2 - 'Formality of Digital Regularisations vs. Informality of Brokerage': Digital Brokers in Everyday Digital Practices among the African Traders in Guangzhou, China

Based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Guangzhou, China, this study explores how African traders adapt to, perceive, and negotiate China’s everyday digital regularisations, specifically focusing on the implementation of the Great Firewall of China and mass digitally-based travel control management during the COVID-19 outbreak. It examines these dynamics through the interactions between the African traders and ‘digital brokers’, a concept introduced in this study. Drawing inspiration from studies on brokerage emphasising mediation, digital brokers are seen as those who facilitate negotiation between individuals’ digital practices and top-down digital regularisation—the locality, however, suggests that digital broker is not a being; instead, brokerage practices identify them. The study shows that digital brokers act as an in-between party situated between African traders and the Chinese digital landscape, navigating the gap between them at the digital technology level: on the one hand, the African traders seek help from digital brokers to facilitate their bottom-up engagement and resilience with China’s digital regularisation; on the other hand, the top-down digitally-informed management relies upon these digital brokers to engage with the African traders on the ground. Furthermore, while scholarly debates on brokerage in relation to its potentials of inequality, moral ambiguity, and illegality are echoed by fieldwork materials from this study, the informality of brokerage and the demand for it reveal a vital role of brokers in coping with top-down structural oppression towards individuals. This study argues that informality of brokerage practices is deeply intertwined with top-down processes of formality.