Title: Factory Girls Pdf From Village to City in a Changing 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. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.
A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.
Most informative book on this subject I've read. I have had the good fortune to meet and work with some Chinese women who are recent émigrés to the U.S. and have found them to be extraordinarily resourceful and independent. I purchased some books in order to better understand a culture that produces young people with such determination. This is not a book about historical figures or great deeds, nor is it an academic book dealing with politics or economic theory. Instead it is a third person journal which traces the lives of two particular young women who have made the decision to leave their old village life behind and travel to the city in search of employment and a new way of life. Their stories are told with compassion but unwavering objectivity. What they find and what happens to them along the way is the story of millions of young Chinese girls from rural families who make the same decision. Each one of them is different but most are driven by the shared goal of independence and a desire to better themselves and improve the lives of the family members they leave behind. They all face hardships which must be overcome in order to pursue their dream. They do this in a uniquely Chinese way: blending a strong sense of obligation to family and their traditional village values with a new faster paced urban way of life and an emerging sense of autonomy. They are pursuing an individual destiny despite being born into a stratified social order where futures are largely determined by circumstances of birth. The interplay between the two sometimes opposing and vastly different world views is what this book is really about. I found it informative, compelling and even inspiring at times This is not a book about making tennis shoesRevealing window into Chinese society First things first. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but when certain ignorant Amazon customer reviewers make frivolous off-the-cuff comments like the book is "boring" or "the chapters don't flow easily," when that is decidedly not the case, I must state right off that this marvelous and well-written book is one of the best introductions to Chinese society I have read.Late in the book there is a disturbing account of a small-scale business operation in an apartment in Dongguan, Guangdong Province. The male running it keeps his female underlings working all day and forbids to them to leave the apartment except for a few hours once a week; they sleep in a cramped dormitory-style bedroom. Quiz: this operation is A) a brothel, B) a sweatshop, C) a religious cult, D) none of the above. D is correct: it's a private English language school for adults, mainly female factory workers between jobs who want to gain English credentials. Their teacher's notion of language learning is, like so much in China, quantitative-based and modeled on the factory assembly line: a machine he invented rapidly rotate words which the students must memorize as they flash by. This episode in Leslie Chang's book is representative in presenting two aspects of life in China for the hundreds of millions of migrant workers trying to achieve career stability or success in the city. On the one hand, there is the optimistic assessment, emphasized by Chang throughout the book, namely the freedom migrants now have to leave the village and go where opportunity beckons, with increasing numbers of success stories, primarily for female migrants, who often paradoxically enjoy greater freedom than males due to the obligations of male migrants to return to the village and care for their family. As Chang recounts with the stories of two migrants she befriended and followed for two years, Min and Chunming, the choices young Chinese women from the countryside now have at their disposal for upward mobility can be compared to the freedom and allure of worldwide travel young people from the developed world enjoy.On the other hand, there is a powerful counterforce holding many Chinese back from freedom and autonomy: the imposing psychological control of group conformity. As a longtime American resident in China, I see this all the time in numerous guises among all social strata, not just migrants (and I write about this in my website attached to my Amazon profile). Although it is true that working conditions in factories have been improving over the past few years as workers learn about their rights and bargaining power through better communication (the internet) as well as negative publicity about labor exploitation at Foxconn, this still largely applies to skilled factory workers. For countless other workers in the service industry (restaurants, shop workers, the sex industry), working conditions remain awful - 12-14 hour days, 1-2 days off per month, minimum wage. Educated white-collar workers, for their part, experience a different kind of exploitation, hardly less grim: typically just as long working hours (though varying considerably from company to company) or 24-hour cellphone monitoring when off work, with elaborate penalty systems for failure to respond immediately to cellphone summons or other minor infractions (one highly educated female I know who worked as a journalist for a national newspaper quit because they were docking too much of her pay each month for largely unspecified penalties).So returning to the aforementioned English training school, where Chang would describe the conditions experienced by these women as a matter of personal freedom and choice, we also recoil at the psychological coercion involved, which prevents them from rebelling, protesting and leaving. To be sure, this school is a bizarre exception, and most English schools in China, even unaccredited ones, are run like normal schools, with students present only during class hours. But another book needs to be written that deals with the dark side of China's economic success, even in these upwardly mobile times. It's good to have Chang's upbeat account, but for every migrant who achieves success like Min, how many millions of Chinese (including the educated class) remain locked and paralyzed in their internal cages of fear and anger, quietly spending their entire waking hours making superiors rich while they receive a pittance (not to mention the horrifying ongoing problem of companies that don't pay their workers at all, even an entire year's promised wages, folding up operations just before the Spring Festival and disappearing). After years of teaching in Chinese universities, I could see the mental slavery all around me on university campuses, which unlike universities almost anywhere in the world, are completely void of any signs of student protests. Largely enabling and ensuring China's economic expansion, in short, is group coercion and internalized fear on a scale few other societies know.The opening of a new world.. Excellent reading! The author clearly portrays life in modern China for young people, especially young women. Huge numbers of them move to the cities for jobs from the rural areas to earn money for their families. The jobs at the factories are miserable, mind-numbing tasks with monstrous supervisors,high expectations, long hours and very little safety provisions for these 'country girls'. Most factories are closed cities, the women must sleep in factory dormitories and eat factory kitchen food. They are allowed one bright shining moment on Sundays when they can go out, meet friends, buy clothing and enjoy having money in their pockets.They can even slip on a new persona, a new name and the game is to keep switching up to better and better jobs. If you have ever wondered how your 'Made in China' products are made, this book will entertain, and educate you.Parts of it are bleak, but only in revealing the truth. The author tries to follow several 'girls'and learn their stories while also portraying huge societal change, in that a poor man's daughter is no longer seen as a burden or liability when the family cannot provide a dowry or find a husband for her. A daughter may even achieve a status close to that of a son! The young women feel that their status is changing and they resist the old ways of getting married and having children. Some of them can say 'I want to work,' or they may send money home but never return to their provincial villages after seeing the life in the big city. For most of her time in China the author passes as Chinese and she has the unique ability to see the issues from many different perspectives.
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