Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace

Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, London, Hong Kong: Duke University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 227 pp.

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...