Nellie Chu. 2026. Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou. Durham: Duke University Press.
Since the promotion of the state-endorsed “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation” initiative in 2014, entrepreneurship has been framed as a panacea for nearly all socio-economic problems. Individuals across different social backgrounds are encouraged to embrace entrepreneurship, turning the entrepreneur into an aspirational figure. As of March 2026, flexible workers account for around 27 percent of China’s workforce (Tang et al, 2026), reflecting the growing normalization of self-employment and casualization of labor in a time of increasing uncertainty. In this sense, Nellie Chu’s Precarious Accumulation provides timely and critical insights on how entrepreneurial aspirations are lived and constrained within China’s postsocialist transformations and global neoliberal capitalism. The book’s rich and solid ethnographic accounts demonstrate how aspirations and dispossessions are intertwined with processes of capital accumulation amid the shifting dynamics of global supply chains.
Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Guangzhou, Chu examines the labor and livelihoods of migrant entrepreneurs in transnational fast fashion supply chains. She develops the concept of “precarious accumulation” to describe the contradictory experiences of domestic and transnational migrant entrepreneurs, who aspire to achieve entrepreneurial promises of wealth, freedom, and autonomy while being exposed to structural violence of extraction, exploitation, and extortion by both state and market forces. These contradictions produce conditions of “stalled mobility,” defined as “the experience of a treadmill-like effect of chasing after capital and social mobility” (p.19).
Precarious Accumulation bridges a gap between earlier labor studies in China, which have largely focused on waged labor in manufacturing and service sectors, and broader discussions of precarity that often center on middle-class experiences and confined within national boundaries. By focusing on small-scale migrant entrepreneurs from the rural China, West Africa, and South Korea, Chu expands the analytical scope of precarity to include transnational and intersubjective dimensions, and connects it to the fluctuation of capital accumulation, particularly in the fast fashion industry. Her work also contributes to the recent scholarship (e.g., L. Zhang 2023; C. Zhang 2022) on postsocialist China’s transformations of labor and desires and its integration into the neoliberal global capitalism from a bottom-up, transnational perspective.
Across five chapters, Chu’s ethnographic vignettes unfold migrant bosses’ everyday rhythms of labor and their practices of “bosshood” across different nodes of the supply chains in Guangzhou. Each chapter highlights a distinct aspect of precarious accumulation and takes the reader into the lived world of migrant entrepreneurs, from family workshops (jiagongchang) in the Zhaocun urban village, wholesale markets such as Xi Fang Hang building, to the Xiaobei district and underground churches where many West African migrants are concentrated.
Chapter 1 sets the scene by situating the research within China’s postsocialist transformations of labor, land, and personhood, which have facilitated the emergence of global fast fashion supply chain in the household assembly workshops in urban villages and transnational migrant districts in Guangzhou. Different migrant populations seek entrepreneurial opportunities across the supply chains: the rural Chinese migrants, who are historically vanguard of socialist revolution; South Korean entrepreneurs, who take the waves of the global K-pop; and West African traders, who rely on faith-based networks.
Chapter 2 zooms in on labor practices and social relations in the Wong family’s workshop in an urban village in Guangzhou. It illustrates the uneven relations across the supply chain through the Wongs’ interactions with temporary migrant workers, subcontractors, and clients. Importantly, the story of the Wongs’ shows how practices of accumulation are embedded in contingent social relations, including kinship ties, migrant networks, and gendered dynamics. Constrained by the hukou system, the Wongs’ accumulative practices, often reliant on exploitation, requires constant negotiation between mobility and immobility, as well as freedom and unfreedom.
Chapters 3 and 4 offer a nuanced analysis of the multiple forms of surveillance and extraction enacted by both the state and non-state actors operating across the supply chains. In urban villages, the peasant landlords and private security guards maintain an extralegal economy that monitors and surveils the migrant bosses to extract profits from them, constituting what Chu terms a “shenfen (identification) economy.” These regulatory mechanisms—including “arbitrary fee collection from small-scale bosses, the racialization of West African migrants, affective control over rural Chinese and West African migrants, and regulation/valuation via the suzhi discourse” (p.102)—further aggravate migrant entrepreneurs’ conditions of stalled mobility.
Similar extractive and predatory mechanisms are evident in wholesale markets. Through a detailed description of the spatial, temporal, and bureaucratic organization of the Xi Fang Hang wholesale building,Chapter 4 shows migrant wholesalers’ subjection to the risks and vulnerability associated with the market demand, and the debt and extortion stemming from speculative real estate management practices and the police fee extraction. Migrant entrepreneurs respond through design-copying and strategies of “flexible appropriation” including retagging garments, reassembling garment pieces, and “flipping” finished goods. Meanwhile, these strategies reproduce the very hierarchy of debt and extraction that confine their accumulation (p.137).
Chapter 5 investigates the distinct precarious conditions faced by the transnational migrant entrepreneurs from West Africa, South Korea, and Korean Chinese (chaoxian zu) in the fast fashion supply chains in Guangzhou, mirroring the stalled mobility experienced by rural Chinese migrants on a transnational scale. These migrant bosses rely on religious, ethnic, gendered, and nationalist networks to achieve economic success, yet these very same identifications also shape their vulnerabilities and their eventual departure from China. For instance, West African entrepreneurs combine their entrepreneurial activities with Christianity in pursuit of capital and spiritual accumulation, while facing racialized extraction and surveillance on daily base, as particularly evident during the COVID-19. South Korean traders, who perform “bosshood” through masculinized practices, benefit from their connections with Korean Chinese communities and from the global popularity of K-pop, but they are also vulnerable to shifting geopolitical relations, such as the 2017 anti-Korean campaign. The chapter also underscores how migrants’ everyday entrepreneurial activities link China to the globe, extending beyond the nation-state boundaries. As noted in the conclusion, the precarity of these accumulative practices becomes even more apparent in the post COVID-19 period, as fast fashion supply chains shift toward Southeast Asia and other regions, prompting transnational migrant entrepreneurs to follow these changing circuits of production.
Taken together, Precarious Accumulation offers a compelling account of the lived contradictions of entrepreneurship as both an aspiration and a form of structural precarity. By foregrounding the labor practices and livelihood of migrant bosses, Chu not only expands the scope of labor studies but also sheds lights for understanding the broader socio-economic conditions of labor and a structure of feeling in a time “marked by the retraction of state-sponsored welfare and by global market forces” (p.8). Indeed, the stalled mobility experienced by migrant entrepreneurs, the deference of neoliberal promises, resonate with larger social groups, including recent young graduates navigating increasingly uncertain labor markets. In this sense, the figure of migrant boss, as Chu suggests, does reflects the fragmented and individualized conditions. The question of “common prosperity,” raised in the conclusion, becomes particularly salient in the prevalence of flexibility and self-entrepreneurship in post-COVID 19 era.
Chu captures a historical moment in which entrepreneurship is shaped both by top-down official endorsements and by bottom-up everyday practices in a postsocialist China. While the book offers powerful and meticulous examination of the latter, it leaves less room for the broader historical genealogy of entrepreneurship in China. Further elaboration on the policy frameworks shaping China’s openness to transnational migrant capital accumulation, and the wider transformations of the fast fashion sector over the past decade, would help situate the ethnography within a more contextual grounding for readers who may be less familiar with China.
References:
Tang, Hanyu, et al. 2026. “How China’s Growing Gig Economy Has Left a Generation Adrift.” Caixin Global. March 2. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-03-02/cover-story-how-chinas-growing-gig-economy-has-left-a-generation-adrift-102418672.html
Zhang, Lin. 2023. The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy. New York: Colombia University Press.
Zhang, Charlie. 2022. Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lili Lin is an independent scholar who works on gender and labor in contemporary China. Her writing appears in Chinese media outlets and in publications such as Critical Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture, and Chinese Literature and Thought Today.