The Chinese Industrial Revolution Right Before our Eyes
Steven HorwitzThe Portland, OR paper has an absolutely fantastic article on Chinese "sweatshop" workers who have now earned enough to own houses (paying cash!) and multi-unit apartment buildings, as well as becoming small business owners and generally aspiring to bigger and better things for them and their children. This is particularly true of young women.What's striking about the piece is that almost everything that's happening there is an instant replay of what the West went through 150 or 200 years ago, right down to the female-dominated mill towns of the northeastern US. One snippet:Chu Zhiling, a young woman at Beijing Topnew garment factory, sends 80
percent of her income home to Inner Mongolia -- a region with 19 percent
economic growth last year, the highest in China. "I'd like to
open a shop, like my friend who has a boutique selling coats," Chu said.
"Now that I've seen the world, I have so many more choices than my
parents had." U.S. journalist Leslie Chang followed young
Chinese assembly-line workers for her recently published book, "Factory
Girls." Chang says money sent home, and migrants moving back, are
changing rural China. Line workers, she says, can earn several
times the average $200 annual income of a farm family. "They're
sleeping 12 in a dorm, and it looks like a pretty crappy life," Chang
said. "But you don't hear workers say, 'Oh, I have no hope, I'm a
slave.' They say, 'I want to save some money. My dream is to be Bill
Gates or to own a restaurant.'" Chang views sweatshop critics as
condescending. She notes that the 19th-century U.S. industrial economy
developed in a similar way, as Vermont and New Hampshire farm girls
migrated to work in Massachusetts textile plants, sending savings home.
She says savvy Chinese workers, not preachy activists, are securing
better conditions and wages in China's fast-developing economy. There's no doubt that the very short run effects of industrialization are not pleasant, but the medium and long-run ones are strongly positive, both in terms of the narrowly economic benefits and the ways in which urbanization and wealth and the cultural mingling it brings open up the world to young people, especially young women. As they say, read the whole thing.