EVENTS

This Wednesday Seminar presentation draws on fieldwork conducted by the speaker since 2009 in the district of Keqiao, Zhejiang Province, China. It draws from the speaker’s forthcoming book that explores the intersection of transnational trade, finance, and Indian diasporic networks in China’s textile exports. It highlights the critical role of not-so-stable financial transactions in sustaining fragile business relations between Indian traders and Chinese suppliers. Much of the textile exported from Keqiao relies on intertwined formal and informal transactions operated through Indian diasporic trading networks. Such transactions help circumvent institutional hurdles and compensate for deficiencies in operating capital; yet they also generate recurring payment lags that strain relations between payers and payees. At the same time, these interlocking circuits of money circulation inhibit the overaccumulation of wealth and power by any single stakeholder and defy the formal authority of state and financial institutions that seek to regulate such practices. By creating a broader space for business survival among grassroots actors—especially Indian traders facing capital constraints—these financial networks foster forms of entrepreneurial resilience and development possibilities often overlooked in formal economic analyses. In the post-pandemic context these networks remain vital in countering structural inequalities and navigating uncertainties in the global political economy.

Speaker

Ka-Kin Cheuk is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Southampton, England. His research focuses on migration, transnationalism, and India–China connections and their global implications, with ethnography rooted in China, Hong Kong, India, and Scotland. He has conducted long-term fieldwork on the Sikh diaspora in Hong Kong and Indian diasporic traders in China and is currently completing book manuscripts based on these projects. He is also leading a new interdisciplinary project examining transnational flower industries and the global circuits of environmental ethics. His latest publication is “Beyond Local State Corporatism and Entrepreneurial Political Selves: A Governance Assemblage Perspective on the Management of Foreigners in a Chinese County,” in Mark Frazier and Manjari Mahajan (eds.), Constrained Expertise in India and China: Knowledge and Power in Policymaking (Amsterdam University Press, 2025), an output of his India China Institute Fellowship at the New School for Social Research.

Chair

Madhavi Thampi is a former faculty of the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi. She is a scholar of modern Chinese history and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi.
 

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