The Anthropology of Special Economic Zones (Free Ports, Export Processing Zones, Tax Havens)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Neveling
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Service Industries ◽  
Special Economic Zones ◽  
Export Processing Zones ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Tax Havens ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Flexible Accumulation ◽  
Economic Zones ◽  
Export Processing

Special economic zones (SEZs) are a key manifestation of neoliberal globalization. As of 2020, more than 150 nations operated more than 5,400 zones. The combined workforce of factories and service industries in bonded warehouses, export processing zones (EPZs), free trade zones (FTZs), science parks (SPs), regional development zones (RDZs), economic corridors (ECs), and other types of SEZs exceeds one hundred million. These figures include tax havens, offshore financial centers, and free ports. Neoliberal academics and researchers from international organizations say that this has been a long time coming, as the freedom offered in the zones was integral to being human and first implemented in free ports of the Roman Empire. Critical social scientists, among them many anthropologists, have instead identified the zones as products of a 1970s rupture from Keynesian welfarism and Fordist factory regimes to neoliberal globalization and post-Fordist flexible accumulation. Since the early 21st century, scholarship in anthropology has expanded this critical stance on worker exploitation in SEZs toward a historical analysis of SEZs as pacemakers of neoliberal manufacturing globalization since the 1940s. A second strand of ethnographies uses a postmodern lens to research the zones as regimes that produce neoliberal subjectivities and graduated sovereignty.

The Provision of Housing and Social Services in China's Special Economic Zones

1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
D R Phillips ◽  
A G O Yeh
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social Services ◽  
South China ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Physical Development ◽  
Foreign Firms ◽  
Special Economic Zones ◽  
Export Processing Zones ◽  
Retail Services ◽  
Economic Zones

The development since the late 1970s of four Special Economic Zones in South China, in which a variety of economic change is being piloted, has now been widely documented. These zones have certain similarities with Export Processing Zones in some other countries within Southeast Asia, although they are more comprehensive in development and include the provision of housing for foreigners and local Chinese, as well as social services and many other facilities. Housing and service provision has, to an extent, however, lagged behind the economic and physical development of the Chinese zones. The authorities in the zones have begun to view housing as an item worthy of investment, and the coexistence of foreign firms and joint ventures with Chinese-owned undertakings within the zones has meant that incomes and aspirations, and hence demands for facilities, are often higher than elsewhere in the country. This has meant an important re-examination of socialist principles in the zones. Housing in particular is becoming a commodity which is of higher quality than elsewhere in China and can be bought and sold, and many types of social and retail services are also being provided by individuals and firms rather than by the state or larger production units. In this paper the authors examine some of the changes currently being witnessed in these zones and the dilemmas which they pose for a government still attempting to maintain an avowed socialist orientation in its policy. In particular, they discuss the emergence of competition for housing and resources, and consider the extent to which the commodification of social facilities is compatible with the continuation of socialist state policy.

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