Scale-mediated marginalisation of Myanmar jewellers in China during the live-streaming trade era

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, generations of Myanmar jewellers have settled down in the Chinese border cities next to northern Myanmar. Currently, most of them are based in Dehong Prefecture, a border prefecture in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province. In the past few years, they have faced increasingly precarious economic and social conditions due to China’s anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative and the rise of live-streaming trade in the transnational jewellery business. Our study focuses on the Myanmar jewellers’ economic and social predicaments in the live-streaming era of the late 2010s. Applying the theory of urban scalar reconfiguration, this study argues that the economic and social marginalisation facing the Myanmar jewellers is produced by the prefecture’s urban scalar reconfiguration and the corresponding division of labour. It contends that the prefecture’s urban scalar reconfiguration redraws the boundary of inclusion and exclusion in the border urban space and reshapes the urban socioeconomic hierarchies in which the Myanmar immigrants are situated. The article provides an alternative approach to understanding the changes in transnational immigration in urban contexts. Ultimately, it presents an empirical case study of the much-neglected immigrant population in the China-Myanmar borderlands.