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

In Made in China Pun Ngai explores what globalization means for the lives of global capitalism's laborers by focusing on the lives of young Chinese women working in a factory. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in which Pun lived among women workers in factory dormitories, worked with them on factory floors, and joined in their activities during their days off, Pun investigates the reasons the women choose to migrate from rural areas to the special economic zone (SEZ) to look for work, the discrimination they face in the factory and the surrounding area, the limited overt resistance to the exploitative actions of the factory system, and the ways in which, through physical pain, their bodies resist. She examines the creation of a new female migrant laborer identity, that of the dagongmei, how it is shaped by multiple actors (the state, global capitalism, the patriarchal family system, and the women themselves), and how, although devalued for their class, rural origins, and gender, the dagongmei personifies multi-layered tensions and fusions of globalization and persisting cultural difference.

Pun argues that the factories are a site of social violence committed against the dagongmei who are thrice exploited: first by global capitalism; second, through the hukou system of residence restrictions, by the state; finally, by the familial patriarchy. Pun situates her study in a wide range of theoretical discourses. To examine the control the state and factory have over the laborers and their means of exploitation, she draws on Marx and Foucault. To identify a wide variety of possible sites of resistance, she draws again on Foucault, and also on the work of Kleinman, and finds most useful Deleuze and Guattari's idea of a "minor literature of resistance," which she retools as a "minor genre of resistance."

Two of Pun's stories highlight one of the key apparent contradictions she seeks to understand in the lives of the dagongmei. At the beginning of the Introduction, she tells of going to a hospital to visit Xiaoming. Badly burned, Xiaoming was one of the survivors of a factory fire that killed more than eighty workers and burned or injured another fifty. Industrial accidents were not rare, and most women migrating to look for factory work were aware of this kind of risk, as well as the more mundane tolls factory work could exact through headaches, backaches, and eyestrain among other physical pains. They also knew that as migrants from rural villages they would face discrimination in the more cosmopolitan cities. Nevertheless, the story that opens chapter two, of hundreds of women lining up to compete for a handful of these jobs, illustrates that they are not daunted by the downside of the work. Indeed, Pun goes to great lengths to show that dagongmei are not naïve or tricked into working in the factories; nor are they coerced or forced by their families. She carefully avoids falling into the trap she identifies in previous scholarship on Chinese women which results in a portrait of a homogenous, difficult life that is inevitable for all of them. She emphasizes that these women freely choose to work in factories, although it seems the reality of factory life and its exploitations, discriminations, and dangers would stifle their desire to do so. She explains that their unflagging willingness to endure stems from a desire to separate from the less modern rural villages from which they come in order to become new modern selves, and that in part that modernity comes from the consumption of goods they can afford with the wages they receive as industrial producers. They also see this time away from their families and earning their own wages as a brief window during which they can be active agents in their own lives, exploring their individual desires and, as one of her field subjects says, living for themselves. Speaking to Pun after her accident, Xiaoming described her choice to work as a dagongmei as...