Culture & Market

Guest Editor: "Circulating capital, circulating culture: the economic lives of new Chinese migrants in Africa and the Middle East." The China Review. Special Issue

This special issue will bring together ethnographic research on the economic experiences of Chinese migrants in the Middle East and Africa, addressing how Chinese migrants bridge divergent cultural understandings and social norms to organize economic life abroad, and how they transform cultural practices in migrant and host communities through economic activity. This collaborative project advances the analysis of global China by illuminating the underexplored cultural work that drives its development.

The Moral Negotiation of Labour Resistance: Relational Work among Chinese Muslim Translators in Yiwu (Under Review)

This article investigates how Hui translators negotiate the morality of labor resistance to shape transnational labor relations and the moral order of the trade market. I show that translators engage in interactional rituals and moral boundary-making to manage the moral meaning of their strategies for resisting status inequality and economic insecurity. The article unveils the underexamined moral labor that structures marginalized workers' everyday resistance and experiences of alienation, extending debates on how morality mediates the production of inequality in the labor process.