magazine.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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