Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China Review

The industrialization of China's Southeast has afforded young women born to lives of dull existence in rural small-holdings the opportunity for independence, education, and self-fulfillment through upward mobility from blue-collar factory jobs to white-collar careers. This theme is contrary to the received wisdom that China is exploiting its children by using them in cruel, inhuman sweat-shops.

Chang, born and educated in the United States, lived for 10 years in China as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, follows three women from factory floors to factory offices to non-factory employment to their own businesses. She uses her own family history as the back-drop for old China to contrast it with this new China. She describes the irony that traditional China's world-view of "first son" which keeps men near home and women from any accomplishments outside their families but made it necessary, when industrialization came to China, women "go-out" to work and thereby find independence-- find themselves.

This is a big topic--the changing of the status of women in the largest population ever known. Chang handles it fairly well with a few slips that take the reader in the wrong direction from time to time. Chang shows us three different perspectives on success but does not show much of the results of failure. Only tangential characters return to their father's houses and traditional marriages to local village men.

Chang's training as a journalist shows in her diction and pace. The reader seldom must consult a dictionary and is never left wondering what the subject of a sentence was by the time she reaches the verb. The short to-the-point phrases means the reader is asked to trade smoother transitions for added clarity. That is a sacrifice this reader is always happy to make.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China Overview

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.


China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.

As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.

A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates howthe mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

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