Business 2.0: Kyrgyz middlemen in Guangzhou

Philipp Schröder

Central Asian Survey, 2020, vol. 39, issue 1, 116-134

Abstract: Among the many ‘businesspeople’ whom the promise of commercial success has drawn to southern China in recent years one can find a small number of Kyrgyz middlemen. Working mostly with Russian-speaking clients, their job is to organize buying trips, coordinate with local manufacturers, translate, and oversee cargo shipments. Based on ethnographic fieldwork since 2013, this article examines in detail the careers, work routines and business model adopted by Kyrgyz middlemen in Guangzhou. I argue that in contrast to the early bazaar or shuttle traders, who have been operating across Eurasia since the 1990s, these Kyrgyz middlemen constitute a next kind of economic actor within more diversified, service-oriented and formalized value chains across post-Socialist Eurasia (referred to here as Business 2.0). One of these middlemen’s most salient contributions is to translate between the informal and formal domains of national economies as well as within cross-border economic transactions.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02634937.2019.1711023 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ccasxx:v:39:y:2020:i:1:p:116-134

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ccas20

DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2019.1711023

Access Statistics for this article

Central Asian Survey is currently edited by Raphael Jacquet

More articles in Central Asian Survey from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().