Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [7]
The best way to understand the city of Dongguan is to walk it. Bank headquarters of mirrored glass tower over street-side shops selling motorcycle parts and plastic pipes and dental services. Roads are ten lanes wide, high-speed highways in place of city streets. Migrants walk along the shoulders carrying suitcases or bedding, while buses and trucks bear down from behind. Everywhere is construction and motion, jackhammers and motorcycles, drills and dust; at street level the noise is deafening. The roads are wide and well paved but there are no pedestrian lights or crosswalks. This is a city built for machines, not people.
The offices of the government bureaucracy that appear on almost every block in other Chinese cities are nowhere to be seen. Men on motorcycles accost pedestrians, each one touting a taxi ride, and all of them illegal. Counterfeit college diplomas are for sale at street corners. In Dongguan there is a fake IKEA and a fast-food chain whose name translates as “McKFC” and a ten-story building that calls itself the Haiyatt Hotel, with a marble lobby and a decidedly lax attitude toward copyright violation (“We have an ‘i’ in our name, they don’t,” explains a young woman at the front desk). The city is divided into thirty-two towns, and each one specializes in manufacturing. Chang’an produces electronic components, Dalang is famous for sweaters, and Houjie makes shoes. Samsung and Pioneer operate plants in Liaobu; Nancheng is home to the world’s largest Nokia mobile-phone factory. All the Nescafé instant coffee that is drunk in China is processed at a plant in downtown Dongguan. Factories are the bus stops and the monuments and the landmarks, and everything exists to serve them. Dongguan’s highway network, already the densest in the country, is under constant expansion in hopes of delivering goods to the world faster. Luxury hotels and golf courses have sprung up to pamper factory clients. The buyers of the world stay at the Sheraton Dongguan Hotel, which gives guests a card listing every destination they will ever need:
GUANGDONG INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION CENTER
DONGGUAN INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION CENTER
MUSEUM OF OPIUM WAR
TAI PING JETTY
WAL-MART
CARREFOUR
PARK ’N’ SHOP
HARBOUR PLAZA GOLF CLUB
HILLVIEW GOLF CLUB
LONG ISLAND GOLF CLUB
No one is sure how many people live here. According to the city government, Dongguan has 1.7 million local residents and almost seven million migrants, but few people believe these official figures, and speculation about the city’s true population is rife. Dongguan has eight million migrants. Dongguan adds one million migrants a year. Dongguan has ten million migrants, but it reports only seven million to avoid paying higher taxes. The city’s mayor might know more, but he’s not telling: “Dongguan’s population is far more than the publicly announced figure,” he told reporters at a forum in 2005. His personal estimate—“conservative,” in his words—was over ten million.
Dongguan is unfinished, a city where everything is in the process of becoming something else. A stretch of sidewalk is piled high with stone tiles, under a sign promising EUROPEAN STYLE PALACE-LEVEL OFFICE BUILDINGS. The central business district yawns with open pits. On the east side of town, a new city center is rising, which will one day have government offices, a library, a science museum, and a theater. For now, the area’s wide boulevards are empty of cars and its grassy malls perfectly still, the hedges trimmed in tidy geometries. Dongguan’s motto is “One Big Step Every Year, a New City in Five Years.”
Molding a new life is even faster. A few computer lessons can catapult a person into a different class, and a morning