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Cheap, Cheerful and Chinese?
by Andreas Lorenz and Wieland Wagner

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,385446,00.html

China's overwhelming ambition is to become an
economic superpower. Everything takes second
place to this goal, not least the well-being of the
people laboring toward it. They earn little and have
even less say. Yet waves of willing workers continue
to deluge the country's industrial regions. The global
factory is gearing up for a change of shift. The streets
of Dongguan are still relatively deserted -- filled only
by the rising heat and swirling dust. Trucks rattle along
the multilane thoroughfares, thousands every hour.
They keep the supplies coming for the plants that
line the streets, mile after mile, like gigantic military
compounds.

Then, suddenly, Dongguan explodes into life. It's the same bustling picture every
day, morning and night: Workers, most of them women, stream in from every direction,
with uniforms in every color of the rainbow. Laminated company IDs dangle from their
necks -- IBM, Siemens, Nokia, Duracell, Sanyo -- to name but a few of the major
international brands that have set up shop here.

Most of the workers look like schoolgirls. Holding hands, some are returning to their
hostels exhausted, while others dutifully head off to the night shift. Outside the
factories, the flags of the world have been hoisted to announce where the employers
come from and what their employees are producing: cables for Germany, batteries for
the United States, computer components for Japan, cellphones for Finland, clothing
for France, toys for Hong Kong, shoes for Taiwan. There is almost nothing that this
city of 1.5 million and its roughly 5 million migrant workers cannot supply.

Dongguan is only a small part of the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, which is
booming like scarcely any other region on the planet. Export plants are mushrooming
from the red earth all along the highway that leads to the nearby industrial center
of Shenzhen. Here, as everywhere in China, international corporations have turned the
battle cry of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' 1848 Communist Manifesto, "Workers of
the World, Unite!" into its opposite: "Producers of the World, Unite!"

Where communism meets capitalism

Here, in China, nominally still communist but in reality a hub of unbridled
capitalism, the corporations of the world have found a bottomless reservoir of
cheap -- and eager -- workers. Here they can operate largely unfettered by all those
niggling social benefits that, from a management perspective, make products so
prohibitively expensive: high wages, well-paid overtime, occupational health and
safety regulations, maternity leave, free trade unions, and the right to strike.



Like many other German companies, the electronics producer Wickmann from North
Rhine-Westphalia knows how to make the most of this situation. Some 200 Chinese
workers have the company logo -- "Weiwen Dianqi" in the local language -- emblazoned
on their light blue jackets. For 500 to 700 yuan a month, roughly €48 to €68, they
produce electrical fuses: nine and a half hours a day, six days a week. Overtime pays
3.5 yuan per hour. "It might actually be less," says one worker, "because we don't
really know how our wages are calculated."

They can rest assured that the company calculates very carefully. Wickmann plans to
relocate its production altogether to China by the middle of next year. At the main
plant in Germany, which still employs some 240 people, the first will soon be getting
their marching orders. The company says the high cost of production in Germany and
the rising value of the euro against the dollar make products 40 percent more
expensive on the Asian market. "We can't absorb that kind of shock," managing
director Matthias Huber recently noted.

The new El Dorado for German craftsmanship is located in a small alleyway in
Changping. Only a village a few years ago, it is now part of Dongguan's urban sprawl.
At the end of the street, close to the pink-and-blue-tiled Wickmann plant, stands the
drab factory hostel.

Migrant workers or slave workers?

Despite the wretched conditions, the German company is considered almost exemplary in
this Chinese neighborhood. There are certainly worse jobs in south China, much worse.
At Tyco, a U.S. company across the street, the work is so grueling that after just
three days on the job, four young women from Hunan packed their bags, grabbed their
washing bowls and headed for the bus stop. "We're going home," one of them says,
frantically counting out her fare.

The four women belong to the roughly 120 million migrants who have moved south from
poverty-stricken rural provinces like Sichuan, Hunan or Guangxi in search of work.
They were prepared to sacrifice their youth and health, but not under these
conditions.

Their dream of a better future has vanished now, as has the 1,000 yuan they paid a
job broker. They could have earned 800 yuan a month, including overtime, for
soldering wires onto small circuit boards. "But the work is too hard, especially on
the eyes," a young girl complains. The minimum working age in China is 16. Though she
is underage, she was forced to labor like the adults. "The pace was too much," she
says.

The four Chinese women are leaving. But, all over the country, millions of other
migrant workers continue to slave away. Their numbers are swelling every day: About
800 million Chinese live out in the rural areas, and an estimated one-sixth do not
have work.

They all want a piece of the prosperity that globalization promises to bring to their
country. That's why they bow to the fate of wage slavery for a few years -- in hopes
of a brighter future. Few of them have electricity or running water in their villages
back home. They have watched neighbors spending their savings from the new jobs,
first to buy television sets and then to build homes or open small restaurants and
shops. A desire to share in the new affluence drives them into China's wealthy
coastal areas.

An economic power at all costs

The Chinese leader who initiated the biggest migratory wave in his country's history
is omnipresent in the Pearl River delta: Deng Xiaoping. The Communist Party head, who
died in 1997, smiles down from propaganda billboards as big as houses, cheering the
huge country on to maintain his legacy.

For his successors, Deng's teachings often come down to the single mantra with which
he freed China from decades of ideological torpor in 1978: "It doesn't matter if a
cat is black or white," Deng proclaimed, "as long as it catches mice."

Deng's pragmatism powers the brute force with which the political elite surrounding
President Hu Jintao are catapulting China's 1.3 billion people into the industrial
age. China wants to become an economic power at all costs. And consign to the past
the humiliations it has suffered from foreign subjugation since 1842.

Personal well-being and environmental protection have fallen by the wayside during
this patriotic leap into the future. Whether more than one million farmers are being
resettled at the Three Gorges Dam, or an army of migrant workers is being redeployed
from the fields into the factories -- what counts is "fazhan" -- the incessantly
trumpeted "development."

The strategy, which simultaneously cements the power of the communist leadership, is
paying off with breathtaking growth that has reached an average annual rate of 9
percent. The reform course steered by Deng and his successors has lifted some 300
million Chinese out of abject poverty. Per capita income in China has quadrupled
since 1990 to well above $1,000.

The effects of this dramatic revolution are reverberating throughout the world. The
abundance of cheap goods "Made in China" may well quicken the pulses of Western
bargain hunters. But few consumers are aware of the price they will pay for this
windfall: the loss of their own prosperity and, increasingly, of their own jobs.

A free hand for employers

The Chinese economic miracle is working, thanks to investors like the Wickmann
electronics company which can no longer afford German labor. In Dongguan, Wickmann's
management has a much freer hand than back home. According to its workers, the
company provides insurance benefits for white collar workers only -- a blatant
violation even of China's social laws.

"I don't know why," one young woman says. "Maybe you have to stay with them longer.
Three years is what I've heard." But does anyone really care?

The Chinese women at least have valid employment contracts at Wickmann: a luxury in
the Pearl River delta. "Anybody who is laid off here can expect one month's base
wages as severance pay," says one of the women in the company's blue uniform: "390
yuan" -- 180 less than the legal minimum wage. Wickmann grants its employees seven
days off three times a year: to mark the Spring Festival and the national holidays on
May 1 and October 1. But the women say that only three days of each week are paid.

Wickmann Chairman Horst Hübner paints a different picture. "We pay the legally
required minimum wage of 565 yuan. We insure 90 percent of our employees and provide
paid vacation. We comply with the laws."

Even in China, Dongguan has a reputation as a sweat shop. Not that workers
automatically fare better in other areas. Such as Wenzhou, which produces some 75
percent of the world's disposable lighters. Or Yiwu in Zhejiang Province,where cheap
Chinese workers churn out Christmas decorations and toys for western consumers.
Including Germans.

Or in Ningbo, with its mammoth garment factories. At Youngor, China's largest shirt
manufacturer, some 6,000 seamstresses produce fashions for Pierre Cardin and Nike --
in piecework. At the BenQ factory in Suzhou near Shanghai, a workforce of 10,000
builds TFT monitors and other technical equipment for the Taiwanese electronics
specialist. And then attaches the logos of HP, Thomson and other global brands.

The hidden side of Shanghai's glitz


Western executives who fly in to China by the hundreds every day train their
blinkered sights only on the glittering façade of this global factory. Yet a few
yards away, in the backstreets of Shanghai's neon-lit commercial center, they could
readily meet the true heroes of China's boom: modern-day coolies, who work their
hands to the bone every day in the cement dust of construction sites and then
collapse into bed exhausted every night. Or the children of migrant workers, who are
forced to beg because officials deny them residency permits and thus the right to
attend school. In Shanghai alone, half of the eight million workers are migrants.

But western investors walk on by, oblivious to the squalor. Their attention is fixed
on new production sites, where labor is even less of a cost factor. The number of
businesses outsourcing production to China grows daily. A recent headline read
"Rowenta vaporizes Erbach." The venerable brand from southern Germany's Odenwald
region is planning to manufacture its low-end irons in China -- for a fraction of the
previous cost.

Could China threaten Germany's car industry?



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I intend to last long enough to put out of business all *****-suckers
and other beneficiaries of the institutionalized slavery and genocide.

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"The army that will defeat terrorism doesn't wear uniforms, or drive
Humvees, or calls in air-strikes. It doesn't have a high command, or
high security, or a high budget. The army that can defeat terrorism
does battle quietly, clearing minefields and vaccinating children. It
undermines military dictatorships and military lobbyists. It subverts
sweatshops and special interests.Where people feel powerless, it
helps them organize for change, and where people are powerful, it
reminds them of their responsibility." ~~~~ Author Unknown ~~~~
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