cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/54690450
China has witnessed the greatest stretch of sustained growth and poverty alleviation in human history, made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions workers. A new book recounts the life of one of them offering a glimpse into the dark side of China’s success.
Behind the broader narrative of [China's] marvelous macroeconomic success lie the stories of hundreds of millions of exploited Chinese workers thrust into a new capitalist paradigm. Inseparable from China’s growth was the largest urbanization project in world history. As China developed its manufacturing ecosystem, hundreds of millions of rural peasants flooded into coastal cities, chasing the economic opportunities brought by new factory jobs. In the cities, they searched for an escape from rural poverty but encountered the horrors of industrial capitalism.
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A drift in the South is the memoir of one of these workers, Xiao Hai, a poet who has spent much of his adolescence and twenties toiling in the harshest jobs available to Chinese workers.
Like many rural Chinese, his parents covertly circumvented the one-child policy, making him an “over-quota child.” This meant that he would have to be given away to another family for five years to avoid harsh government punishment for having multiple children. While his parents managed to avoid being reprimanded, the cost of supporting two children to study past working age was too heavy to bear, so at fifteen, Xiao left school to become a child laborer.
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Appropriately, Xiao’s journey through the South begins there. His first job is at a large factory on an assembly line putting together battery boxes with a screwdriver. There he works fifteen hours a day and takes one day off each month. For his long hours, he enjoys a meager monthly salary of ¥400, approximately $48. One day, exhausted at work, he dozes off during an overnight shift and is woken by a blade that slices open his index finger, creating a painful wound that gushes blood. His manager comes over, wraps his finger with gauze, and tells him to finish his shift.
At the end of his day, he notices that a fragment of poisonous plastic from the blade has gone into his bleeding wound and has created an infection. Without access to medical services, Xiao must rely on makeshift treatment from a coworker who disinfects the wound with a lighter and a sewing needle.
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Stories like this are often lost in breathless accounts of China’s development that rightly point out how extraordinarily successful Shenzhen and other manufacturing hubs have been. Xiao reminds us that this success was built on the backs of millions of workers who felt the worst of capitalist exploitation.
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Commentators on China often reject comparisons between China and the West by pointing to cultural differences like those between Confucian thought and Protestantism. But Xiao’s autobiography shows that, under capitalism, our cultures are increasingly similar. Xiao’s accounts of factory life tap into something universal within capitalism: the degradation and alienation of work. But alongside universal suffering there is, Xiao insists, also the universal desire for freedom from exploitation. The book ends with these lines: “I have but one humble wish: to live like a human, with dignity. That’s all I can ask for. That’s all.” In a better world beyond capitalism, Xiao’s wish wouldn’t be “humble,” but a basic right guaranteed for everyone.
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