Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (review)

In this multilayered ethnography, Pun Ngai, from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, analyzes the Chinese dagongmei, "a new social body" (p. 2), the rural migrant working girls who toil in the global capitalist factories set in socialist China's Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. Based on eight months of fieldwork conducted in the "Meteor Electronics Factory" (a pseudonym) in 1995-1996, this study disentangles the relationships of power that enmesh this new, gendered working "class"—half peasant, half proletariat—created in the hybrid socialist / global capitalist culture of the SEZ. The authoritarian Chinese government, the production and consumption imperatives of the global capitalist market, and patriarchal Chinese culture all inflict their specific and sometimes complicit violence on the female producing body, according to Pun, and all are subject to harsh judgment. Her analysis, drawing heavily on Foucault's theoretical insights on sexuality, disciplining the body, technologizing the self, and dream readings, critiques the oppressive matrix of power constructed by the socialist state, global capitalism, and patriarchy. Yet Pun also focuses on the transgressive tactics of the rural dagongmei, who perform individual and collective acts of resistance to the violent coercion and exploitation they experience in the urban factories, even as they dream of staying in the city and delaying inevitable marriages. The lives of the dagongmei, Pun argues—with more hopefulness than her chronicle seems to warrant—foretell "new configurations of social resistance and the coming of a silent 'social revolution' from below" (p. 19).

Pun, a Hong Kong native, entered the Shenzhen workforce in November 1995, her entrance provided by a Hong Kong capitalist and family friend, Meteor Electronics Factory director, "Mr. Zhou." For the next eight months, Pun worked on the factory line and lived in the company dormitory, studying the factory system and the lives of the women workers. While she never became a "real" dagongmei, she listened to the "dreams and screams" of her production-line coworkers and roommates, and was schooled in the rules of the Shenzhen factory world by department managers, foremen, and line leaders. In six chapters and a brief conclusion, Pun juxtaposes excruciatingly revealing stories of individual dagongmei with dense explanatory analysis. This formula succeeds in explicating an individualized, complex, contradictory, and fluid worker-subject as she existed in the mid-1990s, as well as in illuminating the web of power relations that govern the dagongmei's existence in contemporary urban industrial China.

In chapter 1, "State Meets Capital: The Making and Unmaking of a New Chinese Working Class," Pun draws on analytical lessons from E. P. Thompson's classic study The Making of the English Working Class to understand the "new" Chinese working class in its particular cultural and historical context in the Shenzhen SEZ in Guangdong Province. This working class possesses an active "class-conscious" agency according to Pun, who cites workers' poems and graffiti expressing resistance to the commodification and exploitation of their bodies. But it is a consciousness that is neither Marxist nor Maoist in its political articulation. The new industrial proletariat has lost its former privileged gongren status in post-Mao China as government reform leaders seek to eradicate the language of class struggle and replace it with the language of capitalist growth and development and consumer desire. Those who prosper in the SEZ, besides foreign capitalist investors, are those who were born in Shenzhen when the Maoist-era village commune government transformed into a parent company that spawned various production enterprises in 1981. With a Shenzhen hukou, or official residency, ties to local family and kinship networks, and shared ownership in the privatized company that regulates all aspects of the "socialist market economy," the formerly peasant Shenzhen ren are now "urban citizens" and China's new bourgeoisie.

Migrant workers, the dagongmei and dagongzai (working boys) with rural hukous, inhabit Shenzhen on a temporary basis, only for as long as the terms...