The Emergence of “Craft” and Migrant Entrepreneurship along the Global Commodity Chains for Fast Fashion in Southern China

Abstract

This article examines the historical emergence of “craft-like” manufacture and labor along the global commodity chains for fast fashion in southern China. Using Guangzhou’s garment district as a case study, I analyze how intensification of transnational subcontracting practices across the Pacific Rim has facilitated a synergistic melding of craft and industrial production that is often described as a post-Fordist model of mass manufacture. Craft-based organization of production and work life has melded with industrial principles of transnational subcontracting and garment mass manufacture in urban villages that serve as China’s “workshops of the world.” While conventional ideas of craft in the contemporary period tend to project an aura of authenticity upon objects and ways of making, flexible mass manufacture in this age of intensified mechanical reproduction has increasingly relied on small-scale, craft-based practices that complicate migrants’ experiences of labor across divergent historical and geographical contexts. The mobility of people, objects, and practices in China and beyond has destabilized the categories of industry/craft, rural/urban, and wage worker/entrepreneur by blurring the divisions of land and labor that once organized centralized modes of industrial and craft production.