ABSTRACT
In the 1980s and 1990s, the China-Brazil-via-Paraguay trade route was booming. On the margins of the law, it united producers, distributers, and retailers of cheap Chinese goods in a transnational commodity ecumene boosting local or national economies in the Global South. Studies on globalization tend to focus on the flows, but less on the frictions. As Benzecry highlights, there are contingencies that lurk in the links of the large-scale chains. What happened in the twenty-first century was that these everyday adjustments between flows and frictions became somehow unsustainable when neoliberal discourses from Euro-America institutions attempted to reorganize the world system's hegemony. During the main part of this research, China chose one path toward IP discourse. It resisted Western guidelines and considered its mode of production a driver for development. Brazil's massive adoption of the IP discourse dramatically impacted the lives of people both in the metropolitan informal street markets and on the border with Paraguay.
