The Economy of Qualities in a Cross-Border Market: Shopping Tourism as a Performative Practice

The article discusses the performativity of shopping tourism on the Russian-Chinese border using the terminology of M. Callon’s and his co-authors’ economy of qualities. The 2014 crisis has changed the parity of the ruble and the yuan, and has also changed the vector of cross-border tourism in the opposite direction. The authors show how observation of the residents of Blagoveshchensk regarding the purchases of Chinese tourists performs the perception of their social time and sends them “into the past”. They compared their everyday “here and now” knowledge with the knowledge accumulated during the operation of the cross-border local market. The usage of the language of the economy of qualities allows for the expansion of the boundaries of this concept for another type of market, that of the buyer’s market. We also ask about the dynamics of power in the wake of the assertion about the nature of market dynamics. The article consists of three main sections. The first section is a theoretical overview of the use of the concept of performativity in tourism research and the choice of the descriptive language for this empirical case. In the second section, we describe the “Chinese market” and trade practices before the 2014 crisis. The third section contains a reflection on the post-crisis changes and the processes of (re)qualification of goods and themselves. Empirical materials were gathered by the authors in the course of long-term studies in the twin-cities of Blagoveshchensk and Heikhe located on two banks of the Amur River, mainly through observation and interviews.