Organised Informality and Suitcase Trading in the Pearl River Delta Region

ABSTRACT

Suitcase trade is a common activity along state borders in Asia. Existing scholarship has often viewed such suitcase trade as locally embedded activities characterised by informality. This article contends that this perception underestimates the diversity and complexity of suitcase trade. This is illustrated with a case study of the Pearl River Delta region of southern China, where thousands of suitcase traders carry goods across the borders between mainland China and its two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao. Several patterns of operation run in parallel, ranging from petty traders working alone to highly-organised group operators. While each individual transaction is small scale and based on informal networks, the entire chain of operations is run by syndicates that are highly organised, commercial, with well-defined divisions of labour, and on a large scale. We describe such a combination of organisational competence and informal networks as “organised informality.” The concept allows us to expand the analytical horizon to cover those cross-border exchanges that incorporate modern commercial practices in otherwise non-formal settings. It also bridges the oft-criticised dichotomies of formal-informal and licit-illicit.

KEY WORDS:

• Organised informality
• suitcase trading
• cross-border exchanges
• checkpoint politics
• China
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Workshop on Cross-border Exchanges and the Shadow Economy, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, December 2015. We are grateful for the workshop participants and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In fact, during field research the authors, carrying a wheeled-luggage, were often approached by “buyers” right after crossing the Lo Wu checkpoint to Shenzhen and asked if we had infant formula to sell.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by Research Grants Council, Hong Kong (Project reference: UGC/FDS12(14)/H02/14).