Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
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...
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An ethnography of a new electronics factory in southern China, showing how rural girls are made into compliant factory workers.
1State meets capital : the making and unmaking of a new Chinese working class232Marching from the village : women's struggles between work and family493The social body, the art of discipline and resistance774Becoming dagongmei : politics of identities and differences1095Imagining sex and gender in the workplace1336Scream, dream, and transgression in the workplace1657Approaching a minor genre of resistance189
\ From the Publisher“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\ \ \
