Business 2.0: Kyrgyz middlemen in Guangzhou

Among the many‘businesspeople’whom the promise ofcommercial success has drawn to southern China in recent yearsone canfind a small number of Kyrgyz middlemen. Workingmostly with Russian-speaking clients, their job is to organizebuying trips, coordinate with local manufacturers, translate, andoversee cargo shipments. Based on ethnographicfieldwork since2013, this article examines in detail the careers, work routines andbusiness model adopted by Kyrgyz middlemen in Guangzhou. Iargue that in contrast to the early bazaar or shuttle traders, whohave been operating across Eurasia since the 1990s, these Kyrgyzmiddlemen constitute a next kind of economic actor within morediversified, service-oriented and formalized value chains acrosspost-Socialist Eurasia (referred to here as Business 2.0). One ofthese middlemen’s most salient contributions is to translatebetween the informal and formal domains of national economiesas well as within cross-border economic transactions