Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [39]
A girl might signal her interest in a young man by offering to pay his mobile-phone bill. Couples announced their allegiance with a shared phone, though relationships sometimes broke up when one person secretly read text messages intended for another. The migrants I knew spent a great deal of time managing their phones—changing numbers constantly to take advantage of cheaper calling plans, and switching phone cards when crossing to another city to save on roaming fees. That was the short-term mentality of Dongguan: Save a few pennies, even if it meant losing touch with some people for good.
Migrant workers are a major reason the Chinese mobile-phone market is the world’s largest, yet the industry has mixed feelings about them. Migrants were behind the market’s poor economics, one friend in the telecommunications industry told me; they supposedly drove down prices because they were willing to pay for only the cheapest services. Popular culture also felt their negative impact: The quality of Chinese pop music had deteriorated in recent years, I was also told, because migrants chose the least sophisticated songs for the ring tones of their phones.
Hundreds of Dongguan factories made parts for mobile phones, and every third retailer in the city seemed to be a mobile-phone store. The city also did a thriving trade in stolen phones. Certain districts were known for a high incidence of phone theft; one tactic was to speed down a sidewalk on a motorcycle and rip a phone from a pedestrian’s ear, mid-sentence. The stolen phones might be fitted with new covers and then sold as new. Manufactured, sold, stolen, repackaged, and resold, the mobile phone was like an endlessly renewable resource at the heart of the Dongguan economy.
It was also Min’s link to the city. With the theft of her phone, the friendships of a year and a half vanished as if they had never been. She was alone again.
5 Factory Girls
It takes two hundred pairs of hands to make a running shoe. Everything begins with a person called a cutter, who stamps a sheet of mesh fabric into curvy irregular pieces, like a child’s picture puzzle. Stitchers are next. They sew the pieces together into the shoe upper, attaching other things—a plastic logo, shoelace eyelets—as they go. After that, sole-workers use infrared ovens to heat pieces of the sole and glue them together. Assemblers—typically men, as the work requires greater strength—stretch the upper over a plastic mold, or last, shaped like a human foot. They lace the upper tightly, brush glue on the sole, and press the upper and the sole together. A machine applies ninety pounds of pressure to each shoe. Finishers remove the lasts, check each shoe for flaws, and place matched pairs in cardboard boxes. The boxes are put in crates, ten boxes to a crate, and shipped to the world within three days. Every shoe has a label on its tongue: MADE IN CHINA.
If you wear athletic shoes, chances are you have worn a pair that was made at the Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan. The Taiwanese-owned factory is the biggest manufacturer for Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, along with smaller brands like Puma and Asics, all of whom stopped making shoes years ago and farmed out production to factories that could do it more cheaply. Yue Yuen’s secret is vertical integration: It controls every step of the manufacturing process—from initial design to making glues, soles, molds, and lasts to cutting, stitching, and assembling