Jade Rush

This dissertation examines what happens when jadeite (also known as feicui or Burmese jade) enters livestreaming (zhibo). It explores how the jadeite trade, an age-old cross-border industry in which stones are mainly sourced from northern Myanmar and whose end consumers are predominantly Chinese, has transitioned from traditional bazaar markets to livestreaming platforms. Rather than a linear shift from offline to online, this transition has produced a mosaic of parallel markets that overlap and intertwine, forming an increasingly hybrid and entangled ecosystem. In this context, the research revolves around two questions: why has livestreaming become a central commercial practice in China’s platform economy, and why does jadeite, as a singular, materially uncertain, and trust-demanding commodity, lend itself so readily to livestreaming commerce compared to other gemstones. More broadly, the dissertation asks how trust is built in uncertainty-saturated, high-risk markets when exchange is mediated through screens, how the materiality of a highly physical commodity is transformed on digital platforms, and how platformization reshapes inequality in borderland economies in the global South. The study is grounded in multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2021, primarily in the jadeite markets of Ruili (Yunnan, China), Sihui (Guangdong, China), and Mandalay (Myanmar), along with extensive digital observation of livestreaming platforms between 2019 and 2024. By looking at the livestreaming jadeite trade from both its “backstage” (the physical sites where livestreaming is organized and filmed) and its “front stage” (the phone screen), the research reveals a complex ensemble of human and non-human actors, including jadeite itself, traders, consumers, livestreamers (zhubo), middlemen, Burmese and Chinese vendors, platform operators, and the platforms and marketplaces through which they operate. Conceptually, the dissertation foregrounds both jadeite’s agentive materiality and mistrust as a pervasive sociality. In line with new materialist thought, it takes materiality as a central analytical lens, showing how jadeite’s physical and visual qualities are staged and contested on-screen, and how these qualities shape authenticity, valuation, platformization, market configuration, and relations of trust and mistrust among traders, viewers, and platforms. Rather than a mere absence of trust or a sign of failure, mistrust appears as a necessary stance in the exchange of complex commodities like jadeite, a parallel orientation that equally structures social interaction and economic exchange. As online trust is mediated by various intermediaries, the study also interrogates different trust devices to understand what turns viewers into buyers. At the same time, the dissertation shows how the platformization of jadeite produces a collision between Myanmar’s fragile resource frontier and China’s livestreaming boom. While livestreaming opens new opportunities for Chinese new retailers and reshapes marketplaces in Guangdong and Yunnan, it simultaneously further marginalizes many Burmese traders, who are excluded from Chinese platforms by structural barriers in digital payment systems, logistics infrastructure, and border politics. This collision shows how digital economies can reproduce and even deepen existing asymmetries in cross-border commerce. Overall, the dissertation offers a bottom-up ethnographic account of this trade transition, showing how individuals, not only institutions, adapt to the logics of the platform economy and how jadeite’s particular materiality shapes trading practices and relations of trust. The livestreaming jadeite trade unsettles binaries of online and offline, trust and mistrust, and human and non-human, and challenges capitalist logics of economic valuation and anthropocentric assumptions by highlighting the situated interactions and practices through which value is produced. In doing so, it shows that the livestreaming jadeite trade is not merely a regional story about Myanmar and China, but also a revealing site for thinking about how materiality, mistrust, and digital infrastructures intersect in contemporary forms of commerce.