ABSTRACT
Hai Heng (English name Robert) is Shanghainese. He is 29 years old and works for a privately owned fabric trading company – owned by a Shanghainese woman,who is married to a famous local television presenter.This helps give her a ‘good political background’.The fabric company,which has ten employees, does not manufacture at all. They export fabrics: they are a ‘middleman’ company. They buy and sell. If a client’s order is below a certain amount, Robert’s company buys from the factory, pays the factory and then sells onto the client. Some orders, however, are over US$1m. In these cases the buyer pays the factory directly and pays Robert’s company a commission. He says ‘US$1m’, in a ‘LC’ (letter of credit) because in 2008 buyers were paying only in US dollars. Buyers want to do business in euros too, but at the moment are only set up to do US dollars. All the suppliers are from neighbouring Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces – from notWenzhou,but Hangzhou,Ningbo, Jiaxing in Zhejiang, fromWujiang and Suzhou in Jiangsu province: from Huzhou which sits on the border of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. Perhaps the secret of Shanghai’s (comparatively) fabulous wealth is its positioning between these two economically super-vibrant provinces. They – especially Zhejiang – provide a labour force for Shanghai of middle-class, very ambitious lower and middle management. In Shanghai’s periphery, factories make the stuff that Shanghai sells. These are more often than not light industry factories. Silk from Hangzhou and Jiaxing, which are important trading cities on their own. Robert’s company does two lines: silk and beddings, for example, duvets. Robert is head of beddings. Shanghai, along with the southeast part of Jiangsu and northeast Zhejiang make
up the global economic powerhouse of the the Yangzi River Delta.These YRD factories are not just anywhere in the massive Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces.They do not for example include Nanjing or Wenzhou. They constitute a factory
periphery around increasingly post-industrial Shanghai, comprising in total some 75 million people.TheYRD has two of the world’s five busiest ports by cargo tonnage.1 If there is a motor of the world economy, it may be here.About 20 years ago Saskia Sassen wrote some about the global city – about NewYork,Tokyo, London. In 2013, none of these make the world’s top twenty ports.At stake now is not the global city but the megacity: Shanghai, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Mexico City. At stake primarily may be no longer a New York-Tokyo-London axis, but the Shanghai-Hong Kong-Singapore axis.This is a question not only of cargo tonnage, but also increasingly for finance and a range of products moving up the value-chain. This chapter is about ‘risk biographies’ – based on detailed interviews with 60-70
Shanghai residents. This is supplemented by another 70 interviews more closely structured around just housing and stock markets.These ‘risk biographies’ overlap experience in markets: labour, housing and, in many cases, stock. In their crosshatched and networked accumulation, these risk narratives are constructing Shanghai.They are producing the city on an urban, para-urban and ex-urban level. Robert’s company’s buyers are mostly from India and, secondly, Australia.
