Factory Girls

I recently finished the book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang. Chang is an American who spent quite some time living in Shenzhen area in China, following the lives of several young Chinese women who came from rural areas and migrated to Southern China to work in the factories. It was especially meaningful to me because it is focused on the district right next to Hong Kong where thousands of factories are set up by companies from all over the world. This is where the factories moved when the left Hong Kong for the cheap labor of China. It is where virtually everything we use in the U.S. is manufactured. And it is in the news every day here for a variety of reasons.

In following the lives of several women over time, Chang depicts the challenge of thousands of young people living together in factory dormitories, cut off from relations in a culture that is very group oriented. Some of the migrants develop a cultural value of individualism, saying they can only depend on themselves, and don't tell parents what they are doing as they move from factory to factory, or how much they earn. They experience a move to the modern age overnight. The modern invention of the cell phone allows them to hide their mobility. In several instances, these migrants become subject to fly-by-night "self-improvement" opportunities that range from pyramid schemes that are supposed to make them rich, to learning English by machine. Disconnected from their social system, few rules exist and so they make up experience and reinvent themselves regularly to survive and move ahead. At the same time, pressures come from home to marry a local boy and send money home. In tracing the changes in one young woman's life, Chang illustrates how the money earned created an ability to be independent--to chose not to come home to live--and also changed the power structure of relationships within the family with the young and female having money and with it, power, or the ability to resist demands put on by the family structure. In the meantime, they remain disconnected from any other strong social network. Relationships come and go.

At the same time I was reading this book, I also was reading newspaper accounts of suicides in a major factory in Shenzhen. The factory, Foxconn, makes parts for Apple, Dell, HP and Sony, for example, but is Taiwanese owned. In Shenzhen they have over 400,000 workers in two plants and employ over 900,000 in China. Imagine that--almost a half million young people working in two plants!

Foxconn has experienced 13 suicide attempts since January, resulting in ten deaths. Most have involved jumping off of roofs or out of windows--all involve young people who have come to work in the factory. While this gets a great deal of press, I don't know if this is actually a high rate or not given the numbers, age, and dislocation of the workers. Such plants are all-contained with housing, stores, etc. The recent newspaper article claimed that Foxconn frequently violated the overtime guidelines in Apple's code. It appears that the limit is supposed to be 60 hour, 6 day weeks. Foxconn has the lowest costs of all competitors.

All of this reinforces my sense of the instability of China. There is great upheaval there at all levels. With this upheaval is increased social anomie and disconnectedness. In addition, despair comes from a tremendous desire to move up, but frustration at lack of meaningful opportunity. And no rule of law. It seems like a fragile society, or perhaps a fragile political system. And you can't measure development by what you see because of lack of accountability. For example, universities get money to build campuses and never pay it back.

As a colleague of mine said--a better measure of what is going on than GDP is the number of university graduates who cannot find work.