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Following the work of Jean Baudrillard, David Harvey suggested that the flexible accumulation that gives rise to the postmodern condition is characterized by the production of images and sign systems rather than commodities themselves.1 Such cultural forms and the fantasies they generate in daily experience are integral to the circulation of capital. One of the key fantasies driving and underpinning the East Asian circuit of flexible accumulation is the fantasy of the Chinese diaspora as cosmopolitan capitalist entrepreneur. The Chinese diaspora is fantastic in two senses. Historically, these waves of migration were driven by fantasies of wealth outside the poverty of the mainland. But it is also the subject and object of fantasy today as ideological discourses seek to explain the phenomenon of the East Asian miracle prior to the 1997 financial crisis and in the wake of contemporary Chinese hyperdevelopment. From this perspective, the economic modernization of the People’s Republic of China can be glossed as a rearticulation of Chinese-ness through these fantasies of the diaspora, a rearticulation that is more precisely a repatriation and restoration of certain cultural elements of the migrant business/merchant class back to the mainland. For the mainland wants to model parts of itself, especially the coastal cities of South China, after these diasporic communities and external Chinese cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore. In his famous visit to South China in January 1992, Deng Xiaoping had called for the construction of a few Hong Kongs. After 1992, overseas Chinese investment, which had earlier been concentrated in the South China Economic Periphery, expanded into the interior provinces of Hubei and Sichuan and the northeast beyond Beijing.2 The global city of Fantasies of “Chinese-ness” and the Traffic in Women from Mainland China to Hong Kong in Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian Pheng Cheah 11 Pheng Cheah 260 Hong Kong is thus a crucial site and node for this rearticulation and remodeling of Chinese capitalism, of Chinese as capitalist. It was always the gateway to China for Chinese diasporic business networks and the corporate headquarters and eventual place of residence for many overseas Chinese tycoons.3 From the standpoint of political sovereignty, Hong Kong may have been handed over to the PRC in 1997. But as a synecdoche of the permeability of the mainland’s borders to overseas Chinese capital and its enlargement into Greater China, the handover also symbolically marked the irreversible integration of the PRC into the global capitalist system. It is effectively the handover of China to capitalism, its gradual weaning from Communist principles, where Hong Kong itself has become a borderzone for the flow of money, consumer goods, and fantasies, and people. For instance, Disneyland chose to locate itself in Hong Kong as a launchpad for the Disneyfication of China because although its primary intended market is the mainland tourist, the standard of living in the PRC and consumer awareness is not yet high enough to sustain a Disneyland there.4 Thus, Hong Kong, and its broader economic hinterland in Southern China (especially the Guangdong area and the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen) is also a frontier, the source of change and innovation for the mainland. As Xiao Yan/Siew Yin observes in Durian Durian, the Fruit Chan film I will be discussing in this chapter, the South (nanfang) is where everything foreign, whether it is the exotic Southeast Asian fruit, the durian, or imported cosmetics by Christian Dior, first comes to China. What seems to me interesting about the post-handover situation is that it leads to the formation of an emergent modality of Chinese migration, what one might call using the current argot, a “subaltern” Chinese diaspora, the study of which can provide resources for a critical understanding of the contemporary articulation of Chinese capitalism because it puts into question the hegemonic fantasy of the triumphal Chinese migrant entrepreneur that has become an important image (Bild) for the capitalist Bildung of the mainland. The permeability of borders that resulted from the handover also led to a new wave of migration from the mainland to Hong Kong that increased the clandestine and legal migrant worker population. The Shenzhen-Hong Kong border is the busiest border in the entire world. One large component of this migration is the movement and traffic of women for the purpose of sex work from various parts of the mainland to Southern China onward to Macau, Hong Kong, and the rest of the world.5 What role do they play and...

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