The Transnational Flow of Tourism and Daigou between China and Nepal before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Through various ethnographic research techniques, this article examines transnational daigou practices — meaning informal onsell practices — between two neighboring countries, China and Nepal. Linking daigou to debates on transnational flows, it analyzes the paradoxical implications of the dilemma daigouers find themselves in and their desired alternative mobilities among “flows,” especially that of Chinese tourism to Nepal. I show how these daigouers disrupt the boundaries between the public and personal, virtual and physical, as well as local and global in an attempt to achieve upward social mobility by harnessing their bodies, information, products, and other forms of capital amid the tourism flow. Traveling in this capacity becomes a creative response to the tensions inherent to the various translocal structures wherein they are otherwise marginalized. I thus show how this tourism flow shapes, allows, and also restricts daigou mobility. While acknowledging the latter’s dependence on this flow, specifically investigating how the COVID-19 pandemic has created a temporary site through which such mobility endured for some time even while tourism was suspended, I also show how these daigouers have claimed their subjectivity. Based on this case study, I refute hegemonic narratives of such flows being untethered, uniformed, faceless, and agentless. Instead, I argue that even though flows are powerful and influential regarding types of mobility and immobility they are still not dominant. Instead, different actors’ grounded mobile and immobile experiences keep practicing, conditioning, and negotiating various flows, with those concerned maintaining their own characteristics in confronting them. As such, the article seeks to make the current discussion of transnational flows more nuanced by highlighting the structuring imperatives of (im)mobility, class, and capital vis-à-vis globalization.