Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [11]
Many things I had read about China’s migrants were not true. They no longer lived in fear of being picked up by the police; instead, the authorities just ignored them. Discrimination from local residents was not really an issue, because migrants almost never encountered locals. And I was surprised to learn that job mobility was high. Almost all the senior people I met in factories had started on the assembly line. The young women I knew did not appear destined to return to the farm because they had never farmed before. They often did not know how much land their family had or when the planting season began. My assumptions had come from studies of Chinese migrant workers done in the mid-1990s; almost a decade later, this world had utterly changed, but things were happening too quickly to be written down.
I came to like Dongguan, which seemed a perverse expression of China at its most extreme. Materialism, environmental ruin, corruption, traffic, pollution, noise, prostitution, bad driving, short-term thinking, stress, striving, and chaos: If you could make it here, you’d make it anywhere. I tried to fit in as much as I could. I ate twenty-five-cent bowls of noodles for lunch and took buses everywhere. I dressed, in jeans and sandals, more plainly than many migrant girls who wore embroidered shirts and high heels when they went out. I was invisible in Dongguan, and I liked that too. In other places in China, a person staring at strangers and writing things in a notebook might attract attention; here, people were too focused on their own affairs to notice me. Only once did someone interfere: I was in the talent market, copying down instructions from a sign on the wall. A guard asked me what I was doing. I told him I was practicing my English, and he left me alone.
Dongguan is invisible to the outside world. Most of my friends in Beijing had passed through the city but all they remembered—with a shudder—were the endless factories and the prostitutes. I had stumbled on this secret world, one that I shared with seven million, or eight million, or maybe ten million other people. Living in Dongguan was like arriving in it for the first time, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, the scenery changing too fast to keep track of it. Dongguan was a place without memory.
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Dongguan was also a city of contradictions, because modern Chinese history had begun here. During the nineteenth century, British smuggling of opium into China devastated the country and drained the treasury. In the summer of 1839, a Qing Dynasty imperial commissioner named Lin Zexu ordered the public incineration of twenty thousand cases of opium in the harbor at Humen, a town in Dongguan. That act set the two nations on course for the First Opium War, which was fought in Guangdong Province and ended quickly when British warships overwhelmed Chinese forces. The Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong to Britain, forced open Chinese ports to international trade, and gave foreign nations unprecedented commercial and legal privileges within China. In the history that is taught in Chinese classrooms, the burning of opium in Humen ignited the modern era: the subjugation to foreign powers, followed by the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, revolution, war, and the Communist victory in 1949.
But there was another history of this place. In the autumn of 1978, the Taiping Handbag Factory of Hong Kong opened the first foreign factory in Dongguan. Income in its first year of operation was one million Hong Kong dollars. The factory processed materials from Hong Kong into finished goods, which were shipped back to Hong Kong to be sold to the world. It established the model for thousands of factories to follow. Over the next two years, China set up four “special economic zones