 |
Workers in a denim factory, southern China.
Image from the documentary China Blue
|
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Workers in the recycling industry, Dharavi slum, Mumbai
Source:Korea Times
When we returned from India in January, we had one week
before spring semester classes began.
All I could think about was India, but I had to prepare a class on
China. More specifically, I had to
prepare the class I teach for Colgate’s CORE Cultures and Identity program,
an interdisciplinary course which lets me teach about Chinese history, society,
political economy, art, religion, food, literature and anything else I can
stuff into the 15-week semester.
Normally I love preparing this class, but this time my brain only wanted
to think about Indian history, society, political economy, art, religion, food,
and literature. I found myself reading
novels about India (Mistry’s A Fine
Balance), histories of India (Dalrymple’s City of Djinns), looking up World Bank statistics about India, Googling
Bollywood films…. I had to cut myself off and get to work.
I decided to sign up to teach my Nations and Nationalism
course next year, so I could indulge in a whole unit on India. (I wonder if I can assign all 944 pages of
Ram Guha’s India after Gandhi? Will students
freak out when they see its telephone book-like heft? But it's such a fabulous
read!)
But in the meantime, I want to find ways to bring India into
my course on China. I always start off
the course by giving students some statistics about China in comparison to
other countries. I don't give them any
background or explanation, but instead let them peruse the data to see what
they notice. This year, I featured
India prominently. For example, one of
the tables I offered looks at GDP/per capita and growth rates:
Comparing China with Selected Countries 1980-2010
*current US $
Data from World Bank, World Development Indicators
As I hoped, my students noticed that China, India, and
Syria are all very poor countries in comparison to the United States. They also note that China's economic growth
in the last two decades has been exceptional.
Compared to China, India looks like an underachiever. (This is something that many Indians obsess a
great deal about, as I pointed out in a previous blog post, “Chinese
in India.”) But compared to Syria
(or Haiti or Indonesia or Romania or Nigeria), India’s economic growth looks
very impressive.
I also plan to bring India into class later this semester
when we look at the manufacturing economy that is the driver behind China's economic
growth. In that unit, I have my students
watch China
Blue, a documentary about Chinese workers in a denim factory. Students find this film eye-opening and often
emotionally devastating. They are
appalled to see young men and women (mostly women) their age - and much younger
- working to exhaustion to produce blue jeans for lower and lower prices. They not only find the exploitation
horrifying, but also express disgust at the living conditions for the workers:
tiny concrete dorm rooms stuffed with eight or ten girls, squat toilets, no hot
running water. I have heard former
students exclaim, months after they saw the video, that they still feel guilty
every time they buy a pair of jeans.
This year I plan to ruin even more consumer products for them by assigning some recent New York Times articles about Foxconn, the Chinese company that produce Apple products, such as iPads. (The following image comes from the NY Times.)  Although I do want my students to understand the very human cost of their electronic toys and fashionable attire, I do not want emotional disgust to be the main lesson of this unit. I worry that my students end up simply antagonistic to China's manufacturing economy, and they do not understand the complexities and constraints that led to these economic policies. My students find China's factories upsetting because they are comparing the lives of the workers to their own privileged conditions here at Colgate University. But if those Chinese teenagers were not working in those factories, the alternative would not have been an elite American college, but life as a peasant toiling in the low-paying agricultural economy. This year I hope to help my students reach a more nuanced understanding of the Chinese manufacturing economy by providing them with a counter example from India. In contrast to China, the Indian state has invested much less in the manufacturing sector. In 2010, value-added manufacturing was only 14% of the Indian economy, while it was 30% of China’s (World Bank World Development Indicators). The Chinese government has deliberately developed low-skill manufacturing as a way to absorb the surplus rural workforce. The Indian government has done very little to promote job opportunities for rural migrants, but that does not stop peasants from pouring into cities anyway. One of the results is giant slums. This year, after they watch the China Blue documentary, I will ask my CORE China students to read an article about one of the most infamous slums, Mumbai’s Dharavi. Dharavi contains over 60,000 buildings, most of which are decrepit, unsafe shanties. It is bereft of sufficient infrastructure for water, power, sanitation; it is rife with disease, overcrowding, and … hard work and entrepreneurial activity. Unable to work in the formal economy like the factory workers in China, the inhabitants of Dharavi start their own semi-legal businesses and workshops, with an annual economic output of between $600 million and $1 billion. According to Jim Yardley in the NY Times: Dharavi is an industrial gnat compared with China’s manufacturing heartland — and the working conditions in the slum are almost certainly worse than those in major Chinese factories — but Dharavi does seem to share China’s can-do spirit. Almost everything imaginable is made in Dharavi, much of it for sale in India, yet much of it exported around the world.  The people of Dharavi described in the article remind me of the working class people I have interviewed all over China - ambitious, optimistic, hard-working, deeply embedded in their families, and willing to invest everything they have in their children's education in hopes that they will have a middle-class life. Is it better to channel that energy in a Mumbai slum or a Chinese factory? Either way, the life many of them dream of for their children is the life that we have here at Colgate. |
Wow, thanks for this post.
ReplyDeleteWonder if you knew about this: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory? I know it is This American Life, but the story is really well told.
It blows me away that my iPhone is made by hand by people who will most-likely never own one. It is both astonishing and heartbreaking at the same time.
Thanks for making us think.
Thanks for the reference! Often hearing things it more powerful than reading about them.
Delete