Wages are very low. Chinese workers average $0.57 per-hour, 3 per cent of the average US manufacturing wage. These wages are lower, Harney says, than the earnings of UK handloom operators during the Industrial Revolution. As she writes, in her vivid way, the young women in Canton who work and live in sub-sub-standard conditions, or face the prospect of prostitution, have ‘taken up the baton in the relay race that began in 18th-century Britain with the Industrial Revolution. They were the most affordable and productive workers the world had found.’

Harney spent hours with 12 of these spunky teenagers:

There was no kitchen in room 817, no air- conditioner or heater, no dressers. Just a rusty fan and a cracked vinyl chair next to a broken mirror in the corner of the room. Their modest wardrobes took up only half a foot at the end of each bed — shirts and jeans hung from every frame. Their shoes and worldly possessions fit under their beds.

These conditions make one chuckle mordantly at recent assurances in The Times by well-known UK manufacturers that overseas workers making goods for sale here are paid the minimum wage — in China $0.57 cents per hour. They don’t mention health insurance, which few Chinese workers have, or pensions, which are almost unknown.

Indeed, the whole matter of monitoring, of which these UK household names boast, is explored minutely by Harney. Poisonous and counterfeit goods, bad enough, are not the biggest scandals. It is the diseases of China’s factory hands that might make even Scrooge wince. Owners lie, monitors skimp, ‘shadow factories’ manufacture in conditions that Wal-Mart never sees. Only six of China’s largest cities meet national standards for pure drinking water. Four of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, burning coal from the world’s most dangerous mines, are Chinese. One third of the entire population breathes pollution, from which 400,000 people die every year and the annual bill for water and air pollution is $54 billion.

And as Harney observes, ‘What happens in China doesn’t stay in China.’ Much Chinese pollution floats across to the US, along with carbon monoxide, ozone and mercury. So does the apocalyptic cargo of disease, poverty, horrible working practices and other scandals carried to our shores by those cheap goods that Marks and Spencer, Gap and H&M claim are so morally produced. The ghastly point is that Chinese workers work, live and die in conditions that Charles Dickens could not have described better than Alexandra Harney has.

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