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Trust, Global Traders, and Commodities in a Chinese International City

Objective

Trust, Global Traders, and Commodities in a Chinese International City

Yiwu, a city of 2 million in China’s commercially vibrant Zheijang province, is known by traders from countries including Afghanistan and Syria, the Ukraine and Mexico, and the UK and Russia, as being the world’s hub for wholesale of ‘small commodities’. Journalists have recently been struck both by Yiwu’s significance to consumption practices across the world and by the diverse mix of merchants that assemble in the city. Yet despite the clear insights into globalization and the significance of trade for forging relations between cultures offered by a study of a modern trading node such as Yiwu, the city has yet to be the focus of sustained research. The proposed project, Trust, Global Traders, and Commodities is an integrated comparative programme of research that will provide new empirical data and comparative analysis on the global trade in low-grade Chinese-made commodities. Its focus will be on the ways in which transnational trading activities are conducted in the cosmopolitan and dynamic city of Yiwu. This project’s in-depth investigation of Yiwu, and its connections to the wider world through networks and flows of people, commodities, and knowledge, will yield ground-breaking perspectives on the precise ways in which trade facilitates the simultaneous exchange of commodities, practices, ideas, and identities. The project is necessarily multi-sited and an inter-disciplinary engaging researchers and theoretical approaches in in anthropology, area studies, business studies, and history; it will also draw on expertise from law, commercial shipping, and international trade policy. (1335 characters)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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ERC-ADG - Advanced Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2014-ADG

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Host institution

THE UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 834 588,01
Address
SUSSEX HOUSE FALMER
BN1 9RH BRIGHTON
United Kingdom

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Region
South East (England) Surrey, East and West Sussex Brighton and Hove
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 834 588,01

Beneficiaries (4)

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