Since ancient times, people have dreamed of a City of Youth, where the population never ages, and where any outsider who comes to live there will remain forever young. They probably did not have in mind, however, the “agelessness” of today’s Shenzhen, China. Lying just over the border from Hong Kong, this “instant city” has grown in just over twenty-five years from a small fishing village to a sprawling metropolitan region approaching ten million people. As the first Special Economic Zone in China, it was a model for the capitalistic “market reforms” and “opening to the world” initiated in the late 1970s by Deng Xiaoping. One of its most striking aspects is the low average age of its residents, which has hovered for years at around twenty-seven. This stands in ever sharper contrast to China as a whole, where the population is rapidly aging.

While some 95 percent of those who live in Shenzhen moved there from other parts of the country, its youthfulness does not result from the birth of new generations by its residents. Rather, it reflects the young age of most who come to the city — many in their early teens — and the rapid turnover of those working in its industries. In 2005, only 1.65 million of those in the city had hukou, long-term residential rights, while more than 4.32 million migrants had lived there for more than one year and more than 4 million less than one year (Shenzhen Daily, May 27, 2007). Most work for only a few years in the mainly export-oriented factories, after which they are let go as “old,” or they quickly burn out under the harsh working conditions. Some move on to seek jobs in other cities, or even return home to their villages. Many leave before they reach thirty, and few last in the plants into middle age.

The vast majority of these young migrants are from the poor rural interior. For some, it is a matter of finding bright city lights attractive after the hard life and isolation of the countryside. But their migration also reflects the transformation of farming itself. Young workers say that a new level of mechanization — small-scale tillers, pesticide and fertilizer dispensers, and processing machines — makes daily work easier on the farms now. These technological advances have increased productivity and reduced the need for labor. Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2004, competition from food imports — most Chinese soybean production for example, has been undercut — has also pushed the younger generation off the farms.

 

Extremes of Labor and Capital

Even a short visit to the city in the summer of 2006 revealed the prevalence of very young workers, and the depths of their exploitation by large and small employers, whether mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese companies, or foreign owners. The introduction the two of us had to the harsh conditions of labor and life came quickly, after a walking tour of one of the main outlying factory districts, an hour-long ride from downtown. As we caught a bus back to our hotel at eleven that first night, among the handful of other passengers were three very young men who had just completed a 7 am to 10 pm shift at one of the plants of the largest company in the area. Despite fifteen hours on the job, they said they would only be paid for ten, including two hours overtime. With one unpaid hour for meals subtracted, they were in effect giving four “free hours” of work to the company. They complained they were totally exhausted, but were required to stay at the plant to finish a “rush job.” Young as they were, they did not stand out in this area. Three others waiting at the bus stop after their shifts looked to be only fifteen to sixteen years old.

We met many such workers, and heard similar stories of abusive conditions, like the young women at the next table in a restaurant, who had started at 7:30 am and gotten off at 8:00 that night. They told us their “official” shift ends at 3:30 pm, but the next crew is not scheduled to start until 7:30 pm, because it is so common for overtime to stretch well beyond eight hours. Something close to twelve hours is the normal shift for these young women. Similarly, a seventeen year old from Hunan province we met at a roller skating rink late at night told us he had just worked for eleven hours. The same story was repeated with only slight variations by virtually all the younger workers we met on our walks through the factory area. Many of the young people complained of the toll taken on their minds and bodies.

The brutal exploitation of these young workers is the foundation of the rapidly growing wealth of Shenzhen. Even in a country transformed in just three decades from one of the most egalitarian in the world to one having among the highest and fastest growing rates of economic polarization, the extremes found in this city are especially dramatic. In its gross domestic product, the income of enterprises accounts for over 50 percent, that of workers only 30 percent, and that of the state 15 percent — an enterprise–worker gap wider than in any other Chinese urban area (http://www.tdctrade.com; Human Resources, no. 7 [July 1, 2006]). With its many soaring skyscrapers and shiny green glass Shenzhen Stock Exchange tower, Shenzhen is now the richest city in China. A 2004 report found that it had an average income of 23,544 yuan ($2,843), almost double that for all cities at 12,216 yuan ($1,475) (Victorinox Hong Kong Lmt.). The most relevant comparison may, however, be with the low average rural income, which in 2005 was around 2,500 yuan ($300) annually (Associated Press, September 21, 2005). It is this widening gap, along with harsh conditions on the farms, that draws millions of young migrants to the factories of Shenzhen and the other urban centers concentrated in the southern and eastern coastal regions, which produce the vast flow of Chinese exports.

The rapidly expanding wealth of these cities rests directly, therefore, on the poverty of the countryside, and its enormous reserve army of labor. With almost 1.3 billion people in China, around one in ten are now migrants. Investors come from all over the world to take advantage of this seemingly bottomless pool of workers.

iPod City

The largest enterprises in the Shenzhen region are virtually complete cities unto themselves. In the suburban area where we based our investigations, Longhua town in Baoan district, the main company is Foxconn Electronics, the trade name of Hon Hai Precision Industries, Inc., of Taiwan, which at its wholly owned subsidiary Hongfujin, makes iPods for Apple and motherboards for Dell, among products for other U.S. companies. It has only been in Shenzhen since 1993, but already has 240,000 employees, with plans for up to 300,000 in the near future, and eventually as many as a half-million. As the biggest foreign operation in the area, and the largest of the Taiwanese manufacturing companies on the mainland, it exported $20.7 billion in goods in 2005 (“Foxconn Refutes UK Media Labor Allegations,” June 1, 2006). The Longhua “mega-factory complex...is the world’s largest electronic-components work space” (San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 2006), and its mini-city is measured in square miles, occupying a vast complex of production plants, administrative offices, and housing.

The central downtown districts of Shenzhen may gleam with newfound wealth, but one would not know this walking through the environs of Foxconn, where block after block of dormitories and private apartment buildings for workers already look shabby, though most were built within the last few years. At its factory gates, on the streets, and in area restaurants, it is easy to find many whose stories make starkly clear how the enormous wealth of the capitalistic “new” China is accumulated.

At a Foxconn dorm for women, a lower-level supervisor gave us a sense of the vastness of its “company town” environs, and the regimentation under which its hundreds of thousands of workers live and labor. This single facility houses five thousand female employees, yet it is only one of forty-eight such dorms for men and women. The workers get free housing, with a minimum of six or seven to a room, and in some cases many more, with three rows of double bunk beds — so crowded and noisy they cannot sleep properly. Most younger employees live in these dorms, and every time they pass in or out, they must slide their badges over an electronic data recorder. They are not permitted to cook, even on a hotplate, and no visitors of either sex, including family members, are allowed. The dorm rooms are not air conditioned, but since the factory floors are, this is a further stimulus to overtime and weekend work as one way to escape the intense summer heat (San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 2006). When they are first hired, the company gives workers a brief course of what the supervisor referred to as “military training,” the purpose of which is to ready the young “recruits” for industrial discipline. Married couples and children are excluded from the dorms, and live in nearby apartment houses.

One of the young women told us she is on the job from eight to eight each working day, but is only paid for ten hours, because two hours are deducted for meals. Day and night shifts rotate every three weeks, making it hard to adjust to the grueling schedule. Most workers eat at the plant cafeteria. They are allowed to go outside for meals, but rarely do so, in part because they would have to pay for their own food. The lowest rank workers earn only around 1,000 yuan ($120) per month, including overtime pay, approximately fifty cents per hour, not counting free food and housing. A group of technicians from Taiwan we talked with confirmed that the standard working day on the plant floor is ten hours, two of which are overtime, but that if production requires, may include Saturday and even Sunday at double time without any rest. These technical employees themselves work twelve hours per day, six days a week, but do get a week off after thirty-five days, during which they are flown home to Taiwan at company expense. All those employed at Foxconn have some limited benefits. If workers get sick, they can go to a factory clinic, and in cases of major illness, they can go to a hospital, with the company paying 80 percent of the cost. For terminal conditions such as cancer, fellow employees take up a collection. If women workers become pregnant, they get three months off and can keep their jobs, though most leave after giving birth.

As activists familiar with the city explained, Shenzhen employees are entitled by law to certain benefits that are guaranteed after ten years at any one enterprise, including open-ended, rather than fixed-term, contracts and retirement plans. But workers who try actually to claim their right to insurance, medical, pension, and unemployment payments are often fired — and some even ask their employers to disregard these legal obligations, so they can keep on working. Governmental authorities collude with the enterprises in this process. When the city first announced the post-ten-year regulations, according to these labor activists, enforcement representatives from the city’s legal division advised employers to give workers one-year contracts, because if the employees do not keep copies, they cannot document their length of employment. In some cases, employees are fired after nine years or less, to avoid the ten-year benefit guarantee rule. Even technicians and higher managers are often forced out when they become “too expensive.”

‘Blood and Sweat’ Factories

We asked why, since the city undermines its own rules, it even bothers to pass such regulations as the post-ten-year benefits package. The answer was that it is one more way that authorities deceive the working class. Government and employers “wear the same pants” as the Chinese saying goes, but they pretend to act separately. City leaders may also have been pressured by national officials, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), or even NGOs that increasingly monitor and protest against abusive conditions in the plants. But with some 90 percent of the enterprises in the area foreign owned, and investment from abroad a key element in maintaining annual economic growth upward of 10 percent, local authorities are under great pressure to keep the new money flowing and owners happy. As a result, regulations are commonly ignored at the local level. It is for such reasons that Foxconn, and similar enterprises, are known as xuehan or “blood and sweat” companies, roughly equivalent to “sweatshops.”

Still it is considered one of the better places to work, requiring a high school education, along with good health and eyesight, a little English, and some technical training. At the even more high-tech electronics firm, Huawei Technologies, employees are required to have a college degree. Yet there too, abusive conditions are common. Xu Mingda, an economics professor at the local Shenzhen Association of Social Sciences, refers to the “‘mattress culture,’ in which every newcomer receives a mattress, which is put under the desk. Employees sleep on it during lunch break or whenever they work late and can’t or don’t want to return home” (English People’s Daily Online, July 5, 2006). Just a month before we visited the area, Hu Xinyu, an athletic twenty-five-year-old software engineer, who had worked at Huawei for a year, died of exhaustion. The government press reported on the case, and “everyone” talked about it on the Web, exchanging similar experiences and debating whether the excessive hours he worked were the fault of the employee or of the company, and if such practices are necessary for the rapid growth of Chinese enterprises. Other similar cases, however, go virtually unnoticed. This phenomenon, known as guolaosi, is becoming widespread, and affects intellectuals, professionals, and managers, as well as factory floor workers (English People’s Daily Online, July 5, 2006).

But the conditions in these large electronics plants are far from the worst in the Shenzhen area. In the western sector of the city, where production of clothing, toys, and similar consumer goods prevails, the situation is generally worse, due in part to the higher ratio of women to men found there. In the electronics firms the numbers are fairly equal, and the workforce may even be majority male. In the clothing and toy factories, by contrast, many enterprises specify in recruitment ads that they only want women workers, who they consider to have superior “dexterity.” There the ratio approaches seven females to one male. Coming largely from isolated villages, where domination by men is rife, young rural women are considered more pliant and less aware of their rights than their male counterparts. Once hired, they are subject to extreme exploitation, in the form of excessive hours and poor working and living conditions, including sexual harassment, and even stricter discipline than at Foxconn and similar factories.

Outside of the large multinational enterprises, conditions may be less restrictive, but this relative “freedom” often comes at the cost of longer hours, lower wages, and less security. In a factory compound near our hotel, over twenty companies, big and small, most owned by mainland investors, surrounded a grassy courtyard — a pleasantly green refuge from the sterility of the surrounding area. In contrast to Foxconn — where one guard came outside the gate to warn us, rather threateningly, not to take photographs — here we were able to wander in and talk freely with the employees.

Workers in a print shop, lounging on the grass before their evening shift, said they have similar daily hours to those in Foxconn. Two young men from Hainan province told us they worked from 9 pm to 8 am, with a one hour meal break, leaving them hungry as well as tired. Another said he worked from 8 am to noon, and after an hour for lunch, from one to five, but after another dinner break, did overtime from six to nine — a thirteen-hour work day. But what most distinguishes these smaller factories is the lack of days off. Though they are supposed to be in the plant only twenty-five days per month, workers were often on the job thirty or thirty-one days at a time. Some had worked three hundred hours the month before, some seventy hours per week, in continuous days.

These workers live in a dorm inside the compound, twelve to a room. They do not cook, as the company provides cafeteria meals. They pay twenty to thirty yuan per month for rent, and different amounts for food. In one dorm room we visited, there were “only” seven workers, with bunk beds and minimal space for personal possessions. They generally work eight hours a day — the only workers we met who did not routinely put in overtime — but are paid just 800 yuan ($100) per month, 20 percent less than those at Foxconn.

Yet these employees are the “lucky” ones. Three very young men from Hainan province had been in the area for two months, unable to find work. The often desperate search for employment can lead to taking jobs with barely survivable wages and living conditions. Some plants pay as little as 580 yuan ($70) per month and deduct 200 yuan for food and housing, leaving 380 yuan ($45) net, too little to live on. Twice we heard, “maybe such low wages are OK for women, because they do not have to eat as much, but men need more for food, cigarettes, and to go to town to drink beer.” Employers play on such well-entrenched attitudes.

(To continue...)

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Note from the EL News editor: We deleted the links correspondent to the media quotations since they are not active anymore.

Originally published in Monthly Review

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