Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace [Paperback]

Pun Ngai (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1932643001 | ISBN-13: 978-1932643008 | Publication Date: April 5, 2005 | Edition: Revised

As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. 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, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family.

Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Made in China is a passionate, engaged ethnography. Pun Ngai provides us with a searing critique of how global capital, with the collusion of the Chinese state, is turning China into the sweatshop of the world. Her ethnography is a moving and angry description of the lives of young migrant women, who are the guts of this process. Through Pun’s ethnographic eye, these women come alive as active subjects who confront the pain and trauma of the social violence inflicted on them in a complex poetics of transgression.”—Lisa Rofel, author of Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism

“Right now, anything that happens in China’s economy affects all of us. Pun Ngai’s book should be required reading. It is jam-packed with richly drawn and provocative insights mined from her fieldwork as a ‘factory girl’ in the midst of South China’s migrant workers.”— Andrew Ross, author of Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor

About the Author

Pun Ngai is Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is coeditor of Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation, and the Global City and the founder and chair of the Chinese Working Women Network, a grassroots organization of migrant women factory workers in China.

For more information regarding the Chinese Working Women Network, please click here.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books; Revised edition (April 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932643001
• ISBN-13: 978-1932643008
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #253,635 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Treat workers as human beings for better results, October 29, 2006

By 

Katie Larsen "TripleBottomLine" (China) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Paperback)

Anyone working on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), with NGOs, or otherwise on development issues in China and most developing countries should read this book. I only wish Pung Nai had a shorter version where she cut out all the intellectual references to supposed `great thinkers' of the past century and actually kept it to its GEMS, which are her own insights into the true life realities for women factory workers.
This book came from Pung Nais PhD as she tells us. This is unfortunate as it makes what is otherwise fantastic material hard to read and slow. But the well written sections tell us stories of individual workers odysseys to Shenzhen from far away provinces, and explain social issues in China, and factory language providing insights few other writers have provided.

To those working on improving factory conditions, there are a lot of great tips here about what Not to do. Pung Nai talks about worker slowdowns due to frustration at dogmatic authoritarian pressure to work faster, or have music turned off, etc, and of workers being less efficient and regularly fainting from working excessive overtime. Reading this book gives those of us working to encourage factory managers to give their workers more reasonable hours and wages, more force in our argument that doing so will improve productivity and quality.

Regardless, Pung Nai points out the terrible toll on peoples lives of excessive overtime, particularly the physical and psychological impacts on young women, who are not only burdened by the work pressure, but also familial pressures back home to marry and have sons. It helps us understand the value of programmes such as Nikes high school graduation programme for factory workers in Asia, to give workers a chance to gain self respect and pride in an environment in which the very essence of who they are, country girls, is looked down upon.

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a good book to understand Chinese rural migrant workers' condition, October 15, 2011

By 

Yue Ray - See all my reviews

This review is from: Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Paperback)

Pun takes a Foucaultidan approach in examining the rural women's condition in China now. It is insightful to depict the ethnography of these woman workers' hard work and lives in factories, dorms and even back to their rural hometowns. To me, the factory discipline is vivid and clear for understanding how different/desperate these woman workers' lives are from mine in urban China.

I lived in the Pearl River Delta, China around 10 years. Pun's interpretation echoing in my mind matches my experience in contacting Chinese rural migrant workers in the PRD.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read..., August 10, 2011

By 

AZM - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Paperback)

This was a good memoir to read. I found it slow at times and choppy because the author moves back and forth from past to present constantly and then the book suddenly ends. There is no sharing of her actual transition from her Amish life into her "English" life, nor any details of how she actually met her husband. The end was far too sudden. Further, the information contained in the very back of the book about Amish factsregarding naming and so forth I found interesting and I was disappointed that they were pushed to the last few pages of the book when I felt they would have been best incorporated into the memoir throughout the book in order to help the reader get a better understanding of Amish tradition. Overall, a good read though and honestly writen from the heart. I would recommend this book.