In the global imagination, “Made in China” is often linked to cheap, fast, and sometimes counterfeit goods; and to the nameless workers who make them. But what about the people in between? The small-scale entrepreneurs who are neither wage workers nor secure capitalists, who run household workshops out of urban villages, and who dream of freedom admist precarious circumstances?
Nellie Chu, Assistant Professor and cluster lead for the Cluster for Gender and Global China at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, spent years embedded in Guangzhou’s fast fashion industry — one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of transnational commodity production. Her recently published book, Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou, tells the story of rural Chinese migrants, West African and South Korean traders who navigate the high-speed, low-margin world of just-in-time garment production. Read More
For many first-year students at Duke Kunshan University, research can feel like something distant: a world of faculty offices, grant proposals, academic talks, and polished conference presentations. But for three members of the Class of 2026 — Chia-l Wei,Hanyang Zhou, and Felipe Rebello Silvestri — research did not begin with certainty. It began with a class, a question, a newsletter, a professor’s suggestion, or a topic that kept returning until it became impossible to ignore.
Over their four years at DKU, each of them found a different route into China-related research. What connected their journeys was the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, a DKU research center established in 2018 to advance research and teaching on the social, economic, and political factors shaping modern China. With a mission as supporting contemporary China research, connecting undergraduate learning with empirical social science, and bringing scholars together for exchange, CSCC became more than a funding body for these students through grants, lectures, conferences, faculty mentorship, and informal academic communities. It was a place where early questions could become research projects, and where students could begin to see themselves as scholars. Read More
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