Chungking Mansions is a building full of cheap
guesthouses, restaurants, and wholesale businesses located in the heart of
Hong Kong’s tourist district of Tsim Sha Tsui. It is where traders, merchants, temporary
workers, and asylum seekers from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa come to seek
their fortunes. In this research, I sought to understand the people in Chungking
Mansions: how exactly they make their livings and comprehend their lives. This was
pursued through extended ethnographic research, living in Chungking Mansions for
250 nights over four years, interacting with and interviewing its residents,
and accompanying traders and merchants to China, India, and Africa to learn about the
global context of their trades and lives.
Prof Gordon Mathews (first from the right)
|
|
I found that Chungking Mansions serves as a central hub of what I term ‘low-end
globalization’. This is the globalization of cheap, often copy goods smuggled across
borders, largely under the radar of states and laws; this is globalization as experienced
by most of the world’s people. I estimate, on the basis of extensive interactions with
merchants, that 20% of the mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa have passed through
Chungking Mansions. The building exists as a hub of low-end globalization because,
due to Hong Kong’s flexible visa policies, it serves as an intermediary between South
China manufacturers and developing-world entrepreneurs. South China, with its massive
production of cheap goods, plays an essential role in spreading the fruits of
globalization to South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, areas that otherwise would not be
able to experience globalization; Chungking Mansions, under
Hong Kong’s neoliberal rule of law, facilitates this process.
I also found out much about all the other kinds of people in the building, including
asylum seekers, who provide the building with its intellectuals as well as its cheapest
labor;
Pakistani merchants, who may have lived in Hong Kong for generations; Indian
temporary workers flying back and forth between Hong Kong and Kolkata every 42
days, carrying goods to finance their journeys; tourists from all over the world
staying in the building’s guesthouses; Indian and African sex workers
plying their trade and dreaming of becoming middle-class; and Nepalese heroin addicts
surrendering their families’ dreams. All these people play key roles in Chungking Mansions’
low-end globalization.
The primary result of this research is a book explicating Chungking Mansions through
the anthropological lens of globalization, Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking
Mansions, Hong Kong (The University of Chicago Press, 2011). This book depicts the
building, the people in it, the goods that pass through it, the laws that constrain it,
and what it can tell us about the world’s future. Chungking Mansions will eventually
vanish, but our increasingly borderless world will become more and more like Chungking
Mansions, the book predicts. My research on Chungking Mansions has been profiled in
Time Magazine, BBC, CNN, and the Financial Times; the Ghetto at the Center of
the World
book has been favorably reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, the Los Angeles
Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other newspapers and
magazines, and is now being translated into several languages.
Prof Gordon MATHEWS
Department of Anthropology
The Chinese University of Hong Kong cmgordon@cuhk.edu.hk
|