How to Evade States and Slip Past Borders:

Lessons from Traders, Overstayers, and Asylum Seekers in

Hong Kong and China
GORDON MATHEWS
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
DAN LIN
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
YANG YANG
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Abstract
This paper analyzes how traders, overstayers, and asylum seekers in Hong Kong and
south China experience and evade the state. It does this by utilizing two of Ananya
Roys key ideasthe organizational logic of informality, and unmapping as an
informalization of the state. It considers the organizational logic of informality by
examining the individual strategies followed by traders, overstayers, and asylum seekers
in their conduct of low-end globalization. These strategies include laying low beneath
the notice of the state, using ones social networks and cultural capital in ones
evaluation of uncertain information, and engaging in self-presentation that remains
carefully concealed. The paper applies Roys concept of unmapping to the governments
of Hong Kong and China in their informalization of state control over immigration and
police, rendering the enforcement of low-priority laws a matter of the individual
discretion of state agents. However, even if the state does not usually act, it could act,
making the lives and livelihoods of these immigrants particularly uncertain. This paper
shows how Roys ideas may be applied to a realm of analysis far from her original
purview. [traders, overstayers, asylum seekers, low-end globalization, Hong Kong,
China]
Introduction
C
hungking Mansions is a dilapidated 17-story building in the
heart of downtown Hong Kong that serves as the temporary
home of several thousand sub-Saharan African and South Asian
traders buying China-made goods to send to their home countries (see
Figure 1). Between the 1970s and the 1990s the building was a haven
for Western backpackers traveling through Asia. It was transformed
again in the late 1990s, into a haven for traders from the global South
making use of Hong Kongs liberal immigration regulations, as well as
South Asian merchants and asylum seekers from around the world
(Mathews 2011). Guangzhou, in south China, a two-hour train trip
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City & Society, Vol. 26, Issue 2, pp. 217238, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. 2014 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/ciso.12041.