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<\/a>In S\u00e3o Paulo, the commercial activities in the shopping bazaars (known as galleries) in the center of the city and expanding trade in Chinese products supply popular markets around Brazil through sacoleiros,<\/em> individuals who buy goods and sell them in their home cities. “The gallery sales model has increased between 2000 and 2014, transforming traditional trade spaces in the center of the city,” says Freire. He says that a square meter in Pag\u00e9 Gallery, one of the most traditional spaces, costs more than the same amount of space in some shopping malls. A 2013 article published in the O Estado de S. Paulo<\/em> newspaper showed that the standard purchase price for a square meter of space on Rua 25 de Mar\u00e7o (the street where the gallery is located) jumped from R$5,200 in 2009 to R$12,000 in 2013. Another article from the same newspaper in 2010 indicated that rent for a square meter on the same street was R$1,000, and R$800 in the Br\u00e1s district, compared to the roughly R$744 charged by the high-end Iguatemi Mall.<\/p>\nIn addition to the galleries, another space that drove the movement of Chinese goods was the night fair in Br\u00e1s, in the center of S\u00e3o Paulo. This fair began in 2004 in a former train maintenance area, and involves wholesalers supplying sacoleiros<\/em> who come to the city from all over Brazil. Freire explains that in the early years, street vendors and small-scale producers of clothing from Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia occupied the space. As the fair gained value, Chinese traders began to buy stores, which they transformed into an extension of the activities in the galleries. Today, despite the strong Chinese presence, most of the products found at the night fair are not from China, but rather from the local textile industry and sewing workshops that are scattered throughout the outskirts of the city.<\/p>\n “The cost of a sales spot has already reached R$400,000, which reflects the value of the wealth circulating there, even though the products are inexpensive,” stresses Freire. He says that the night fair drove the development of a new commercial dynamic in the region, creating galleries that target the sacoleiros<\/em> who come to Br\u00e1s at night. “The Chinese predominate in these new ventures,” he explains. Clothing, costume jewelry, purses, bags, cell phone accessories, electronic components and equipment, rackets to kill mosquitoes, flashlights, and toys are some of the Chinese products that circulate in the popular trade.<\/p>\n The activities of Chinese migrants to S\u00e3o Paulo revolve around sales, but there are also entrepreneurs who operate in the real estate market, buying spaces in galleries in order to rent them out, says Freire. Some are employed by these entrepreneurs, while others join together to create credit unions and import goods on a large scale. “There is wide diversity among the Chinese of S\u00e3o Paulo, not only in terms of their professional activities but also in relation to their origins. In some galleries, you can hear four different Chinese dialects,” Freire states. The Chinese presence in the center of the city also extends to other spaces: today, Chinese children make up more than half of the students at Col\u00e9gio S\u00e3o Bento, one of the city\u2019s most traditional private educational institutions, connected to the S\u00e3o Bento Monastery.<\/p>\n According to Pinheiro-Machado, most products arrive at the port of Santos but only a portion are declared. “The Federal Revenue Service utilizes sampling, which makes it possible to circumvent the control system. However, it is impossible to accurately measure the amount of goods entering the country illegally,” she explains. Freire emphasizes that popular trade does not always have a well-defined distinction between formal and informal, legal and illegal. In Brazil, as trade has developed and the scale has changed, import and export companies were established in the center of S\u00e3o Paulo to purchase goods directly from China. “Moving from the narrow lanes of the Friendship Bridge in Paraguay to containers in the port of Santos involves changes in the mediation of how goods circulate, and this passes through a more formal dimension of relationships,” says the sociologist.<\/p>\n Despite the difficulty of measuring the quantity of Chinese goods that illegally enter Brazil, it is estimated that 15% to 20% of electronic and computer products sold in Brazil are smuggled, says Paulo Roberto Feldmann, a professor at the USP School of Economics, Administration, and Accounting (FEA). “Since a good part of the products coming from China are of this type, I would use this same proportion as the basis for estimating the percentage of illegal items in other types of goods,\u201d states Feldman.<\/p>\n Daniel Veloso Hirata, a professor at the Department of Sociology and Methodology in Social Sciences of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) who is part of the thematic team, says that the sale of popular merchandise is associated with itinerant work. He says that in the 1990s, the city of S\u00e3o Paulo began to provide licenses for certain persons working in this modality, including ex-convicts and the disabled, who may have had more difficulty entering the formal job market. During that same period, vendor associations were formed, bringing together people who sought to broaden the right to work in the streets. Hirata believes that a tipping point was the creation of legal status for individual entrepreneurs (MEI) in 2000, which formalized different activities. “In the case of itinerant vendors, they still need to obtain a license from the city, but with this formalization they came to have some social rights and welfare,” explains Hirata.<\/p>\n The situation in the city of Recife, Pernambuco, is different, according to anthropologist Marcos de Ara\u00fajo Silva, a collaborator in the Anthropology Investigation Network Center in Portugal and the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). In Recife, he estimates that approximately 30% of Chinese products come from S\u00e3o Paulo, and the remainder leaves the Chinese province of Guangdong and comes directly to the port of Suape in the Greater Recife region. In the capital of Pernambuco, popular trade is most intense in the neighborhood of S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9. “Between 2001 and 2010, the Chinese worked in most of the shops. Today, they act as managers in approximately 40% of these establishments, controlling the movement of capital,\u201d Silva explains. The numbers are the result of research on the Chinese in Pernambuco that the anthropologist has conducted for approximately 10 years.<\/p>\n In 2016 US$30 billion in Chinese products entered Brazil legally<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Despite the current predominance of popular Chinese products in the center of S\u00e3o Paulo, Douglas de Toledo Piza, a doctoral student in sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York, recalls that the center of the city has been an important distribution center for goods since the early twentieth century, when immigrants from different ethnic groups set up shops and worked in itinerant sales. “The street hawker was a type of itinerant vendor who used the train lines from the city center to distribute products across the country,” he says.<\/p>\n Carlos Freire at USP emphasizes that the circuit of Chinese goods distributed in popular trade works alongside large firms that also seek lower production costs in China. “The spread of copies from China is linked to the work of foreign companies that outsource their production to Chinese factories. These sometimes end up reproducing and selling products without authorization from the brand holders,” he explains. With regard to labor, the researcher reports that in China, social and labor rights are linked to a birth record, which must be transferred when a person moves to another city. If this is not done, this person may be exploited by companies and not have access to other rights.<\/p>\n “China was a closed country until the end of the 1970s. The government was concerned about the financial collapse of the Soviet Union and decided to gradually introduce capitalism in the country in the late 1990s, creating a successful business model,\u201d says Feldmann, a professor at FEA-USP. He explains that on the Brazilian side, commercial opening during the 1990s resulted in the expansion of trade with China. But after the arrival of Chinese products, many Brazilian companies went bankrupt. He says that the flow of trade between Brazil and China gained momentum during the Lula administration (2003\u20132011), when that president signed a trade agreement with the country. Feldmann estimates that in 2016, approximately US$30 billion worth of Chinese products legally entered Brazil, 90% of these goods industrial; S\u00e3o Paulo received approximately US$9 billion in total, including mainly electronics, computers, cell phones, and printers.<\/p>\n He also explains that part of China\u2019s commercial strength comes from the fact that the country deliberately devaluates its currency to encourage exports. “Between 2011 and 2012, the acquisition of Chinese products by Brazilians was so intense that it was reflected in the creation of 1 million industrial jobs in China. It is a high number, if we consider that Brazilian industry currently employs around 8 million people,” concludes Feldmann.<\/p>\n Projects<\/strong> Book:<\/strong><\/a>The informal economy<\/strong>
\nThe informal economy is believed to have moved R$1 trillion in Brazil in 2017, a number including goods from other countries as well as China. This number comes from a study by the Brazilian Institute of Competitive Ethics and the Getulio Vargas Foundation\u2019s Brazilian Institute of Economics, and appeared in an article published in Valor Econ\u00f4mico<\/em> on December 6. The newspaper also published data from the Brazilian National Forum Against Piracy and Illegality estimating that the city of S\u00e3o Paulo lost R$4.5 billion in taxes in 2016 because of the trade in illegal products.<\/p>\n<\/a>But Pinheiros-Machado argues that it is necessary to avoid the image of the Chinese importer as a mafia figure. “Many migrants who sell illegal goods are people that the Brazilian labor market was unable to absorb, and need to do this work in order to survive,” she claims. In addition to the Chinese, commercial activities in the galleries in the center of S\u00e3o Paulo and the bazaars selling these goods across Brazil provide livelihoods for people from various nations.<\/p>\n<\/a>Commercial power<\/strong>
\nThe first Chinese immigration to Brazil occurred in 1812 and was related to investments in tea cultivation in Rio de Janeiro. This flow increased significantly after the second half of the twentieth century, when Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants came to Brazil to escape political conflicts in Asia. After the death of the communist leader Mao Zedong in 1976, the nation underwent changes that allowed Chinese to move between the country\u2019s provinces and also travel abroad. Many people moved to the southern provinces, where many factories that produce superfluous goods are located. The country also began to offer export incentives, authorizing the shipment of containers with different types of goods to any part of the world.<\/p>\n
\n1.<\/strong> Conflict management in producing the contemporary city: The experience in S\u00e3o Paulo (No. 13\/26116-5<\/a>); Grant Mechanism<\/strong> Thematic Project; Principal Investigator<\/strong> Vera da Silva Telles (USP); Investment<\/strong> R$2,298,704.81.
\n2.<\/strong> Cities and markets: Migration and trade routes from S\u00e3o Paulo to Guangzhou and Yiwu (No. 15\/15056-7<\/a>); Grant Mechanism<\/strong> Postdoctoral Grant; Principal Investigator<\/strong> Alvaro Augusto Comin (USP); Scholarship Beneficiary<\/strong> Carlos Freire da Silva; Investment<\/strong> R$181,185.72.<\/p>\n
\nPERALVA, A.; TELLES, V. (eds.) Ilegalismos na globaliza\u00e7\u00e3o: Trabalho, migra\u00e7\u00f5es, mercados.<\/strong> Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ, 2015, 572 p.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"S\u00e3o Paulo has become the main distribution center for popular Chinese products in Brazil, replacing Ciudad del Este in Paraguay","protected":false},"author":601,"featured_media":258186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[261],"coauthors":[1600],"class_list":["post-258181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humanities","tag-sociology","position_at_home-sumario"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258181"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=258181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}