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" The New Merchants of Canton: "
Jiang, Qiuyu
Hyde, Sandra
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1111892
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2505390110
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| Main Entry
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Hyde, Sandra
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Jiang, Qiuyu
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| Title & Author
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The New Merchants of Canton:\ Jiang, QiuyuHyde, Sandra
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| College
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McGill University (Canada)
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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261
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| Abstract
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In the past two decades, strengthening Sino-African ties have led to the emergence of a transnational African population in Guangzhou, China’s southern manufacturing center. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research, this dissertation examines how African migrants navigate their lives in the city, with a focus on Muslims from sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of migrants studied work as small-scale business owners. They face racial, cultural, and legal challenges on a daily basis, and often have tense relationships with local residents, the Guangzhou police, and the Chinese state. Exploring the experiences of African Muslim migrants in Guangzhou opens up new discussions about globalization, urbanization, citizenship, xenophobia, ethnicity, and religion in contemporary China. On one level, the dissertation looks at how China’s legal system (including a restrictive immigration system based mainly on ethnicity) attempts to control, mediate, and regulate African migrants’ experiences in Guangzhou, as well as Africans’ responses to Chinese immigration laws and their enforcement. It examines how immigration laws and their implementation, including through surveillance and strict border management, serve as exclusionary tools to prevent Africans from stable, long-term stays in the country. Simultaneously, it also shows how the lack of uniform enforcement of immigration laws creates spaces in which African migrants can negotiate and work around the formal legal system. Visa-partnership, an informal economic relationship between Africans and Chinese has developed to maximize the visa rights of Africans. On another level, the dissertation examines Muslim Africans’ religious practices and supporting social networks based on a shared religion. I show how Guangzhou’s history and economy have combined to produce a vibrant, multi-ethnic Muslim community in the city. The dissertation attends to how religious conduct acts as a form of community-generated law that serves to enforce social order and regulate business conduct, as well as helping migrants transcend ethnic-national differences. This “religious common ground,” as I term it, also serves as a major basis for the provision of social aid and for community making.
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Citizenship
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Cultural anthropology
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Ebola virus
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