Think about your knickers. Your bra, shoes, socks, running shoes, anorak, television, towels, light bulbs, computer, and, sooner rather than later, your car or its parts. If they were made here they would be far more expensive. But they’re made in China, so that’s all right then. OK, workers here lose their jobs, but that’s globalisation for you, and anyway there is still plenty of work for people willing to do it. So that China price is really worth it, right? But what if the China price includes Chinese workers living in dark Satanic conditions and hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives lost every year?
We should consider, too, the deadliest remark in Alexandra Harney’s eloquent and vibrant study, from the wife of a Chinese man dying of the lung disease endemic and often fatal for thousands of workers grinding, polishing and crushing stones for cheap export jewellery. Fifty-five per cent of China’s export goods are made of imported parts, ‘by contract manufacturers you have never heard of that produce goods carrying their customers’ brand names’. An expert on the working conditions of men like her husband, the woman said to Harney: ‘Isn’t it because you Americans have brought all your bad factories to China?’
Dead cheap is not China’s only advantage. It has an excellent infrastructure of airports, harbours and railways. For some labour-intensive goods, Harney explains,
the entire supply chain has moved to China, so that components, machinery repair shops and raw materials are clustered together within a two-hour drive of the factory. It will take time to replicate the cluster effect in other countries with lower costs than China.
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peter adler
July 12th, 2008 6:44pmThank you KMcC! I know that Jonathan Mirsky is very knowledgeable about China and I can only assume the same of Alexandra Harney. So it is a terrible pity that they don’t realise the vital truth that KMcC raises. Furthermore, while there is of course a lot of truth in their actual description of the situation on the ground today, I can still only see it as a very selective truth, tailored for a Western audience who expect to hear how terrible things are in China. I came back from China a few months ago, after five years of living there. I have visited hundreds of factories, including many factories doing ”dirty” things like fabric dying, electroplating of metal and tanning of leather. I have seen some with appalling working conditions. But although the vast majority certainly had many faults in the working environment, which I would point out, most of them were not Dickensian. I do not deny that there are Dickensian factories out there, probably at a greater proportion than what I have seen, but I deny that they are the majority. I have also visited dozens of dormitories – foreigners’ luxury compounds they ain’t, but livable, they are. I have wandered on the streets of Dongguan, the grey city between World-record City Shenzhen and Guangzhou (Canton), which can be seen as the heart of the Pearl River Delta massive light industry regins, and is famed for consisting solely of sweatshops and dormitories. The spirit is open, the girls giggle and hold each others’ hands, and the men are not so macho or aggressive.
Why do I call Shenzhen ”World-record City”? Because no other city in World History has grown from nothing to 14 million people in a period of less than 30 years. Just to illustrate KMcC’s point.
Having been a reporter for the FT, Harney should know full well that it is exceedingly difficult to measure inflation – and therefore to compare wage levels – over longer time periods. How do you measure the inflation in the price of mobile phones over the last 200 years? According to some particular econometric yardstick, the Chinese migrant laborers may have lower wages ”than the earnings of UK handloom operators during the Industrial Revolution”– but I don’t believe that the latter had the option of talking with their friends any time, anywhere – there are something like 700 million mobile phone subscribers in China today, and counting – at a rate of approximately 5 million per month. For that matter, I don’t believe those UK handloom operators had electric lighting or tarmaced roads either.
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wonderfulforhisage
July 10th, 2008 8:29pmAnd what if China's leaders are playing a long game.
Get the West thoroughly dependent on cheap Chinese imports by keeping the exchange rate ludicrously low and ten, twenty, thirty years on...the World is Their Oyster.
Game Set and Match to those that understand dynasty.
Why else would the Chinese Government be subsidising our under class.
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KMcC
July 10th, 2008 11:08amI haven't read this book, but I've read enough about the subject of sweatshops, industrialisation and the economics of growth and development to offer a few thoughts.
First, sweatshops are indeed not nice places to work, but poor people in poor countries make the rational choice to work in them because a job in a sweatshop sewing clothes or making toys is better than the alternatives. These alternatives may be unpaid labour in subsistence agriculture; prostitution; picking over rubbish heaps. You get the picture. Sweatshops not nice; alternatives worse.
Second, I'd suggest that the process of industrialisation takes many decades less than it used to. It took Britain grim generations to move from sweatshops and early industrial activity to a service-based economy; other nations, with much more capital to utilise and more experience of earlier successes and failures to examine, will do it in less. Japan and S Korea and Taiwan all made the gruelling transition in less time than Britain and the US and Western Europe did. I expect China will do it in even less time.
Finally, it would be wrong not to buy goods made by poor people because you don't like the way they were produced. Without people willing to purchase said goods, those who manufacture them will find their progress out of poverty to take much longer.
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