Selling Out Other’s Culture: Overseas Chinese as the Brokers of Cosmopolitanism in Online Shopping

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session I
  In Interactive Paper Session: Popular Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

This study tackles with a global purchasing phenomenon that is popular in Chinese online shopping experience. Chinese diaspora, who acted as global purchasing agents (GPAs), help to buy products overseas and sell them back to consumers in China. Through the back-and-forth communication and cultural products exchanges, GPAs provides their consumers multicultural experience and transnational visions as imagination. This practice blurs the essential national boundaries and complicates the mentality of diaspora that might assume a dichotomy of homeland and host country. As the study reveals, it is the mundane practice of online shopping that links to lived and imagined experience of cosmopolitanism. In conducting online shopping and global purchasing, diasporic subjects become cultural brokers that help people in homeland make their way into other’s culture, be appreciatively open to divergent cultural experiences, and consume the sense of cosmopolitanism as a daily activity.

Author

• Sara X. T. Liao, University of Texas at Austin