The main argument of this book can be summed up succinctly: the remarkable growth of wealth in Chinese society challenges the authority of global actors to define what constitutes value, who can create it and where it can be found. This book explores the frictions, negotiations and interdependencies among actors, places and cultural representations involved in global processes of value creation within contemporary capitalism. The ethnographic focus is on professionals from different countries who specialize in commercial intermediation of foreign goods in China.
Operating in the space between production and consumption, these intermediaries play a crucial role in shaping economic relationships between China and the world. Some of them represent large multinational corporations or small businesses from different parts of the world looking to market and sell their products in China. Others work on producing market reports for foreign companies selling goods in China. Their analyses, insights and recommendations influence not only the production of goods destined for the Chinese market but also the strategies adopted by other intermediaries to promote and sell these products. They also contribute to promoting Western imaginaries that fuel the cosmopolitan aspirations of contemporary Chinese society.
While these professionals seek to do business and gain unique career experiences at the heart of global capitalism, the ethnographic analysis in this book moves beyond this straightforward observation. My argument revolves around the concept of value. This is not limited to the economic value of the foreign goods they promote and sell in China, nor is it solely based on the human labour embedded in these goods. Instead, I define value in terms of the negotiations, conflicts and agreements these actors engage in regarding what is considered important in objects, people, places and social relationships.
Most of these professionals perceive value as something they bring to China through their expertise and the global prestige of the foreign products they represent. They believe it is their role to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers about the value of these goods, transforming their consumption into a learning experience about Western global modernity. This is what I refer to as pedagogies of value. By using the term ‘pedagogy’ I emphasize the instructional perspective that shapes how these intermediaries view Chinese consumers and develop strategies to make them recognize the value of foreign products.
However, as will become evident throughout this book, these pedagogies are far from a seamless execution of economic, social and symbolic strategies by foreign intermediaries and companies in China. On the contrary, their efforts are fraught with contradictions, tensions, uncertainties and frustrations, particularly as they are forced to reassess their own assumptions about value and, more importantly, about who has the authority to determine where value lies. Two examples illustrate a recurring challenge these intermediaries face in their interactions with potential Chinese clients: the uncertainty surrounding the recognition of value.
Oscar, a Spanish businessman, is one such case. I met him at an international real estate trade show in Beijing in 2016. When I asked about his experience at the event, he immediately began complaining about ‘the Chinese’, claiming they only attend trade shows to collect brochures and business cards, take pictures, gather information and ‘steal ideas’, but never to make purchases. He also recounted organizing a promotional event at a luxury hotel in Shanghai the previous year to market real estate properties in Spain. According to Oscar, ‘the Chinese’ came only to enjoy the gourmet prosciutto and fine Spanish wine he provided as a courtesy, but hardly anyone signed contracts. ‘It was like tossing pearls to swine’, he said, half-joking, half-exasperated.
I spent a long time talking with Oscar at his trade show booth. Over the course of our conversation, I learned that he had been selling international properties in China for three years. To me, it was clear that his frustration over his commercial failures coloured his complaints and his perception of his potential Chinese clients. But beyond that, I sensed that his frustration stemmed from something deeper: the realization that his Chinese interlocutors did not see him as someone worth paying attention to beyond the information and culinary delights he could offer them.
A contrasting dilemma arose for Alex, a 60-year-old American real estate agent specializing in luxury properties and golf courses in California. In May 2016, I met Alex at a small booth he had rented at an international real estate trade show in Shanghai. Throughout our conversation, he periodically interrupted to observe visitors watching promotional images on a large screen or flipping through brochures on the countertop. Since Alex did not speak Mandarin, he would initially address visitors in English, and if they did not understand, he quickly signalled for Sunny, his Taiwanese colleague, to assist.
Alex explained that this was his second time participating in such a trade show in China and that he had extensive connections with Chinese clients in California. One of the key lessons he had learned was that ‘in China, you should not judge a book by its cover. Everyone is a potential buyer.’ To illustrate his point, he gestured towards an elderly man staring at one of the booth’s banners: ‘See that guy? He looks like a typical Chinese retiree who worked in the countryside until very recently. But maybe he’s loaded and can buy a mansion or a golf course in California from you.’ According to Alex, many people in China have become wealthy very quickly and have only recently begun to adjust their behaviours and tastes. That is why, he noted, ‘most of them don’t look like rich people in the US or the West.’
Oscar’s experience highlights a conflict over recognizing who and what should be considered a source of value. As this book will show, the work of professionals like Oscar and Alex, along with other intermediaries from around the world promoting foreign goods to China’s newly wealthy consumers, underscores a broader challenge: the profound transformations in value creation strategies that the dramatic growth of wealth in Chinese society is imposing on contemporary capitalism.
When I began my fieldwork in Shanghai in 2014, my initial goal was to study the growth of consumption and wealth among China’s emerging middle classes. However, as I explored the consumption spaces frequented by these social groups, I quickly encountered a network of professionals engaged in commercial intermediation and marketing of foreign products, as well as in analysing the consumer market for China’s middle and upper classes. Their discourses and practices soon became the focal point of my ethnographic attention.
Several factors drove this interest. First, any observer of Chinese society can recognize the massive scale that the market for foreign products has reached in China over recent decades. This led me to inquire into the social life of these products and, more specifically, to explore who promotes them in China and how they do so. Second, tracing the journey of foreign products in China drew my attention to the vast number of trade fairs held throughout the country, where these products are exhibited and marketed. Finally, my exploration of expert mediations in the foreign goods market led me to a wealth of books, reports and articles produced by marketing agencies and market consultants – mainly from Europe and North America – offering insights, advice and sociocultural interpretations to Western companies regarding the consumption practices, preferences and transformations of China’s middle and upper classes.
I thus decided to investigate the practices and ideas of this diverse group of professionals based in China, who play a crucial role in shaping strategies for promoting foreign products and constructing imaginaries about Chinese consumers. Between 2014 and 2018, I conducted a total of nine months of fieldwork in China, primarily in Shanghai and Beijing, with a brief stay in Yiwu. Over these years, I interviewed professionals from various countries specializing in commercial intermediation of foreign products targeted at China’s middle and upper classes, observed numerous trade fairs and exhibitions of these products, attended conferences, seminars and meetings with market consultants and marketing specialists in China, and worked as an applied anthropologist on two qualitative research projects for foreign market consulting firms based in Shanghai. This last experience provided an exceptional opportunity to understand, as a practitioner, how expert knowledge about Chinese consumers is produced.
In 2023, after completing my fieldwork in China, I had the unique opportunity to help forge a commercial-political relationship between an Argentine state agency, a group of private Argentine actors, and Chinese political and business stakeholders. This experience included travelling to China as part of a delegation of Argentine public-private actors, a rare chance to explore first-hand the state dimension of international trade relations. The work of the intermediaries featured in this book involves commercial dealings with foreign diplomatic agencies in China – embassies, trade attachés and trade fairs – as well as interactions with government officials both in their home countries and at various levels of the Chinese government. These relationships often remain out of public view or become obscured under the guise of private-sector commercial interactions. What I narrate in the final chapter of this book is more than a record of such negotiations: it is the story of a pedagogical journey of value, in which each encounter became at once a lesson about what counted as important for others and an exercise in the slow work of building trust.
I examine the work of commercial intermediaries and marketing professionals as an assemblage of activities aimed at managing the transformation of value in the evolving relationships between people and goods in contemporary China. I introduce the concept of ‘pedagogical value’ to describe the politics of value embedded in the work of these professionals. The circulation and consumption of foreign goods involve power dynamics that challenge not only the value of commodities but also the authority to define what value is and who has the power to create it.
My analysis draws on two distinct bodies of literature. First, cultural and economic sociology highlight how market professionals – such as commercial intermediaries, marketers and advertisers – actively shape their fields by classifying, evaluating and ranking markets, goods and consumers (Zwick and Cayla 2011). The socially recognized and appreciated characteristics of a commodity are not intrinsic to the object itself but arise from a social, professional and technical process of value construction and attribution, involving various ‘market professionals’ (Cochoy and Dubuisson-Quellier 2000), including the commercial intermediaries analysed in this book. Through processes of qualification, valuation and singularization, these professionals contribute to the creation of commodities endowed with specific attributes, qualities and properties (Callon et al. 2002; Karpik 2007; Çalışkan and Callon 2010; Zwick and Cayla 2011).
Similarly, anthropological studies on advertising, branding and marketing reveal that professionals in these sectors act as ‘machines of mediation’ (Mazzarella 2004), manipulating and commodifying cultural differences to justify their interventions (Moeran 1996; Miller 1997; Dávila 2001; Mazzarella 2003; Foster 2007, 2008; Shankar 2012). These studies emphasize that marketing and advertising not only mediate between production and consumption but also actively construct markets and ‘subjects of consumption’ (Miller and Rose 1997) through an assemblage of actors, practices, information, scientific knowledge and cultural repertoires.
While this perspective effectively accounts for the professional practices involved in market construction and the symbolic value of commodities, it often overstates the confidence and capacity of these professionals to imbue commodities with meanings intended for consumers and to shape ‘market encounters’ (McFall 2014) in a predictable manner. In contrast, this book focuses on their uncertainties and ambivalences surrounding the construction of value in products, people and social relations in China.
Additionally, I draw inspiration from anthropological studies of value that extend the Marxist notion of ‘labour value’ to explore the various ways in which groups and societies produce and define what is significant for their existence and reproduction. For example, David Graeber’s (2001) dynamic perspective on value creation builds on Nancy Munn’s idea that value emerges from social relations. Munn links value-generating activities to the production of what a society ‘regards as essential to its communal viability’ (Munn 1986: 3). According to Munn, creating value involves engaging in exchanges and relationships that benefit communal interests and projects. Value, in this sense, represents a form of ‘strength’ expressed through ‘the relative capacity of acts and practices to expand the spatiotemporal control of actors and the community as a whole’ (ibid.: 19).
Building on these insights, I examine how brokers, commercial intermediaries and marketing professionals working for foreign brands in China perceive and attempt to manage the shifting relationships between the value of foreign goods and Chinese consumers, as well as the transformations of brands’ immaterial value. I associate immaterial value with what Munn describes as ‘fame’: the ability of people and things to generate and control their reputation both within their immediate sphere and beyond. Establishing the prestige and reputation of brands is a political process that requires managing the transformation of value and the hierarchies among actors and practices involved in this process.
In contemporary capitalism, the global ubiquity of brands (Lury 2004) makes them privileged instruments for creating value and extending cultural imaginaries and power relations across time and space. Anthropological studies have noted that the economic value of brands is no longer solely generated at the production level but also at the consumption level (Arvidsson 2006; Foster 2008; Nakassis 2013). From this perspective, contemporary brand management seeks to appropriate the ‘immaterial labour’ that consumers invest in brands’ excess meanings. In this sense, the work of marketing professionals primarily revolves around managing the transformations of brands’ immaterial value that occur in the process of consumption. Brand management, as a value-creation process, involves two key moments: ‘the investment of brands with meaning by consumers and the appropriation of such meaning by brand owners’ (Foster 2008: 20).
The negotiation of value in China’s global rise has been explored in different ways. Kimberly Chong (2018) examines how foreign firms attempt to impose their value frameworks while being compelled to negotiate them, particularly within the context of financialization and Chinese state-owned enterprises. Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako (2019) provide another perspective by analysing the manufacturing, distribution and marketing of Italian fashion through Italian–Chinese ventures, exploring the negotiations of managerial labour value among Chinese and European managers in this transnational industry. While my study aligns with these works in examining the complexities of value negotiation, it differs by considering a broader spectrum of markets, products and actors of diverse national origins. Furthermore, my research incorporates a socio-anthropological lens on commercial intermediaries, branding professionals and marketing experts, linking them to empirical fields such as luxury goods, real estate, organic food and wine.
Expanding on these perspectives, I highlight the reciprocal valuation processes among people, places and things (Foster 2007). The attribution of market value to goods by market agents involves their transformation into subjects and sources of value. This book explores the challenges that foreign professionals face in being recognized as legitimate sources of valuation for the products they promote in China. By doing so, it addresses a dimension often overlooked in socio-anthropological literature on marketing and commercial intermediaries: the uncertainty experienced by market professionals regarding their ability to understand consumer behaviour and shape markets as they intend. Their strategies to gain Chinese consumers’ recognition of their products’ value are fraught with contradictions, tensions, hesitations and frustrations.
In China, three decades of political reforms and economic liberalization have significantly improved living standards, expanded material comfort and embedded consumption within a new neoliberal logic that has reshaped subjectivities, desires and social relationships (Davis 2000; Ong 2006; Goodman 2008; Zhang and Ong 2008; Zhang 2010). According to some studies, new forms of creating subjects and citizenship appear in contemporary China, for example, in the privatization of different spheres of society (Ong 2006; Ong and Zhang 2008), the frenetic search for economic gain, prestige and power (Osburg 2013), the professional strategies of young people (Hoffman 2010) and sexuality and consumption practices (Rofel 2007).
This transformation is most visible among the nouveau riche, who have embraced foreign luxury goods and hedonistic practices as integral to their social identities and professional and political networks (Osburg 2013). China’s rapid emergence as one of the world’s largest markets for Western luxury goods is a striking manifestation of its deepening integration into global flows of capital, people and cultural imaginaries. Early ethnographic studies in the 1990s described this phenomenon as a ‘consumer revolution’ (Davis 2000), interpreting luxury consumption as an expression of individual autonomy that could challenge the authority of the Chinese state. However, other scholars argue that the expansion of private wealth and consumption has instead reinforced political authority, as state elites and bureaucrats have derived substantial benefits from these economic transformations (Ngai 2003).
The luxury boom has attracted Western marketing, branding and consulting firms to China’s major cities, where they conduct research and advise global brands on local consumer behaviours (Croll 2006). Foreign professionals in partnership founded many of these firms with Western-educated Chinese experts. Aihwa Ong (2006) suggests that such professionals play a pivotal role in shaping elite Chinese subjectivities for integration into global markets, a process accompanied by an increasing number of expos, trade shows and seminars that showcase foreign luxury goods and expertise.
Although Western luxury goods serve as markers of status and distinction, they also function as instruments of power within the networks of entrepreneurs, business elites and political authorities (Davis 2000; Cartier 2008; Osburg 2013). Yet luxury consumption in China is fraught with ambivalence – while it signals prestige and social capital, it also invites scrutiny and allegations of corruption. President Xi Jinping’s 2013 anti-corruption campaign sought to impose moral discipline on state officials, curbing extravagant displays of wealth and limiting luxury consumption (The China Story 2013). Moreover, luxury is not solely defined by price or exclusivity but by its immaterial value and its connection to the logic of ‘unproductive expenditure’ (Bataille 2007). Its power lies in the surplus of meaning it conveys – excess that transcends monetary value and aligns with symbolic, moral and status-driven aspirations (Abélès 2018).
Part I focuses on the marketing of foreign luxury in China. In Chapter 1, I analyse the ideas and practices of marketing professionals based in China – primarily foreign professionals – concerning the consumption of foreign luxury goods. I demonstrate that the marketing strategies of foreign luxury in China aim to enhance and protect the image of these goods as exemplars of value. Chapter 2 provides an account of my personal experiences working on ‘consumer ethnography’ projects within marketing agencies in Shanghai. Here, I explore how Western marketing agencies construct the image of the ‘Chinese consumer’ as a global product with significant market value.
Part II shifts focus to the role of commercial intermediaries and brokers in the marketing of specific products: international real estate, foreign wine and organic food. In Chapter 3, I examine ‘nation-branding’ strategies in the marketing of international real estate in China. In their efforts to attract Chinese customers to global markets, many Western corporations incorporate strategies designed to enhance the appeal of the nations and cities where their properties are located. This analysis delves into the competing narratives, insecurities and hesitations of foreign real estate agencies operating in China’s international real estate market. It highlights how these encounters reveal the rankings and perceived values of China and other global sites in economic, moral and political terms.
In Chapter 4, I explore the role of consumption in the production of social hierarchies in China, particularly in relation to health and well-being. I focus on restaurants, fairs, trade shows and intermediaries such as online sellers, all of whom promote products labelled as ‘healthy’, ‘organic’, ‘ecological’ and ‘natural’. The chapter reveals that the marketing of healthy food in Shanghai is based on two social logics through which individuals pursue ‘well-being’ and ‘quality of life’ in contemporary China: mitigating the effects of environmental issues and seeking social and moral distinction through consumption.
In Chapter 5, I analyse how intermediaries adjust the value of their products in response to the dynamic Chinese market. I concentrate on the commercial relations between Latin America and China, examining how Argentine, European and Chinese commercial intermediaries market and sell Argentine wines in China. Over the past decade, China has emerged as one of the fastest-growing consumer markets for imported wine, making it a sought-after destination for commercial intermediaries and foreign companies. For many Argentine wineries, this is a critical opportunity. This chapter explores the practices and ideas of these professionals, arguing that their primary challenge lies in constructing the relational value of Argentine wines in China – specifically, how wine plays a role in social relations within the country.
Part III consists of Chapter 6 and the Epilogue. In Chapter 6, I offer a personal account of my experience as part of a commercial mission from Argentina to China in 2023, which lasted fifteen days and involved a group of Argentine businessmen and state officials. The Epilogue reflects on the future of value creation in global capitalism and the political implications of the transformations explored throughout this book.
Note: all names of people and companies in this book are pseudonyms.
Slightly different versions of some chapters were published in the following academic journals: