ARcubE - Advanced Research on Chinese Underground Banking in Europe
Published October 31, 2026 | Version v2
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Riding the Global Checkout: Daigou, Gendered Labour, and the Three Mechanisms of Infrastructural Illegality

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Contemporary illegality increasingly embeds within infrastructures of trade, platforms, and mobility rather than operating in separate underworlds. This article develops a grey criminology of infrastructural illegality through daigou—a transnational, network-based surrogate shopping practice connecting Chinese consumers with overseas buyers. Drawing on ethnographic and socio-legal studies from Denmark, the Russia-China border, Hong Kong, and Australia, we identify three mechanisms: parasitism (riding tourism, logistics, and payment systems), normative greyness (relational morality and non-victim narratives), and platform co-production (how WeChat and e-commerce platforms shape grey markets). We further argue that gendered, feminised labour—students, mothers, and carers—forms the human substrate of these grey economies. The case refines grey criminology by specifying how para-crime operates through designed affordances rather than loopholes.

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