Factory Girls
An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.China has 130 million migrant workers--the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China's Pearl River Delta.As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life--a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
2people
2011–2017years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- People there have no way of knowing if for anybody they see progressing in life there isn't a dozen other having their life ruined, because those later dozen are invisible.
If you want to make claims, you better have evidence to back it up. Because what people experience in China is a significant increase of quality of life at all levels. Yes, the income inequality is huge. Yes, a huge amount of wealth is generated by capitalists on the backs of factory workers. That doesn't mean that the poor are worse off than they were before. Lifting tide truly lifts all boats in China. Yes, there are significant suspicions that China lies about its numbers. That doesn't change the seeing eye test that people in China are way better off than they were 10 years ago. I know a girl who moved to Shenzhen at 16 years old to join a factory. She's approaching 30 now, just finished her university degree, and has a career in advertising. She started out as an uneducated country girl. Her story is common. Those who never make it out of the factory? Fact of the matter is, their quality of life is still better than if they did something else. The book Factory Girls by Leslie Chang is an incredibly insightful look into the lives of these people.
An incompetent government turns its potential into garbage. See Argentina, Brazil, India, and others. Each of those countries could be so much farther than they are, but they shot themselves in the foot due to corruption, poor economic planning, and poor infrastructure planning. China started at the same starting line as many of them. I remember attending the Asia Pacific AmCham thingy in Beijing in 2010. The big story was how India was the future poised for becoming the big story. Here we are seven years later with India still treading water in the same place it was before due to political deadlock and corruption.
But as the saying goes, a big enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference.
As such, it's possible to verify whether or not things are working. Whether or not things will last, that's a completely different story that's yet to be told. I'll admit my own prediction is that China's problems are too big for any human institution to solve, it will likely implode. But that's neither here nor there regarding this topic if we're comparing past to present, given the complexity of their problems.
- As usual, there's always another side to the story. Why do you think these companies continue to be inundated with resumes and applicants?
A good read is Factory Girls by Leslie Chang. I went to listen to a talk she gave last year on her experience at Shenzhen. She made a comment that Shenzhen is a very tough place to live. The place is very industrial and polluted. But when she went to the hometown village of one of her friends (a factory worker) for several days during the Chinese New Year, she found herself missing Shenzhen because the conditions of Chinese countrysides were even worse.
This isn't t justify business practices of Apple, Foxconn, or other manufacturers, but it's important to remember that whether an environment is good or bad really depends on what we are benchmarking it with.
- Another great book is "Factory Girls" by Leslie T. Chang.
- I'm reading through a book right now titled Factory Girls, by Leslie T. Chang. She was the former Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. The book is a fascinating piece of work. It delves into the factories of Dongguan, which is a major factory town, perhaps the most active factory town in China (among other things, cough, cough). I have to say that this book is singlehandedly making me understand everything I didn't understand about China, since coming to live and work here a year ago. I currently live in Shenzhen, about an hour south of Dongguan. (edit: coincidentally, where much of Foxconn's operations are based)
This book explains everything. The mindset of people when they look for factory jobs. What they do to get ahead. How stereotypes and stigmas come into play in deciding the roles in society. How their background influences their future decisions. Etcetera, etcetera. All the people I see every day seriously make a lot more sense after reading this book, and I'm not even half done yet.
Highly recommended.
