Abstract
In this chapter particular attention is paid to the way inhabitants and floating workers of the Zhongda Textile Business Cluster organize their everyday lives in this environment and how they make a living. Formal and informal coping strategies are a substantial feature of emerging markets to shoulder the implications of globalization, fierce competition, working conditions, economic, municipal, and political change in a market which is extremely dependent on economic and seasonal fluctuations. Therefore, these coping strategies undergo ups and downs in the market and need to be extremely adaptable to ever-changing conditions. The maturing megacity is striving for gaining control over—or to bring into order—those hard-to-predict markets which have huge momentum. Understanding informal economic and employment mechanisms is a crucial means to explain socioeconomic change affected by dynamics driven by a globalizing world.
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Notes
- 1.
Research materials in this chapter are direct interviews with government officials in the ZDCM, textile wholesalers, managers and workers of clothing factories, street vendors, indigenous villagers, and responsible stakeholders of the villages. Various relevant archival papers, media reports and government studies are also included. Thick descriptions and inductions in qualitative research are adopted as research methods in an attempt to thoroughly analyze and summarize the research. I would like to thank my students Xiang Wei, Xing Caitang, Sun Hui, and others for helping me to conduct interviews, for their observations, and for obtaining supplementary data from newspapers, websites, and libraries.
- 2.
The number is summed up by net users on the basis of available information found through the search engines “Google” and “Baidu.” It is better described as an incomplete estimation which can reflect the size of wholesale market in Guangzhou on the whole. (http://bbs.city.tianya.cn/tianyacity/Content/5090/1/3009.shtml)
- 3.
It is a position that is low (low technology, low wage), tiresome (high labor intensity, overtime work), heavy (heavy physical labor), hard (rough task), risky (risk of casualty), noxious (risk of occupational poisoning), dirty (exposed to infectious disease), bad (bad labor conditions), urgent (many temporary, urgent tasks), miserable (suffering physical pain and psychological torture without job satisfaction), and inferior (inglorious, unappreciated).
- 4.
The industries of the shops recorded in the observation are generally as follows. Maintenance and services: electric welding, hardware, bicycle, mobile car, oil pump, decoration, laundry, typing and copying, book renting, ironing, haircut, massage, gas delivery, water delivery, photography, phone mart, and phone bar. Commodity retail: door and window, hardware, water pipe, kitchenware, gas, bicycle, telephone, bedclothes, cloth, shoes, clothing, drinks, daily foods, tea leaves, tobacco and wine, food grain, subsidiary foodstuff, fresh meat and vegetables, fruit, stationery, audio and CD, bookstore, newspaper and magazine, gift, sports lottery, adult toy, mart, and scrap collection. Cafes and hotels: restaurant, chaffy dish, breakfast, snack, hotel. Entertainment: singing, mahjong, snooker, game machine, internet bar. Advertisement: signboard, lamp house, and banner. Medicament: clinic, seeing a doctor, medicine selling, dental clinic, etc.
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Wan, X. (2014). Formal and Informal Economies in Guangzhou’s Zhongda Cloth Market. In: Altrock, U., Schoon, S. (eds) Maturing Megacities. Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6674-7_8
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