Introduction

We take our point of departure from the immense collection of commodities-become-spectacles of the trading stalls of Yiwu in the People’s Republic of China, which we visited together in spring 2014 (Figure 1). If China as a whole has become the ‘workshop of the world’, then the mid-sized city of Yiwu located four hours southwest of Shanghai by train is its showroom. If the factories arrayed around the Shenzhen region of China have become the central sites of production in the global economy, in which the Middle Kingdom has participated with particular energy and dynamism since the structural reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, then Yiwu, with its wholesale market, the so-called ‘China Commodity City’, constitutes the nodal point for commodity exchange and accelerated capital circulation. It is a living monument to Deng’s infamous ‘Capitalist road to socialism’, as if somehow, in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1949, that particular pathway could be thought and traversed independently of that specific destination.