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.
