Doctoral Research

Brokering Trade: The Making of China's Global Market and Muslim Entrepreneurs.

Whereas most accounts of China's rise as a global trading power focus on state policy, infrastructural development, or geopolitical shifts, this book project examines this ascendency through the lens of Chinese Muslims (Hui) serving as translators for small-scale international traders. Drawing on state policy and media documents, 50 in-depth interviews, and over 500 hours of ethnographic observation in Yiwu — a city hosting one of the world's largest wholesale markets, this book introduces the idea of “relational labor” to conceptualize how Hui translators invest social and moral meaning in economic relationships to foster transactions against global market uncertainty and to reinvent and sustain self-identities. This research advances cultural economic sociology and the sociology of ethnicity by showing how relational labor simultaneously shapes the social order of the global market and forges new forms of Muslim identity and moral self.