Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women

Yuk-ling, age forty-three, assembles high-end audio systems in a brightly lit, air-conditioned shop floor in a modern factory building in Hong Kong. The pay that she brings home, about US $600, is low by local standards, but it supplements the family income and helps pay the mortgage subscribed under a government sponsored home-ownership program. The flexible hours allow her to bring her two daughters to day care and kindergarten, and the relaxed atmosphere of the factory gives much autonomy to line female workers, who more or less control the shop. These "matron workers" have been in the same factory for decades, their skills allow them to produce small batches of complex products with miniaturized features, but the lack of promotion prospects and the threat of plant closure hang over their future. Chi-ying is a "dagongmei", a twenty-two-year-old working girl from the countryside, lured to Shenzhen by the city lights and the prospects for a better life. She works eleven hours a day, sometimes more, six days a week, for about US $35 a month. She wears a uniform and has to follow strict rules, enforced by line leaders and supervisors who only promote their own locals. She needs a "leave seat permit" to go to the bathroom and gets fined whenever she breaks a regulation. In the factory dormitory, she shares a shower with about fifty coworkers from the same Hubei province. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, she knows that she won't stay in Shenzhen indefinitely. She has plans for her future: accumulate a dowry, marry on her own terms, and perhaps open a small shop. The two factories are owned by the same foreign corporation, they are located a few miles away across the northern border of Hong Kong, they produce similar products, and yet they could not offer more dissimilar worlds of labor. Whereas the women in Hong Kong participate in a management system characterized by "familial hegemony", the young women in Guangdong find an internal system of power based on regional politics and kin connections, or "localistic despotism". This fascinating comparative ethnography can be read at three different levels. The first is a rich description of the working lives and factory cultures of these women, whose years of hard toil lay behind the spectacular economic transformation that has come to be called the South China miracle. More theoretically inclined readers will find a solid social science apparatus, in which the author mobilizes both feminist scholarship and Marxist labor studies before offering her own perspective on gender, class and localism. On a third level, it is also possible to read this study as a personal journey of a young female PhD student grown up in Hong Kong and trained at UC Berkeley, who negociates access to fieldwork and shares the experiences of shop floor women by working side by side w