How to Evade States and Slip Past Borders: Lessons from Traders, Overstayers, and Asylum Seekers in Hong Kong and China

Abstract

This paper analyzes how traders, overstayers, and asylum seekers in Hong Kong and south China experience and evade the state. It does this by utilizing two of AnanyaRoy's key ideas-the organizational logic of informality, and "unmapping" as an informalization of the state. It considers the organizational logic of informality by examining the individual strategies followed by traders, overstayers, and asylum seekers in their conduct of low-end globalization. These strategies include laying low beneath the notice of the state, using one's social networks and cultural capital in one's evaluation of uncertain information, and engaging in self-presentation that remains carefully concealed. The paper applies Roy's concept of unmapping to the governments of Hong Kong and China in their informalization of state control over immigration and police, rendering the enforcement of low-priority laws a matter of the individual discretion of state agents. However, even if the state does not usually act, it could act, making the lives and livelihoods of these immigrants particularly uncertain. This paper shows how Roy's ideas may be applied to a realm of analysis far from her original purview. [traders, overstayers, asylum seekers, low-end globalization,

Yoruba-Chinese Ethical Intersectionality: Towards a Community of Shared Future in Afro-Asian Diasporic Spaces

“…In the age of the internet of things where most countries aspire to the creation of smart cities, one cannot ignore the importance of technology, especially television and the internet, to the layers of global cultural connect of diasporic communities with their home countries on the one hand, and host countries on the other (Mathews, Lin and Yang, 2014). Thus, through the broadcast media, telecommunications and new media, these communities 2 The Nago cult exemplifies the overlapping identities of people in the Diaspora with ritual initiation serving as the basis of identifying with the nation and not necessarily through Yoruba descent, although the term initially referred to the Yoruba Speaking people.…”

“China gives and China takes”

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Trade ‘outside the law’: Uzbek and Afghan transnational merchants between Yiwu and South-Central Asia

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