The Chinese Business Community in Morocco: Informality at the Global Margins

Abstract

This dissertation examines how transnational migration, informality, and globalization coalesce in the everyday socioeconomic practices of Chinese businesspeople in Morocco. Against the backdrop of expanding Sino-African relations and shifting global economic hierarchies, it investigates why some Chinese migrants turn to informal practices, what sustains their participation in informality, and how they navigate the opportunities and constraints of operating outside formal institutional frameworks. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Casablanca and Tangier (2022–2024), the study explores how informality is deeply embedded in transcultural interactions, transnational aspirations, social networks, and contradictory moral economies. Three interrelated case studies anchor the analysis. The first investigates Chinese informal entrepreneurs in Morocco’s tourism sector, showing how they rely on digital platforms and interethnic cooperation to operate in regulatory gray zones while maintaining a strategic relationship with the state. The second focuses on Chinese informal tourism laborers—especially self-employed guides—whose pursuit of mobility and freedom abroad (“quest for elsewhereness”) is often in tension with their struggles to achieve social legitimacy and material stability (“struggle for hereness”). The third examines huan qian, a community-based informal financial practice within the Chinese community in Casablanca and between the Chinese and local Moroccans, revealing how money transfers are entangled with trust-building, moral obligation, and the social reproduction of migrant networks. The dissertation advances an actor-centered, relational, and institutional approach to informality, challenging conventional binaries between formal and informal, legitimate and illegitimate, or survival and strategy. It contends that informality among Chinese migrants is less a mere reaction to marginalization than a hyper-dynamic arena of negotiation, aspiration, and constraint. By bridging economic anthropology, migration studies, and global political economy, this research contributes both theoretically and practically to a more nuanced understanding of informal economies. It also calls for a more engaged and policy-relevant anthropology—one attentive to the grounded realities of economic life at the global margins and capable of speaking across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.