Leslie. T. Chang From Village to city in a Changing China

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Worker Exploitation and Transformation of Chinese Society in Factor Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang
Factor Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang is a story about China’s industrial and economic revolution, and its impact on the lives of the working class and their families. Chang explores the day-to-day life experiences of female factory workers who leave their rural villages for better economic opportunities in the cities. These women, most of them under 30 years, work in poor conditions for little pay, have no time for fulfilling relationships, and have lost connection with their Chinese traditional values. Regardless, they are willing to hang on because they want to escape the peasant life they left behind. The central argument that Chang advances in her book, therefore, is that China’s capitalism and industrial-economic growth is powered by the exploitation of cheap labor, and has transformed the Chinese society by destroying traditional family structures and societal values through the mass movement of people from the villages to the cities in search of employment.
The author starts by revealing that China has over 130 million migrant factory workers, the largest migration in history. The striking aspect, however, is not the mass movement of people from villages to the cities, but the suggestion that China’s economic growth is powered by the abundant availability of cheap labor. The author argues that China’s astronomical economic rise has not been without the social and economic ills associated with capitalist economies; worker exploitation, poor living conditions for the working class, and the disintegration of families. The author follows the lives of two women, Min and Chunming, in a course of three years as they move from one factory job to another in the assembly lines of Dongguan in China’s Pearl River Delta. Their daily struggles, working 16-hours days for as little as 50 to 100 dollars a month, portray the underside of China’s economic progress. Although the economy is growing, the lives of the people who work in factories to ...