Periodic Reporting for period 1 - China Fashion Power (Fashioning Power through South-South Interaction: Re-thinking Creativity, Authenticity, Cultural Mediation and Consumer Agency along China-Africa Fashion Value Chains)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2025-02-28
The surge of China’s global power has caught the interest of the general public, policymakers and scholars alike, often focalised in discussions about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – the Chinese government’s ambitious global development strategy. The nation’s cultural and creative industries (CCI) have been at the top of the Chinese government’s strategic development agenda to export its cultural power to the world. As part of CCI, fashion is recognised as a significant economic force globally and one of the most poignant indicators of cross-cultural exchange. Yet, fashion studies remain ethnocentric to the point of systematically ignoring, mistaking, and excluding those fashion circuits and consumption practices of billions of people in the Global South that do not operate via “the West” or seek legitimacy from it. Existing scholarship largely focuses on how China’s hardware and software development, infrastructural expansion and Confucius Institutes can achieve China’s ambitions abroad. There is an urgent need to more fully analyse China’s new global power structure and expansion in people’s daily life in order to understand its actual economic, political, social, cultural, and affective impacts.
China Fashion Power investigates how, in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global power is manifested, negotiated, and resisted in people’s daily life in a South-South setting using fashion as an exemplary case. By critically examining China-Africa networks of fashion production, trade and consumption, this project will theorise how fashion is created, circulated, valuated, and consumed in and through Global Souths Value Chains (Guangdong-Nairobi-Maputo), dissecting complex dynamics and expressions of power.
Using a multi-disciplinary, multi-method, multi-sited, and multi-scalar approach, the following questions frame the four subprojects: 1) How are everyday fashion products designed and produced in China for African markets; 2) How do Chinese and Africans interact to valuate and trade fashion products for Kenyan and Mozambican markets; 3) How and by whom are cultural differences negotiated and mediated in the marketplace; and 4) What values, meanings and power do African consumers derive from consumption, and what ideas and constraints are imposed on them?
This project’s major contribution is threefold. Theoretically, it will move beyond a Western-centric epistemology to map the chains, restraints and materialities of China’s power expansion through fashion. Methodologically, this project will synergistically collect and triangulate empirical information along complete South-South commodity chains through multi-sited ethnography, semiotic and visual analysis, individual and focus group interviews, and wardrobe archival studies. Empirically, it will provide evidence of how Chinese-African fashion industries impact upon the social, cultural, economic and affective lives of African consumers in the context of increasing globalisation, digitalisation, consumerism, and China’s ambition abroad.
China Fashion Power investigates how, in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global power is manifested, negotiated, and resisted in people’s daily life in a South-South setting using fashion as an exemplary case. By critically examining China-Africa networks of fashion production, trade and consumption, this project will theorise how fashion is created, circulated, valuated, and consumed in and through Global Souths Value Chains (Guangdong-Nairobi-Maputo), dissecting complex dynamics and expressions of power.
Using a multi-disciplinary, multi-method, multi-sited, and multi-scalar approach, the following questions frame the four subprojects: 1) How are everyday fashion products designed and produced in China for African markets; 2) How do Chinese and Africans interact to valuate and trade fashion products for Kenyan and Mozambican markets; 3) How and by whom are cultural differences negotiated and mediated in the marketplace; and 4) What values, meanings and power do African consumers derive from consumption, and what ideas and constraints are imposed on them?
This project’s major contribution is threefold. Theoretically, it will move beyond a Western-centric epistemology to map the chains, restraints and materialities of China’s power expansion through fashion. Methodologically, this project will synergistically collect and triangulate empirical information along complete South-South commodity chains through multi-sited ethnography, semiotic and visual analysis, individual and focus group interviews, and wardrobe archival studies. Empirically, it will provide evidence of how Chinese-African fashion industries impact upon the social, cultural, economic and affective lives of African consumers in the context of increasing globalisation, digitalisation, consumerism, and China’s ambition abroad.
Over the past two years, the ERC project has achieved significant progress in understanding transnational cultural flows between China and Africa through interdisciplinary, multi-sited ethnographic research. The team, comprising of one PI, two postdoctoral researchers, two PhD students, two visiting scholars, six photographers, one artist/videographer, and twelve part-time research assistants, conducted research across Guangzhou, Maputo, and Nairobi, yielding rich qualitative data.
Research methods included 35+ factory and market visits, 48 industry practitioner interviews, focus group interviews with about 110 participants, 30 wardrobe studies, and in-depth participant observation. These efforts have generated extensive data, including over 2,000 professional photographs and 40+ hours of video footage. This visual material has been invaluable for the team’s analysis, and is also employed for social media posts and creative exhibitions, such as the Nairobi Gallery's "Ready for Shipment," which showcases various themes regarding the intersection of African fashion with China.
The research team’s findings have been widely disseminated through various academic channels. Since 2022, the Principal Investigator has delivered 22 invited talks across Africa, Asia, and Europe and presented at four major international conferences, contributing to significant cross-disciplinary dialogues. Both postdoctoral researchers have been conducting fieldwork in Mozambique, Kenya and China. Together, they have given 15 presentations on their research and published four peer-reviewed articles. The PhD researchers have completed essential coursework, their pilot studies, and various academic presentations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Their research addresses diverse themes, such as the global wig trade and neo-colonial impacts on Kenyan fashion consumers.
The project has also fostered a collaborative and educational environment through seminars, reading groups, and workshops, notably engaging with scholars through the new Global Africa research and reading group. The research team members have been and are currently involved in disseminating their findings through an official website (chinaafricafashionpower.org) teaching and organizing five special issues. Together, these achievements underscore the project’s contribution to understanding and documenting the transnational influences shaping African and Chinese fashion industries.
Research methods included 35+ factory and market visits, 48 industry practitioner interviews, focus group interviews with about 110 participants, 30 wardrobe studies, and in-depth participant observation. These efforts have generated extensive data, including over 2,000 professional photographs and 40+ hours of video footage. This visual material has been invaluable for the team’s analysis, and is also employed for social media posts and creative exhibitions, such as the Nairobi Gallery's "Ready for Shipment," which showcases various themes regarding the intersection of African fashion with China.
The research team’s findings have been widely disseminated through various academic channels. Since 2022, the Principal Investigator has delivered 22 invited talks across Africa, Asia, and Europe and presented at four major international conferences, contributing to significant cross-disciplinary dialogues. Both postdoctoral researchers have been conducting fieldwork in Mozambique, Kenya and China. Together, they have given 15 presentations on their research and published four peer-reviewed articles. The PhD researchers have completed essential coursework, their pilot studies, and various academic presentations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Their research addresses diverse themes, such as the global wig trade and neo-colonial impacts on Kenyan fashion consumers.
The project has also fostered a collaborative and educational environment through seminars, reading groups, and workshops, notably engaging with scholars through the new Global Africa research and reading group. The research team members have been and are currently involved in disseminating their findings through an official website (chinaafricafashionpower.org) teaching and organizing five special issues. Together, these achievements underscore the project’s contribution to understanding and documenting the transnational influences shaping African and Chinese fashion industries.
The project team has produced significant impact in its contributions to emerging conceptualisations of China’s global power and Africa. This has been done through contributions to diverse literature centring Africa and China in peer reviewed academic journals, on a wide range of topics such as data colonialism, neo-colonialism, platformisation, creativity, etc. Also, through workshops, the Global Africa Reading/Research Group, and Editorship on Special Issues in high impact academic journals, the team has contributed to conceptualisations centring Africa. One of such conceptualisations is Global Africa as Method – which aims to not only decentre the Eurocentric views of Africa and fashion, but also recentre and pluralize their relationships with other non-Western fashion systems and circuits. This is through examining more closely the various and entangled cultural, political, economic and social engagements that are created, maintained, and sustained from these non-western fashion interactions.
The team’s research data collections in Africa and China have showed a special connection between the topic of sustainability, inequality, and our ERC project’s stated objectives, which will facilitate more of the project efforts in exploring such an area. To this aim, the team has included PhD 3 to expand the research of second-hand clothes to Rwanda and Accra in addition to our current research in Kenya and Mozambique.
Apart from generating scientific knowledge in a specific field, the project also pays attention to disseminating knowledge through social media to a wide audience. There have also been collaborations with third parties to reach a broader audience. For instance, our collaboration with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) allows the project to disseminate its selected social media stories and photos to over 50,000 subscribers around the world through news feed, further broadening our reach.
The team’s research data collections in Africa and China have showed a special connection between the topic of sustainability, inequality, and our ERC project’s stated objectives, which will facilitate more of the project efforts in exploring such an area. To this aim, the team has included PhD 3 to expand the research of second-hand clothes to Rwanda and Accra in addition to our current research in Kenya and Mozambique.
Apart from generating scientific knowledge in a specific field, the project also pays attention to disseminating knowledge through social media to a wide audience. There have also been collaborations with third parties to reach a broader audience. For instance, our collaboration with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) allows the project to disseminate its selected social media stories and photos to over 50,000 subscribers around the world through news feed, further broadening our reach.