Afghanistan’s Cosmopolitan Trading Networks: A View from Yiwu, China

Abstract

This chapter explores Afghan trading networks that are active across a variety of Eurasian contexts. These predominantly, but not exclusively, Muslim traders have come to fill important niches in the forms of economic activity often identified by anthropology as representing ‘globalisation from below’. This chapter emphasises ethnographically the culturally flexible dispositions of Afghan traders, while also bringing attention to the analytical issues that are raised when they are thought of as ‘Muslim cosmopolitans’. In particular this analysis highlights how 'armoured' forms of cosmopolitanism have been frequently visited on Afghanistan during its modern history, often meaning that mobility has been experienced by the country's people in the context of violence and coercion. We explore these issues through a focused ethnographic examination of the lives and activities of Afghan traders in the Chinese international trade city of Yiwu - a critically important node for this and other trading groups, communities and networks.

The Unbearable Lightness of Trust: Trade, conviviality, and the life-world of Indian export agents in Yiwu, China

“…The fast development of its expansive markets and trade centres has attracted not only a buoyant global trade, but also a substantial population of foreign residents who work as traders or export agents, either on behalf of clients or for themselves, often for both (Belguidoum and Pliez 2015;Marsden 2017). The 3,000 3 or so Indian agents and traders resident in Yiwu are perhaps less numerous than their African or Central and West Asian counterparts (Bodomo and Ma 2010;Cissé 2015;Marsden and Ibañez-Tirado 2018;Skvirskaja 2018;Anderson 2019b), and do not appear to be as prominent in trade as they are in other Chinese cities (Haitao 2015;Cheuk 2016). Yet they are well established in the commercial life of the city, as testified by the row of hotels, restaurants, and shops in Yiwu's 'little India', close to the Futian market, which caters for the resident Indian population and their Indian clients.…”

“…Further away, near Yiwu's sprawling dry port-from where containers are transported by lorry to Nigbo's sea portthey can access the warehouses of expeditioners, often located in storerooms on the ground floor of residential apartment blocks. Yiwu's orientation towards global trade is inscribed in its urban environment, whereby different neighbourhoods' restaurants, hotels, travel agents, supermarkets, and so on all cater to the particular tastes and needs of diverse bodies of foreign residents and visitors (see Marsden and Ibañez Tirado 2018;Skvirskaja 2018). During various 'buying seasons' which anticipate increased consumer demand associated with festivities-such as Diwali, Eid, Christmas, or Valentine's Day-or annual events such as the beginning of the school year, Yiwu's trading centres and streets are animated by foreign buyers from the world over, lending an apparent cosmopolitan feel to the city.…”

West-Central Asia: A comparative analysis of students’ trajectories in Russia (Moscow) from the 1980s and China (Yiwu) from the 2000s

“…Such dispositions are habitually recognized as happening in the so-called Chinese "global cities" such as Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, but less so in cities where global transnational student-cum-traders from developing countries in Asia and the Middle East meet (cf. Belguidoum & Pliez, 2015;Marsden & Ibañez Tirado, 2018; see also Cheuk, 2016). The recognition of such type of cities as third spaces for the interaction of people from overlapping arenas in and from West-Central Asia reveals enduring Cold War-related geopolitical processes in Asia, the new nature of studentship and trade, and the processes of fashioning renewed forms of circulatory histories cutting across East and West Asia, as well as Eurasia.…”