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 in Guangzhou’s fast fashion networks. She traces urban villages, wholesale markets, and the liminal status of migrant bosses. The conversation covers transnational traders, policing and rent extraction, platform-driven digitization, and how precarity shapes aspirations and stalled mobility.

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INSIGHT

Guangzhou City As Visible Garment Supply Chain

Guangzhou's urban landscape is a literal garment supply chain with wholesale markets, raw-material stalls, and household workshops embedded in the city fabric.
Nellie Chu observed zippers, buttons, fabrics, and finished goods clustered across markets and urban villages, making production visible in daily city life.

ANECDOTE

Mr Wong Declares I Am The Boss Amid Factory Labor

Migrant workers routinely called themselves laoban despite limited autonomy, using the title as a marker of dignity and seniority.
Chu recounts Mr. Wong telling her simply "I am the boss" while still working long hours in a family household factory.

INSIGHT

Bosshood Between Wage Labor And Entrepreneurship

Bosshood sits between wage labor and full entrepreneurship, shaped by post-socialist shifts toward flexibility and aspiration.
Chu links the China Dream and global entrepreneurial ideals to changing class identity that values autonomy over stable wage work.

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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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