Congratulations to Man Xu, who recently received a Doctoral Fellowship from The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. The fellowship offers financial support to doctoral candidates enrolled in an accredited university in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, or South America for writing dissertations in the field of Chinese Studies in the humanities and social sciences. The award amount is US$20,000, for up to one year.
Man Xu is a PhD student at the University of Toronto focusing on migration, transnationalism and Chinese Muslim traders. Her faculty supervisors are Prof. Patricia Landolt and Prof. Ping-Chun Hsiung. Titled “Global Brokerage by Hui Muslims and the Governance of Transnational Trade in Yiwu,” Man’s dissertation examines practices of small-commodity trade businesses between China and the Middle East. Her article on news coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis was published in Current Sociology. She received her BA in Persian Language and Literature at Peking University, China, and her MA in Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden.
The abstract of her dissertation project is as follows:
My dissertation project examines a trade brokerage system that plays a central role in the operation and maintenance of Global Trade between China and Global South countries. It offers an ethnographic window into the experiences of Hui Muslims who work as global trade brokers in Yiwu - the world’s largest small commodity market. The brokerage work performed by Hui Muslims helps bridge information and network gaps in transnational markets and serves to manage and control risks underlying informal South-South trade. This project contributes to the theorization of the social mechanism of brokerage by analyzing how the relational labor of minority agents facilitates and sustains economic globalization. My research also extends understanding of how complex interplays between global forces and local dynamics in global markets produce novel techniques of governance and new spaces for upward mobility and identity formation.