China in Argentina

“These richly empirical essays enable us to understand China’s ongoing experiments in engaging with the global capitalist economy by focusing on how the dynamic forces at work in Chinese-Argentine interactions arise through their encounters with one another rather than being solely imposed on them by a structural outside.  They reveal the breadth and diversity of actors and types of enterprises, the multiplicity of those who make claims about the 'way things are done' by Chinese; and the economic inequalities in which Argentinians are not mere passive recipients.  Anyone who seeks to gain a richer appreciation of China’s heterogeneous global activities in the twenty-first century will need to read this book”. 

—Lisa Rofel, Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz USA

This is the first book to shed light on the growing presence, influence and expansion of China in the daily life of Argentina. While most previous academic studies focus on the geopolitical and macroeconomics dimensions of the relations between Argentina and China, this book shows at a micro-social level the multiple facets of the economic, political and social influence of China in Argentina. The book presents ethnographic studies of encounters of actors and negotiation of identities from Argentina and China in companies, schools, restaurants, hospitals, districts, public and private institutions in Argentina. Themes discussed in the ethnographies include: identity struggle and strategic uses of culture in Buenos Aires' s Chinatown; teaching Chinese as the first foreign language or teaching it as a heritage language in a bilingual school; the contested production of images of Chinese authenticity in Chinese restaurants; the connections and contestations between so-called “Western medicine” and so-called “Chinese Traditional Medicine”; and the conflictive relations between Chinese expatriate bosses of Chinese state-owned enterprises and their Argentinean employees.

Máximo Badaró is Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, Argentina) and Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de San Martin (UNSAM, Argentina), where he is also the director of the Bachelor Degree Program in Social Anthropology.