Riding the Global Checkout: Daigou, Gendered Labour, and the Three Mechanisms of Infrastructural Illegality

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