Understanding Globalization Through Chungking Mansions

1. UnderstandingGlobalization ThroughChungking Mansions Gordon Mathews Dept. of Anthropology, CUHK
2. Chungking Mansions Where people from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and other areas seek their fortunes through temporary employment and low-budget transnational trade. 90 guesthouses, 380 businesses in all: 4000-5000 people staying in a cramped area of 100 meters square, rising 17 stories. There is no other building in the world quite like Chungking Mansions, in the intensity of global interactions taking place under one roof.
3.  Chungking Mansions is “a ghetto at the center of the world”: a home for South Asians and Africans in Chinese Hong Kong, a node of the developing world in Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong people are afraid to enter the building Chungking Mansions is a world center of “low- end globalization”: the transnational flow of people and goods involving relatively small amounts of capital and informal, semi-legal or illegal transactions, commonly associated within the developing world. This is globalization as experienced by most of the world’s people