Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [12]
Dongguan was different. It rose by no one’s decree; it simply grew. While Shenzhen aspired to advanced technology and innovation, Dongguan took what it could get, which meant low-tech factories from Hong Kong and Taiwan that made clothing, toys, and shoes. All they needed was cheap land and labor, as well as local officials who left them alone. What they initially built could not be called modern industry. Many of the early factories were two-or three-story houses where workers sat at desks, fifty to a room, engaged in simple tasks like sewing cloth for a stuffed animal or attaching artificial hair to a doll. Some of the factories were housed in makeshift structures of sheet metal because their owners did not want the expense of real buildings.
In the early days, there was no train service from Hong Kong. Businessmen traveled to the British colony’s border with Shenzhen, crossed on foot, and caught a taxi to their Dongguan factory on the other side, passing farms on the way. “There were no roads around here, no cars, no TVs, not even curtains,” recalled Allen Lee, a Taiwan shoe industry executive who moved to the city in 1989. “You couldn’t buy stuff like that here.” In June 1989, he bicycled forty minutes to watch the news on TV about the shooting of protesters around Tiananmen Square.
The local labor supply was soon exhausted and migrants began arriving from neighboring provinces. Lin Xue, the woman I knew who wrote for a migrant magazine, had come to Dongguan from rural Sichuan in 1990. “We came here blind,” she told me. “I would go to someone selling tickets and ask, ‘Where should I buy a ticket to?’ and we would do what they said.” Lin Xue got a factory job that paid seventy yuan a month, and her younger sister pressed plywood in a lumber factory.
In the 1990s, the city’s manufacturing shifted to electronics and computer parts. Today Dongguan makes 40 percent of the world’s magnetic heads used in personal computers and 30 percent of its disk drives. Economic growth over the past two decades has averaged more than 15 percent a year. Some things have not changed. The migrants are still arriving. Labor-intensive factories still dominate, and though their products have gotten more sophisticated, the work itself has not. There are still a great many apartment buildings where workers sit at desks engaged in simple tasks with their hands.
So Dongguan was a place with conflicting versions of its past—one a high-profile rejection of the foreign presence in China, the other stealthy embrace of it. Every Chinese schoolchild learns about the burning of opium. But from the Taiping Handbag Factory, which did not appear in any textbook, I could trace a direct line to everyone I ever met in Dongguan, from the migrants studying Microsoft Word to the self-help gurus to the Mercedes salesman who told me that the priciest S- and E-Class cars sold best in Dongguan, because “for a boss to improve his image, this is a good product.” For all of them, modern history began with the handbag factory.
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I went for months without meeting a native of Dongguan. The world of the factory, from the top managers to the assembly line, was the exclusive domain of migrants, though the top boss was sometimes from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Local residents spoke the Cantonese dialect, but the factory world functioned in the official dialect of Mandarin, because that was the only way people from different provinces could talk to one another. Migrants held the local residents in low regard: They were uneducated farmers who made a living renting out farmland to factories, and they could not survive a day in the factory’s demanding environment. “It’s mutual contempt,” my friend