ABSTRACT
Yiwu is obviously somewhere that most people come to frequently, get to know and understand how to negotiate. There are no signs to the markets, no business or translation services advertised, no wholesale agents waiting to meet foreign buyers; only immense, straight roads and austere grey high-rises. In fact, Yiwu is perfectly placed for its function, just close enough to Shanghai, but with the space to expand and gather resources from the whole Yangtze River Delta. Yiwu now consists of Huangyuan Market, Binwang Market and China Yiwu International Trade City which includes Futian Market. In many ways Yiwu fits perfectly the picture painted by Mark Auge when he spoke of 'non-place' as temporal and transient, the classic spaces of postmodernity - airports, supermarkets, motorways - spaces lost in a kind of global blandness. Guanxi is unignorable in Yiwu, as it is across China, and has seen many large Western business players struggle.
