Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China: Leslie T Chang: Review

Leslie T Chang is a Wall Street Journal correspondent who has spent a decade living in China including in Dongguan, a huge metropolis just North of Shenzen, a city that has grown from nothing in a few years like many others in the special economic zones of China’s Southern coast.

What makes Chang different from the average hack is that she actually sought out the new working class, the young migrant women, the first generation proletarians straight from the fields. These are the people who staff the factories that have driven China’s burgeoning export growth over the last twenty years. And even better she is actually interested in their lives and does not either patronise or judge them. Quite the opposite she is inspired by their personal drive and determination to seize the opportunities open to them for the first time ever.

But that is not to say she is a socialist. Far from it. Chang is part of the old time exiled Chinese bourgeoisie who fled, first to Taiwan and then to the USA, after the Maoist acquisition of power in the late 1940s. Her grandfather was a leading KMT official who was probably murdered by the Communists in the civil war.

What really leaps from the page is the social revolution in the lives of the millions of women factory workers who have escaped, for the first time in thousands of years, the drudgery and oppression of rural life.

Crammed in dorms with a load of strangers, working up to 11 hours a day, six days a week, subject to the capricious rules of the factory bosses, who think nothing of discriminating on the grounds of class, region, language, height or hair colour, the lives of these former farmers daughters could not be more different to the stultifying routine, enforced closeness and grinding poverty of their extended families back on the farm.

Monthly wages of around Yuan 600-1,000 (£50-£90) represent a fortune compared with the annual combined income of about £145, earned by the parents of one small peasant family. As these young women find their feet, they constantly move between factories, searching for opportunities and advantage – higher wages, a less grumpy boss, nicer men, their female friends or just better food or an office job. The ceaseless growth of employment provided these women with the best weapon against class oppression.

Marx remarked that the strength of any ruling class rests on its ability to absorb the most dynamic and vital elements of the oppressed, and China’s constant exponential growth defines their lives. The opportunities it provides for individual advancement defines the characters who Chang studies in depth. Chang follows Chunming, a woman who manages to rise from the shop floor to become a sales woman in a pyramid scheme, before falling again with its collapse. Then she starts her own business before ditching that for something else. Life never satisfies.

Then there is Min who comes from the village to work in a factory, and then another, and then another. Chang describes the disaster of having her mobile stolen and in the process losing contact with all of her friends of the previous two years, before landing the office job, that gives her a foot into the commissioning and the backhanders that go along with the job. The second daughter of a poor farmer, Min becomes the head of the family. Respect, tradition, 2,000 years of habit and custom turned upside down in five years.

Unfortunately, as the book goes on Chang’s natural affinity for the exceptional migrants, the women who actually make it out of the factory and into the new middle and ruling classes becomes her focus, something which she acknowledges as a potential problem.

Combined with Chang’s search for her own family roots, this means that her tale loses focus and, while always remaining interesting and revealing of the view of her particular class, becomes less and less about the factory girls who form the nominal subject of her story.

Nonetheless, Factory Girls provides a real insight into the growth of China today and the new multi-million strong working class that is building its economic power.

Mon 08, March 2010 @ 17:02