Friday, January 9, 2009

Light and shadow of an inarticulate age:Reflectionsonchina’sReform

Light and shadow of an inarticulate age:Reflectionsonchina’sReform

Light and shadow of an inarticulate age:Reflectionsonchina’sReformPun NgaiThis abridged translation of “Shiyu niandai de guang yu ying” (OpenTimes, Kaifang shidai) is by Matthew A Hale, a PhD candidate inanthropology at the University of Washington.Pun Ngai (punngai@gmail.com) is with the Peking University-HongKong Polytechnic University’s China Social Work Research Centre. Sheis the author of Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global WorkPlace (Durham, London, Hong Kong: Duke University Press and HongKong University Press, 2005).This tribute to the resilience of China’s migrant workersis by an academic who lived and worked among theminShenzhenforsevenmonths,sharingtheirscreamsand dreams. It touchingly portrays the plight of youngmigrant workers, many of them women, who havebeencaughtinthegripofcapital’sunscrupulouswillingness to sacrifice anything in the pursuit of profit.Their efforts to organise themselves have been at best apartialsuccess.I went to college just as the turbulent, open-minded 1980s was drawing to a close. I do not know where 1980s China got itsenergy, its optimism from: everyone was filled with longingand imagination about the country’s future, and nothing wasbeyond disputation, from economic reforms to political changesto intellectual transformation. I remember everyone carryingbooks from a famous series on philosophy. A student readinggroup on China called “Gems of the Yellow River” (Huanghelang) attracted more than 200, who underwent interviews to joindiscussion groups.TheQuellingoftheFlamesWhere was China headed? That seemed to be the commonquestion on the lips of an entire generation. Trends came and went, but there seemed to be no clear answer. So, in theright hand one carried Li Zehou’s History of Modern ChineseThought, and in the left Liu Xiaofeng’s Freedom and Salvation(Xiaoyao yu zhengjiu). China’s future seemed to hinge on one’sindividual pursuits.At the time, mainstream intellectual currents were more orless shaped by a modernism tinged with the European Enlighten-ment, and the questions revolved around the obstacles to China’s modernisation. Unfortunately, amid all the clamour, the morepressing questions of contemporary socialist practice were, inten-tionally or not, sidestepped. I remember a renowned intellectual,Jin Guantao, who used a theory of super-stable structure toexplain why China’s development had stagnated. Left-leaningstudent groups were discontented with the intellectual environ-ment, so, among them, some brought up Marx and post-Marxism,others introduced Nietzsche’s superhuman values. Some puzzled over the predicament of 20th century capitalism, while still others explored the alternative socialism of eastern Europe.Where was China headed? Thousands of possibilities musthave been posed. I had not yet digested these ideas and my mind was still empty when a tragedy drew all this to a close. Sincethen, no one has followed up on the question. The path forwardlost its light, so all one could do was to wander in the dark.Only in daydreams can one occasionally hear the lingering echoof this question.historyandindividualVolitionThe 1990s was an inarticulate era. Whether because of coercionor co-optation, intellectuals went into a self-imposed exile of thespirit. Those names that fled the scene disappeared quickly. Intel-lectual currents went out like the tide, without a sound, leaving
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china since 1978Economic & Political WeeklyEPWdecember 27, 200871behind only a rare stillness. While intellectuals and civil societyboth fell silent, a new scene emerged on China’s historical stage:on one side, special economic zones (SEZs) sprang up one afterthe other along the country’s coast and invited investment fromHong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the US, declaring that“development is indisputable truth”.1On the other, it was prom-ised that Hong Kong would remain a window to capitalism forthe next 50 years.In early 1992, from 18 January to 21 February, Deng Xiaopingtoured southern China and made a series of speeches inGuangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai emphasising the importanceof economic development and the “deepening” of China’s reformand opening process. He clearly signalled that “leftism” was moredangerous for China than “rightism”. During this “SouthernTour”, Deng brought up the idea of a “socialist market economy”:“Market economy does not add up to capitalism; socialism alsohas markets”; “The essential difference between socialism and capitalism is not which depends more on planning and whichdepends more on markets.”2In October of the same year, at the 14th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the party’s constitution was amended to add “the theory of constructing socialism with Chi-nese characteristics”, and the establishment of a socialist marketeconomy was, for the first time, set as a goal of China’s reforms.“Persist in reform and opening, develop the market economy”thus set the tune for the coming years, and the call to “Let a fewpeople get rich first” entered the course of history.Where will China be heading – is it still necessary to ask? Of course, it is headed towards socialism with Chinese characteristics.Accompanying the 1990s themes of stability and prosperity,then, the blueprint of history was already ratified, and a Chinesesocialist market economy set sail to transcend life and death.Who lived? Who died? These questions were unimportant.Whether you like it or not, history does not change its course forthe will of individuals.Those unwilling to be puppets on the historical stage chose to withdraw. During that last period of struggle, I remember The Selected Works of Vaclav Havel and the moving introduction to its Chinese edition. It taught everyone about the struggle between human nature and socialism and how to be a true per-son. By the mid-1990s, all discussions on China had disappeared without a trace.Did Chinese intellectuals really go into self-imposed exile?ThecharacteristicsofFireIn May 1991, a factory fire consumed the lives of 68 women work-ers. Amid the grieving, we began to reflect on the problems that asocialist market economy might bring. The fire reflected prob-lems in the labour regulation system, but at the same time itrevealed capital’s unscrupulous willingness to sacrifice anythingin its pursuit of profit. The marriage of socialist economic plan-ning to a capitalist market truly gave birth to a process with spe-cial characteristics, one more capable of transforming society.With the death of thought, the market sprang to life.Chinese intellectuals were not really exiled. What took theirplace on the road to “exile” were groups of migrant workers fromrural areas not yet conscious of their class position. In the early1990s, these migrants crowded into the SEZs and embarked onthe path of proletarianisation. Unfortunately, the factories set upin these zones with foreign investment often caught fire, and many of those young migrants were burnt to death or maimed inlocked workshops and dormitories.I forget which day it was in the summer of 1991. Around sun-set, in a hospital ward in Guangzhou, I saw a female worker lyingin her sickbed. Not even 18 years old, her whole body was coveredin burns, leaving only her pretty face unharmed. To this day Icannot forget her tranquil yet desperate eyes. As I left the hospi-tal, the sun set blurrily through my tears. That deathly stillness stayed with me through the rest of the decade.My first real visit to the countryside was two weeks later, whenI sought out the victims of the fire and their relatives to providehumanitarian relief. Digging through my old boxes, I now find some notes from that year, faintly legible on yellowing paper.On May 30, 1991, Xingye Raincoat Factory in Shipai, Dongguan,Guangdong caught fire, causing 68 deaths and over 40 injuries. Thefactory was run as a joint venture between mainland industrialistWang XX and Hong Kong investor Shen XX. Since the factory opened last October, it employed over 120 workers, mostly migrants fromother provinces, especially young women from rural areas. Theworkers all slept in the factory. The doors were locked at night, and the factory was stacked full with flammable plastic materials. Whenthe factory caught fire around two in the morning on 30 May, theworkers, unable to flee, either were burned to death or jumped fromthe windows to their death.Since many of the victims were from Hubei, in late August1991, some friends and I went to three villages in Dawu, Hubei, toinvestigate and provide humanitarian relief.anewly Wedded coupleWe took a bumpy four-hour ride on a coach from Hankou, Hubei,to Dawu county, then took a taxi for an hour until we reached Wangyang village. Wangyang has about a thousand residents and consists of eight village teams (zu) – that is, the units thatused to be called “production teams” in the Mao-era system of rural collectives. We began enquiring at the entrance to the vil-lage and ran into the cousin of a couple who had died in the fire.He led us along a rough path through the hills for about 20 min-utes, until we reached the home of the late Zhang Qingbo and YuAihong. They had only just wedded – and now it was time fortheir funeral. The mother began sobbing and calling out thenames of her deceased son and daughter-in-law as soon as sheheard why we had come. Her crying was like a dirge. The fathersaid the couple had married that spring. The big bed and even theradio in the bridal chamber were new. We noticed that the big red“double happiness” (xi) character had been taken down from thewall, but some traces of the wedding remained, including a photoof the couple by the bed. Later, we heard that Yu had not wanted to get married so early, that she had wanted to earn some moneyfirst, but she had finally succumbed to the urges of her family.Customarily, women gave up their jobs upon marriage, but sincethe couple had spent over 4,000 yuan3on the wedding, mostlyborrowed from friends and relatives, both the bride and groomwent to work in the raincoat factory where Yu had already been
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china since 1978december 27, 2008EPWEconomic & Political Weekly72working for more than two years. Yu was four months pregnantwhen she died. She had planned to work another three months,go home with her husband, and then stay there raising her child and farming for the rest of her life.The Zhang household had seven members. With the decollec-tivisation of agriculture in 1981 they were alloted 3.5 mu (0.23hectares) of farmland consisting of a paddy field and hilly land for cultivating peanuts and wheat. The 1990 harvest yielded1,450 kilograms of rice, of which 550 kg was collected by the gov-ernment as tax. Since they raised peanuts, the government alsocollected 6 kg of peanut oil. In addition, the village administra-tion collected 30 yuan per head in village fees4(raised to 40 yuanin 1991), adding up to 210 yuan for the household. Needless tosay, they were not able to save much after making ends meetevery year, so a 4,000 yuan wedding was really a heavy burden.They did not have an ox for ploughing, which would have cost1,200 yuan – equivalent to a whole year’s salary – so they sharedan ox with four other families. They sold one of their two pigs tohelp pay for the wedding, and all but one of a dozen chickens haddied of disease. Now the aging couple was left with nothing butone chicken and one pig.Zhang Qingbo’s wage at the raincoat factory was not high: as anovice, he made only 180 yuan a month, whereas Yu made 300 to400. He was 24 when he died, she 23. The family received a total of 21,000 yuan in compensation and about 4,000 yuan for funeral expenses. Of this they gave 6,600 to Yu Aihong’s parents. ZhangQingbo’s mother said tearfully that, no matter how poor theywere, they would not use this money for anything but memorial services.The Zhangs had one more 20-year-old son. Their daughter wasmarried and lived in another village. Zhang said, if it were safe,they would still let their son go out to work. Otherwise how could he get married and establish a household? All the villagers knewthe risks of going out to work – some had died in the coal mines of Shanxi – but they had no other choice.aTransmigrationLeaving the Zhangs, we walked along a small path, past a dozencrumbling houses, to the home of Chen Yibao. He was only 15when he went to work in the factory in October 1990. At firstglance, his face seemed almost childlike. He had broken both his legs, so he hobbled around with a severe limp. But he said it didnot hurt any more, and he could now visit people all over the vil-lage. We all laughed with the gaiety of guests from afar visitingan old friend.Chen said after surviving the jump from the fourth floor of theburning factory, he was no longer afraid of anything. In the weehours of 30 May, he had just fallen asleep when he heard thescreams of his female colleagues. At first he thought they wereplaying around, but then he heard a clamour inside the building,and everyone was rushing down to the third floor. He jumped from his bed and it occurred to him there might be a fire. Heopened the door to look for someone to ask and smoke pouredinto the room, almost suffocating him. Without thinking, hemoved to the window. There seemed to be a mysterious force tel-ling him to jump, and without a moment’s hesitation, he did.When his feet touched the ground, he opened his eyes, and he feltas though his soul had transmigrated – only he had chosen to be ahuman again.Chen was not the youngest person working at Xingye RaincoatFactory; there were two 14-year-olds, and he was worried aboutwhat had happened to them. In the factory, he used to jokearound and make mischief, for which he was often scolded by“Fatso” (feilao), the on-site boss. He said most of the workers,both male and female, were like rocks, never moving from theirseats, and the longer they worked there, the more rigid theybecame. Often he got so stir-crazy he wanted to just get up, leavethe factory and go for a walk, but he always managed to suppress this impulse. After returning from Chinese New Year in Febru-ary, he worked for three months till the fire without a single dayoff, even on Sundays. If he was not stir-crazy, his belly gurgledwith hunger. From seven in the morning to midnight, they onlyhad two meals, both limited to stir-fried green vegetables with afew indigestible pieces of pork rind and a bowl of rice. They werenot even allowed to get second helpings. Once when he asked fora little more rice, he was scolded by the kitchen manager, whohappened to be Fatso’s wife.Along with 10 workmates, he slept in prison-like conditions, ina little room partitioned from the others with cardboard. Two bigmattresses were spread on bunks made by nailing together a fewboards, six people slept on the bottom bunk and five on top. Chensaid it was impossible to sleep in the summer, six people squeezed together without even an electric fan to cut the 34 degree Celsius heat. This often led to friction among the male workers.When he did fall asleep, the most he could sleep was six hours,and on several occasions Fatso beat him for nodding off at work.Sometimes he got so angry he wanted to fight back, but in theend he always restrained himself. Using the welding machine tomake raincoats required a lot of concentration. After returningfrom the break in February he was reassigned to attach hoods tothe coats for two yuan per hundred coats. He could do 600 a dayon average, sometimes as many as 800, but he often burned him-self due to sleep deprivation. If the burn was serious he could take a break for a few hours, but most of the time he could noteven do this. After the boss deducted 40 yuan for living expenses,he made about 300 yuan a month.He did not go home for Chinese New Year in 1991 because hedid not want to spend the 100 yuan for transportation, so he justmailed 200 yuan to his parents. He was really homesick, butFatso had said he would have to deposit 50 yuan to keep his job if he went home, whereas if he stayed at the factory he would receive a bonus of 3.5 yuan a day for living expenses. Then Fatsoreneged on his word, and he and the others who stayed at the fac-tory during the month-long break ended up having to pay for liv-ing expenses out of their small savings.After the break, Fatso did not pay their wages until a few days before the fire. The factory’s policy was to pay each month’s wages at the end of the third month worked, so, by the time thefire struck, Fatso had only paid their wages for March and still owed them for April and May, which for Chen amounted to 600yuan. In the fire, he lost 200 yuan in cash and the clothes, sheets,and blankets he had bought over the past year. All he ended up
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china since 1978Economic & Political WeeklyEPWdecember 27, 200873with was a couple of broken legs. Now I think of him every time Ihear the following song.injuredontheJob(Tothetuneof“Xiaocao”)Without a groanWithout a moanThis is how I took my injurySome people sighSome people cryLook how the infirmary overflows with injured workmatesMachineOh, machinePlease don’t go berserk againWorkmatesOh, workmatesPlease be careful on the jobFingersOh, toesWhy did you have to leave me?EnterpriseOh, bossYou’d better compensate me!Those migrant workers who were not killed in the fire, thosewho were doomed to live, underwent transmigration: they beganto develop class consciousness. Chen’s smiling face and brokenlegs speak volumes about the will to live and its inevitable con-flict with a society dominated by capital. Who but this 15-year-old migrant could better understand the nature of capital, the mean-ing of the market economy, and his class position?Two Women Who survivedThis is the path China’s migrant workers have travelled, and often it has been a one-way street. Below is an account by twowomen, Yu Xiazhen and Yu Caihua, who survived the fire.Before the Chinese New Year in 1990, eight of us from the same villageteam went to Dongguan to look for work. We ran across an announce-ment that a raincoat factory was hiring. At that time it was called Salon Raincoat Factory, and people called it “the old factory.” InOctober 1990, Fatso tore it down and built a new factory with invest-ment from Hong Kong, changing the name to Xingye. In our firstmonth we only made an average of 200 yuan each, even though weworked seven days a week from seven in the morning to midnight.During rush periods we even had to work all night. Among ourworkmates were people from Guangdong, Guangxi, Sichuan, and Jiangxi, and we from Hubei. We think it is fair to say that we worked the hardest. Since we were from a remote mountain area, we werefearless and clueless, and we thought we were lucky just to find a job.We worked fast, so by the second month we were making 300 or 400yuan. Sometimes we felt we could not take it any more and thoughtabout quitting, but then we thought, “If the others can handle it, whycan’t I?” and we persevered.We worked at the old factory for four months till it closed in July torelocate, and until the new factory opened in October, we did notreceive any of our back wages. Fatso also promised to give us 3.5 yuana day for living expenses during the interim, but he never gave that.Once we approached him and asked for money so we could go home,but he said the factory would re-open soon and he would then give us the back wages and the living stipend. In August, we wrote a groupletter to the Shipai Labour Department asking for help in getting ourback wages, but we never got a reply. Later we heard that we wereineligible for any kind of protection under the labour law because we were not formal contract workers.In October, Fatso had the new factory. Since the old factory did nothave any money to pay us, Fatso said he would pay us and no longerwithhold our monthly wages if we started working at the new factory.So the eight of us complied. In the end, however, after working fromOctober to January, we only received three months wages. On several occasions, when we approached Fatso about this, he would give us 30or 50 yuan – of course to be deducted from our monthly wages. Wespent most of this on food, since the factory only provided two small meals for each 14-hour workday. Whenever we got a chance we wouldgo out and buy some tofu with peppers from a street vendor. At homewe eat spicy food, so we really could not stand the bland food provided by the factory.The factory had two buildings. One was two storeys, with 15 newwelding machines on the first floor, and 12 old welding machines and two button-attaching machines on the second. The other building had four storeys, with storage and cutting tables on the first floor, morecutting tables on the second floor, more storage and men’s sleepingquarters on the third floor, and sleeping quarters for both male and female workers on the fourth. After the Chinese New Year in February,our back wages were further withheld to buy those 15 new weldingmachines. Fatso was in charge of the day-to-day management of thefactory, and the Hong Kong boss only came once a month or so. But thelatter often sent an accountant named Liu to act on his behalf, and sometimes he would stay for over a week at a time. When he came inmid-May, we asked him about our wages. He said the company was using the money to expand and buy the new machines, but that wewould be paid soon. He even pointed to a dozen or so newly installed electric fans in the workshop and said, “All this equipment costsmoney. How else could we afford it?”Yu Caihua’s job was to attach collars to the raincoats. She was paid 1.8 yuan per 100 coats, and she could do between a 1,000 and 1,500 aday, depending on how energetic she felt. One month she earned asmuch as 600 yuan. Yu Xiazhen’s job was to attach sleeves. She waspaid at the same rate, but she usually could not do more than 1,000 aday, so she earned about 400 yuan a month. These piece rates werenot stable: the boss would lower them if we did them more quickly. InMay, for example, he lowered the rate for attaching hoods from 1.5 yuan per 100 to 1.2.They never installed electric fans in our sleeping quarters, whereover 90 workers slept on the same floor, and we continued to breathethe same air as in the workshops. When the weather started gettinghot in April, many of the male workers could not take it any more and went up to the roof to sleep, but we girls had to stay in our rooms.When we got off work at midnight, we really wanted to go out to thestreet, stretch our legs and breathe some fresh air, but the factorydoors would be locked.When the building caught fire at 2 in the morning on 30 May, wecould not get out through the doors, so we had to jump from thewindows of the third and fourth floors. No one survived the jumpwithout injury, and several died. Yu Xiazhen jumped from the third floor, but her sister did not and was burnt to death. Yu Caihua alsojumped from the third floor, and our friend Zhang Lin from the fourth.All of us injured our legs and hips, and Zhang Lin also burnt her hand.One might say this fire left a black spot on “the socialist marketeconomy with Chinese characteristics”, but I think it would bemore accurate to say it illuminated the scars and silence that wereunique to the 1990s.WhoseVoicesarecallingOut?I am not sure how migrant workers made it through the 1990s,those countless desperate days longing for some light, chasinglittle shadows. I hope to shed a little light on the cold, dark passage traversed by these workers.Leaving the village, I had a new desire: to enter a factory and the world of migrant workers, to enter their lives and search forthe rays of hope behind those scars. In the spring of 1995 I got a
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china since 1978december 27, 2008EPWEconomic & Political Weekly74job at an electronics factory in Shenzhen, where I could live andwork with 500 migrants. Their countless stories filled my previ-ously empty and dreamless days. Their laughter and tears led meto understand that the sense of inability to change is a negationof life.The factory was neither this era’s prison cell nor a place of refuge from the hardships and poverty of rural life. It was a mutant child of capital that could both take away workers’ lives and give them their only hope of survival. China became the world’s workshop and provided a touchstone for the dream of modernisation. Since the 1990s, almost every young person from rural China, no matter which part, has been a potential factory worker. In the factory dormitories, the workers not only complain about the work but also find ways to entertain them-selves, ridicule the cruelty of capital, and dream about how to transform their fate. In my dorm, a women worker used to wake me up in the middle of the night with her screams: what could be a more direct way of denouncing our era’s loss of imagina-tion, thinking and action? Lately my dreams have been about self-transformation and looking for China’s strength and determination for regeneration.But as an academic incapable of self-transformation, the deeper Ientered the world of migrant workers, the more I became awareof my distance from them. Not only could I not become one of them, I was also rejected. Many years later, I still cannot forgetwhat one woman worker said to me: “Your world does not belonghere, there is no need for you to stay in the factory enduring hard-ship. You may as well go back home.”But I could not go home. I could not also become one of them,but I knew that my fate was inseparable from theirs. I wanted theworkers to understand that I was also a passing traveller of theera, homeless and wandering at the margins of society.Browsing through a collection of migrant workers’ literaturefrom the late 1990s, I ran across a poem by a woman workernamed Zhang Bingbing.WhereisthePath?The sky is blueThe sun is blazingThe crowds are bustlingOnly I have something heavy weighing down my heartWatching the people rushing here and thereMy heart is bleedingLike a lost little lambI don’t know where to go, where to go!In this big metropolis, ShenzhenCould it be that I really don’t have a shady green patch to call my own?Where is the path?Migrant workers ask: what should I do? What should I dotomorrow? If we have a socialist market economy with Chinesecharacteristics, then we must also have proletarianisation withChinese characteristics. What kind of answer can be given by asociety that only wants the power of labour without the labour-ers? In the face of exploitation, discrimination and apathy, thecity can only be an eternally foreign land.No one could find a better way, and we were not willing to justleave. So we decided to found our own organisation: the ChineseWorking Women’s Network (CWWN). At first, when we founded itin 1996, we just called it the Women’s Network. The basic ideawas to bring together female migrant workers from all over,break down the boundaries of place and ethnicity, and construct a forum for them. The first group of core volunteers was 12 workers from the Meteor Electronics Factory where Ihad worked.Reading their names brings back memories of discussing plans late at night in the dorm after working overtime. After beingtricked and taken advantage of so many times in the city, theywere worried about how to build trust about the organisationamong other workers. We set this problem aside and began dis-cussing the organisation’s mission: to promote labour rights, raisefeminist consciousness, popularise knowledge of occupational safety, and put into practice autonomous action by women work-ers. At the time no one entertained the idea of establishing aphysical centre for the organisation – what with the lack of capi-tal and civil society, it would be a major accomplishment just tohave a rootless network.Perhaps it was destiny that in the spring of 1996, after fruit-less appeals for assistance to numerous offices of the local and provincial governments, an enthusiastic woman emerged from the Nanshan district branch of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). With her help, we established the first centre for women workers in the Shenzhen SEZ. It opened in May, and the chair and other cadres of the Nanshan ACFTUbranch attended the opening ceremony. Every night since then, the centre has been packed with workers from the surrounding factories.The centre often hosts educational lectures about labour rights,women’s health, occupational safety, sex, and so on, the ideabeing to strengthen women workers’ awareness of their rights and how to protect themselves. The centre also tries to extendthe network to workers’ dormitories throughout the area. Dormnetwork personnel have become an important bridge betweenthe centre and women workers, developing solidarity and thespirit of mutual aid and concern. The centre’s methods are flexi-ble and creative, including artistic performances related to healthand safety, reading groups, handicrafts, courses in English and Cantonese, poetry and art, film screenings and discussions, pho-tography, and drama. These activities help migrant women toexpress themselves, reflect on their collective identity as “work-ing sisters”, and look for their own subjectivity.Marginalised workers are finally making a warm home in acorner of this cold city. One woman shared the story of her strug-gle in a magazine published by the CWWN called Confiding AmongSisters (Jiemei miyu).howcanYouseeaRainbowwithoutGoingthroughtheRain?5Ah-Hong had already worked at a certain factory for four yearswhen something made her almost lose her job.Her mother came from their home in Sichuan to visit her.Ah-Hong had not seen her mother for several years, so she asked her supervisor for two days off to accompany her. Since allrequests for leave of over four hours required authorisation by a
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china since 1978Economic & Political WeeklyEPWdecember 27, 200875manager, she first asked her supervisor and then asked theworkshop manager.The workshop manager not only rejected Ah-Hong’s requestwithout asking why she wanted two days off, he even took awayher leave application slip. So all she could do was ask her supervi-sor for a four-hour break that evening. The supervisor grantedthat, and she happily went and accompanied her mother. Hermother had just arrived from a two-day bus trip, and now she had to turn around and leave after only a day’s rest. The next morn-ing Ah-Hong asked her supervisor for another four hours off totake her mother to the bus station, and he again agreed. Afterseeing off her mother, that afternoon she went back to work asusual, only to find that her punch card was missing. She asked the security guard and he said the workshop manager had confis-cated it. She decided to go on to work and then look for the man-ager that evening. When she did, the manager told her to go gether supervisor. When she came back with her supervisor, themanager accused her of taking leave without authorisation. Whatkind of reasoning was that?The next morning, Ah-Hong went to work as usual only to find a mark for unauthorised absence on her punch card, and she went to talk to the manager. The manager not only brushed her off, he even threw her card on the floor. That made her so angry that she could not help talking back, and in response, he fired her on the spot. Ah-Hong did not know what else to do but go looking for another job. While she was looking, she ran across some books (about labour rights), and she learned that her rights had been violated, so she decided to use the law as a weapon for defending herself.First, she wrote a complaint, planning to mail it to the LabourDepartment. But then it occurred to her that doing so might causeproblems for her co-workers, so instead she submitted it to thefactory manager, planning to go to the Labour Department inperson if he ignored it. As it turned out, as soon as the managersaw the letter, he told her to come back to work. But she still was not content with the situation. So, after consulting her friends,she approached the factory manager and made three requests:(1) to be transferred to another department to avoid furtherproblems with the workshop manager; (2) to be reimbursed thewage docked for her “unauthorised absence”; and (3) to be prom-ised that she would not be harassed or fired without just cause.The manager agreed, and Ah-Hong went back to work. Thisexperience helped her to grow from weak to strong.The CWWN has survived not only because of one or two front-line organisers and a group of enthusiastic women workers whodonate their scarce free time, but also several social workers fromHong Kong. If it were not for them, the network may have alreadybecome history.centenaryaspirationsThe light re-emerged from the clouds. In the summer of 2000,another group of enthusiastic and sincere community organisersappeared on the scene. They had no doubt that their identity was different from that of the workers, but they tried to look for pos-sibilities for mutual transformation. The first question they asked me was, how should intellectuals interact with workers? Inside, Ithought this question ironic, but was moved by their sincerity.Having struggled with an “intellectual” identity for years, I hadalways fled from the heavy burden it entailed. So, though theirquestion did not make me reflect anew on this inescapable iden-tity, it gave us all new hope. Through their efforts, CWWN com-piled a collection of migrants’ oral histories and established acooperative store.After years of hard work, the network established study groups in women’s factory dorms, libraries, mutual aid groups, and rights support groups. In 2000 it also established an express service for helping women in three of Shenzhen’s industrial dis-tricts. The 2000 issue of Confiding Among Sisters ran this announcement.For four months the Women’s Health Express (WHE) has been servingthe industrial districts of the Pearl River Delta, coming into contactwith over 12,000 women. In addition to supplying literature aboutwomen, occupational safety, health, and labour rights, the WHE also provides simple physical examinations. Women may also borrowbooks from a portable library on the WHE van.In order to help our sisters better understand their physical condi-tion, in August we will begin preparing individual health records.Although the WHE provides multiple services, we know it still cannotmeet all the needs of our sisters. So please give us suggestions abouthow to improve our service.Since our numbers are limited, we hope to recruit a group of volun-teers from the industrial districts. By volunteering for just a few hours a week, you can train yourself while helping and sharing love withyour working sisters. Please contact us for details.We also invite readers to write about their own experiences as migrant working women and submit them to Confiding Among Sistersfor publication.In 2001, a group of women workers began to use oral history togive voice to their situation and search for their own identity.Their stories had not ended, their fate made them again ponder:how can we survive independently? How can we escape from thesweatshops without going back to the patriarchal life in the coun-tryside? The experiences of cooperatives in Hong Kong, Taiwan,and Japan piqued their interest. And after several months of excited discussions, five of them established the WorkingWomen’s Consumer Cooperative in August 2002.As an experiment, they hoped this cooperative would helphighly mobile migrants find a way out of their abominable situa-tion. But one woman summed up her years of experience organis-ing fellow migrants by saying, “Although we have cultivated agroup of women, most of them will go home in a few years. Thereis no way to raise our economic status, and there is still no way toovercome the traditional fate of women.”Under the operational logic of global and local capital, theidentity, status, and expectations of migrant workers seem tobe predetermined, doomed beyond any hope of resistance.The idea behind founding the cooperative was encouragingwomen to develop their ability to support themselves independ-ently through cooperation, while at the same time dealingcollectively with some of their everyday needs and strengthen-ing the women’s network. Through alternative economic acti-vities, they aimed to help other migrant women learn toorganise themselves, engender the spirit of being in control of
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china since 1978december 27, 2008EPWEconomic & Political Weekly76their lives (dang jia zuo zhu), and ultimately create a newcollective subjectivity.The days when everyone could feel proud did not last long.When the sun set, all that remained were row upon row of shad-ows cast by the street lamps.Before the co-op had a chance to mature, or even to recoverfrom its birth pangs, it was struck by the work-related injuries and deaths that are so common in the Pearl River Delta. A front-line organiser told me, “Another tragedy has occurred: an 18-yearold girl has committed suicide because she could not stand thepain caused by occupational poisoning.” Confiding Among Sisterspublished this obituary.inMemoryofFlowers6At five o’clock in the morning on 2 November 2003, becauseof an occupational poisoning, an 18-year-old girl jumped toher death from the window of a hospital in Guangzhou. In theblossom of her youth, just like that, her brief existence cameto an end. The very next day at the same hospital, another 18-year-old girl, suffering from benzene poisoning and finding thetreatment ineffective, quietly left this world ...The rose outside the window,Silently withered away in the cruel wind last night,A blossoming rose.A lovely sight to behold,Disappeared.To reach the sunlight,To absorb the dew,To bloom more brilliantly,She stretched out her leaves,Into the cruel wind.Life is too weak,It can’t endure wind and rain;Life is too childlikeIt can’t endure cruel reality.The rose outside the window,Silently withered away in the cruel wind last night,A blossoming rose.Today’s sun,Rose from the east as usual.The wind blustered as usual,The sun couldn’t feel the withering of the rose,The wind couldn’t understand her premature death.Cold and indifferent,Scoffing and sneering,Are their faces.The rose outside the window,Silently withered away in the cruel wind last night,A blossoming rose.Before she had a chance to enjoy the sun’s warmth,Before she had a chance to feel the caress of the spring breeze,She was snapped off by a calloused hand,She’s still lying in the mud.Her fragrance still lingers,Her petals are still intact,Perhaps an affectionate boy,Is still waiting to give this rose to his new bride.The rose outside the window,Silently withered away in the cruel wind last night,A blossoming rose.I could not suppress my anguish. No matter how much effortwe expended, how many nights of sleep we sacrificed, we could not make a dent in the Pearl River Delta’s rate of 100,000 occupa-tional injuries a year. A pessimistic mood led me to have doubts about the directions of the women’s centre and the cooperative.Were community-based rights protection services and a coopera-tive economy capable of responding to this continuous stream of injuries and deaths? What kind of force could more effectivelychange how the world’s workshop operates? How could migrantworkers better increase their power? In 2004, CWWN was at the height of its eight years of activity.In November, we opened another women’s centre and an occupa-tional safety and health centre in the Bao’an district of Shenzhen.The opening ceremony was attended not only by cadres from theCommunist Youth League, the Volunteer Federation, and theHealth Department, but also professors from Peking University,Sun Yat-sen University, and Shenzhen University and representa-tives from several mainland organisations for women and work-ers. The volunteers’ singing and dancing at the ceremonyattracted over 400 workers from the area.Such lustre has no firm foundation. Though we had broad-based support, when the state began to fear that post-socialistEurasia’s “coloured revolutions” would spread to China, thedevelopment of civil society ground to a halt. Today, CWWN has made it through, but the path seems to get harder each year. Theco-op has gone out of business. The bookstore closed even beforeit got a chance to open. The fate of the women’s centres seems asprecarious as that of the migrant workers themselves.Where is the path?I feel guilty for losing the comrades who have already left.The organisers still persevering on the frontlines fill me withrespect, with the conviction that the path is here, right beneathour feet.Notes1“Development Is Indisputable Truth” (fazhan shi ying daoli) is a saying of DengXiaoping popularised in the 1990s. – Trans.2China Daily, 20 February 1992.3The average exchange rate in 1991 was one Chinese yuan to 0.19 US dollar, so4,000 yuan would have been about $760. – Trans.4Here “village fees” refers to tiliu, the fees collected by village committees tofinance public works such as irrigation. The amount was set by the provincial government according to each region’s per capita income. The fees were phased out after 2004, along with most other rural fees and the agricultural tax. –Trans.5By Yang Xuan.6By Ri Yue.available atalter Media BookshopBrahmaswom Madom Bldg,M G RoadTrissur 680 001KeralaEmail: info@altermediaindia.com

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