Spectral Jade: Materiality, Conceptualisation, and Value in the Myanmar-China Jadeite Trade (2025)

Frictions and Opacities the Myanmar-China Jadeite Trade

Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces. Histories of Networking and Bordercrossing, 2022

This chapter discusses how frictions and opacities are productive in the trade of jadeite jade from northern Myanmar to consumers in eastern China. The chapter first outlines a history of flows, frictions, and diversions in the Myanmar-China jade trade and opacities, taxation, and smuggling in the contemporary trade. It then presents the perspectives of a Kachin jade broker in Myanmar’s Kachin State and of two jade consumers in Shanghai. The two cases illustrate how frictions and opacities structure economic strategizing and cultural imaginations. While transparency is an ideal feature of jadeite and knowledge a key asset in its trade, this chapter demonstrates how opacity and ignorance can be produced and used to serve the interests of participants in the Myanmar-China jade trade.

Jade and Guanxi in China: Material-Social Congruity and Contingency

The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 40(2), 2022

This article discusses how the gemstone jade mediates guanxi ('personal relationships'), and how guanxi mediates jade trade in China. Outlining some affective, spiritual, moral and somatic meanings and efficacies of jade, especially as a gift, the article first discusses how jade materialities, cultural history and ontology influence human interactions with, and through, jade in contemporary China. Secondly, the article presents some more economically instrumental investments in, and exchanges of, jade and discusses why and how a national anti-corruption campaign engendered fluctuations in Chinese jade markets. Finally, the article discusses how guanxi ideally forges personal trust that facilitates transactions of jade, even though some younger jade traders consider guanxi insincere. Studies of guanxi in China's reform era have conventionally given analytical primacy to how social relationships structure and give meaning to material exchanges. In contrast, this article argues that jade itself can be a catalyst for social relationships that span affect and instrumentality. Combining object-oriented, ontological and institutionalist approaches, the article conceptualises the outlined relations between jade and guanxi as material-social congruity and contingency in the Chinese context.

Boom or Bust in China’s Jade Trade with Myanmar

Made in China Journal, 2017

Made in China is a quarterly on Chinese labour, civil society, and rights. This project has been produced with the financial assistance of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW), the Australian National University, and the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 654852. The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not represent the views of the European Union, CIW, or the institutions to which the authors are affiliated. MADE IN CHINA 2017 EDITORIAL (P. 5) BRIEFS (P. 6) CHINA COLUMNS (P. 10) MIGRANTS, MASS ARREST, AND RESISTANCE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA (P. 12

Trading culture of jade stones

This article aims to illustrate the trading culture of jade stones by examining the social life of the traded stones in their transnational movement from Burma to Thailand during the period of the Burmese socialist regime. Drawing on the work of the well-known anthropologist, Appadurai, I adopt a perspective emphasizing processes to look into the complex intersection of economic, political, and cultural factors relating to repeated transactions. These factors include the politics of organization, the politics of knowledge, personal guts, and the uncontrollable factor of luck. The research shows that market laws entwined with intricate socio-political forces of the region were the driving force in the exercise of the trade beyond national boundaries.

Understanding Chinese Jade in a World Context

Journal of the British Academy 6 (2018) DOI 10.5871/jba/006.001 For millennia, jade has been valued in many cultures in Chinese archaeology. The favoured types and sources of jade have changed over time, as has our knowledge of the stones themselves. One of the greatest problems in dealing with archaeological jades is the correct identification of the stones in order to trace their source and thereby understand the social relations underlying their patterns of procurement, pro­ duction, and consumption. This paper examines the problems of identification and sourcing of Chinese archaeological jades from a worldwide point of view, dissecting terminological problems arising from mineralogy and rock geochemistry, and expli­ citly identifying the geological constraints on the formation of nephrite and jadeite. In particular, the role of plate tectonics in determining the occurrence of jade provides an overarching perspective on where in China jade sources might occur and how nephrite might be mined and distributed, together with its associated rocks and minerals. The latter associations are equally important to this jade sourcing endeavour.

Boom or Bust in China’s Jade Trade in Myanmar?

2018

Since 2014, declining economic growth and Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign have led to decreasing demand in certain markets for jadeite-the highest valued type of jade in China. But while institutional factors may explain these short-term fluctuations, historical continuity and cultural imaginations underpinning Chinese demand suggest that the jadeite market boom in China is not quite over yet.

Cultura e industria lapidaria del jade en el Neolítico Terminal en China. Consideraciones en torno al debate sobre una "Edad del Jade", en Walburga Wiesheu y Gabriela Guzzy (coords.) El jade y otras piedras verdes. Perspectivas interdisciplinarias e interculturales.México, INAH, 2012,

2012

Discussion of the utility of the concept of Jade Age for the final Neolíthic period in China and description of the onset and characteristics of jade production and consumption in the complex theocratic chiefdom societies that prevailed in the predynastic jade cultures in North and South China.

Burmese Jade: The Inscrutable Gem

Jade and Guanxi in China

The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies

This article discusses how the gemstone jade mediates guanxi (‘personal relationships’), and how guanxi mediates jade trade in China. Outlining some affective, spiritual, moral and somatic meanings and efficacies of jade, especially as a gift, the article first discusses how jade materialities, cultural history and ontology influence human interactions with, and through, jade in contemporary China. Secondly, the article presents some more economically instrumental investments in, and exchanges of, jade and discusses why and how a national anti-corruption campaign engendered fluctuations in Chinese jade markets. Finally, the article discusses how guanxi ideally forges personal trust that facilitates transactions of jade, even though some younger jade traders consider guanxi insincere. Studies of guanxi in China’s reform era have conventionally given analytical primacy to how social relationships structure and give meaning to material exchanges. In contrast, this article argues that j...

FIFTY SHADES OF GREEN: INTERPRETING MAYA JADE PRODUCTION, CIRCULATION, CONSUMPTION, AND VALUE

Ancient Mesoamerica, 2018

This work addresses varying interpretations of the production, circulation, and consumption of jades in the Maya area from the Preclassic through the Postclassic periods (600 b.c.–a.d. 1697). Traditionally, exchange of jades has been seen as a dyadic relationship between elites (gifting and tribute). Some have argued for gradations of value in the circulation of jades, which probably circulated in both elite and commoner spheres. More recent research argues that jade blanks were commoditized because they could be standardized. In this article, we evaluate this last claim, concluding there is no evidence for standardization and commodification of jade blanks, and a dearth of jade blanks in archaeological deposits. We critique the expectation that commodities in some nonindustrial economies should be standardized, and make suggestions about what kinds of jade objects, if any, have greatest potential to become commodities in the Maya area.