Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
It took Leslie T. Chang two years to nail down the story she was after. Hoping to get an insider鈥檚 look at the lives of China鈥檚 more than 100 million migrant workers, Chang followed two young women 鈥� Chunming and Min, both assembly-line workers 鈥� from one factory to another as they changed jobs numerous times.
Then she returned with them to their home villages to better understand the radical break they had made with Chinese family traditions.
In telling us their stories, Chang pulls off a real coup.
In recent years, foreign correspondents have reported on the exploitation of migrant workers. Nearly everyone knows that China鈥檚 rapid economic growth depends on cheap labor often poorly trained and sorely uneducated.
Workers have left villages that could offer no jobs and flooded into China鈥檚 cities, where they face discrimination. City people refer to them contemptuously as liudong renkou, a 鈥渇loating population,鈥� or, as Chang puts it, an 鈥渦ndifferentiated mass.鈥�
But in Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, Chang, a former Beijing correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, does more than describe harsh factory conditions. She writes about the way the workers themselves see migration, bringing us views that are rarely heard.
鈥淔actory Girls鈥� is highly readable and even amusing in many places, despite the seriousness of the subject. In the pages of this book, these factory girls come to life.
Chang focuses her story on factories in Dongguan, a south China city, which has drawn as many as 7 million to 10 million young and unskilled migrants. No one seems to know the real number. But they are estimated to be 70 percent female.
The young women that Chang gets to know disdain the past. They return to their villages at Chinese New Year, but never go back to stay as they might have done a decade ago.
Their everyday lives might be grim, but through struggle they develop a bracing individualism. Their parents don鈥檛 know what to make of them.
Min, a village girl who gets her first job in 2003 in an electronics factory at age 16 (the legal age is 18), finds herself working 13 hours a day for the equivalent of $50 to $100 a month. Talking on the job is forbidden and can draw a fine. Bathroom breaks require a sign-up list.
鈥淕et hurt, sick, or pregnant, and you鈥檙e on your own,鈥� writes Chang. 鈥淟ocal governments have little incentive to protect workers; their job is to keep factory owners happy, which will bring in more investment and tax revenue.鈥�
But Min doesn鈥檛 suffer in silence. Instead, she moves from job to job, improving her skills along the way.
She speaks sharply to older relatives and sometimes goes against her mother鈥檚 wishes but also gives cash to needy elders. She and other young migrants play a dominant role in village holidays, because money talks.
Wu Chunming, Chang鈥檚 other main contact, 鈥渟tarted out in a toy factory, was almost tricked into a brothel, talked her way into management, and struck it rich selling Tibetan medicine and funeral plots.鈥�
She then worked for a government-funded newspaper that practices 鈥渏ournalism as extortion.鈥� Chinese companies often pay journalists for positive publicity or, equally important, to avoid getting negative press.
Chunming later sets up a wholesale building-materials business with her first boyfriend.
Within six months, she loses everything and ends up selling paint for a Swedish-owned company.
A boomtown 鈥榦ut of control鈥�
When I visited Dongguan as a correspondent for The Washington Post two decades ago, I found a boomtown unconcerned about directives from Beijing. In Beijing鈥檚 view, much of south China was 鈥渙ut of control.鈥�
Chang found in Dongguan a city that has undergone rapid change in the past decade or two.
Although she says she 鈥渃ame to like Dongguan, which seemed a perverse expression of China at its most extreme,鈥� she also notes that the city suffers from rampant materialism, corruption, pollution, and prostitution, among other woes.
In Dongguan, Chang discovered, job mobility is high. Almost all the senior factory people she met had started on the assembly line.
In typical Dongguan fashion, through boom and bust, Min and Chumming switch jobs, confront bosses, and do whatever it takes to get ahead. They also find time for romance, searching for partners through online chat clubs.
In 鈥淔actory Girls,鈥� Chang also introduces us to southern Chinese con artists, charlatans, and flim-flam men, who sell some factory girls on their schemes but never manage to dominate many of them for long. One of these characters, a Mr. Wu, runs an assembly-line English training program that has no teachers. Beginning students simply sit at machines while columns of English words rotate past.
The author鈥檚 family as a story of its own
Chang also weaves in her own family history, which dramatizes the contrast between Chinese caught in the past and those who, like the factory girls, forget the past and create new lives.
But at times, Chang鈥檚 own history, fascinating as it is, distracts from the other stories she tells here. Her own material, if further developed, would perhaps make a fine book on its own.
Dan Southerland, executive editor of Radio Free Asia, is a former Monitor correspondent and former Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post.
