Like many newcomers to China before me, I struggled to comprehend the scale and ferocity of the productive forces that have changed Dongguan forever. According to my travelling companions, a young academic and four young female labour activists, Dongguan’s 10 million inhabitants form one physically indistinct node along an urban corridor that stretches for hundreds of kilometres beyond Guangdong province and across south China’s manufacturing heartlands. Perhaps as recently as 20 years ago, the broken concrete pavements upon which we walked and the broad roads along which our minibus rattled would have hosted fertile agricultural lands producing some of the region’s most cherished rice crops. Instead, the descendants of the villagers that once worked this land have found a new and on occasion spectacular source of wealth in the rents derived from the arrival of the factories and their workers.

The scale of what I surveyed was matched by a sense of its brutal functionality. These factories are no dark satanic mills but rather stark utilitarian places of labour, austere physical units of production barely indistinguishable from one another; and possibly from thousands of others in East Asia. Buildings both cheap and quick to erect, and fenced in by high block walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire, there was little visible to betray any effort to create some sense of corporate identity, pride or purpose beyond that conveyed by an occasional national flag fluttering in the warm breeze or by the Spartan, sometimes tatty corporate signage.

Perhaps this functionality could be equally understood in terms of instability, as Dongguan’s current predicament hints at an underlying impermanence. The 2008 financial crisis hit the area hard as orders were lost and the factories let workers go. Since then, according to my companions, few of the factory’s workforces have returned to pre-crisis levels and continuing labour shortages now besets Dongguan. Among the most visible signs of this, for me at least, were the numerous billboards, posters and leaflets pasted to factory walls and doors, or tied to street signs and lampposts proclaiming opportunities for employment. Work, these advertisements announce, is readily available for healthy workers aged 18 to 40 and the pay on offer for a 40-hour week is well above the local minimum. In the most conspicuous examples, the large lettering and bright eye-catching colours also seek to tempt itinerant workers with promises of social insurance and paid holidays, alongside vistas of the seemingly model factory beyond the high walls and the varied entertainments on offer to its workers. And yet the factories of Dongguan continue to struggle to recruit. Wages remain insufficient to meet the spiralling costs of rent and sustenance, the living conditions inside and outside the factories are lonely and unwelcoming, and the work insufficiently engaging. Labour turnover, I am told, can be as much as 50% each year. It is to deal with this labour ‘problem’ that some of Dongguan’s factories, themselves no more than a few years old, are looking to relocate to other parts of mainland China where labour is more plentiful and cheaper.

For the time being at least, the workers still muster a conspicuous presence on the streets of Dongguan’s industrial enclaves. Leaving the factories for lunch or when their shifts end, they spill onto the streets looking for somewhere to eat, refresh themselves, watch TV, telephone a loved one or simply escape their workplace. The ‘uniform’ of this new working class is the ubiquitous polo shirt, its youthful, preppy western signification reconfigured into a utilitarian industrialism that attributes the workers to their factories, and thus to the products that they make, according to the shade of blue, mauve, yellow or orange that they are wearing. To my eye, the bearers of these bright colours are young; some look very young indeed. And perhaps it is only the young that are willing and capable of uprooting themselves from families and friends in order to traverse China’s vast distances in search of a better life in Dongguan’s industrial districts.

After all, he’s the man who faked his CV, laying claim to having studied at the University of Perugia, when really he’d attended the (fabulously named) ‘Universita per Stranieri’, a language school. He also did a few in-house nightschool courses at GEC Marconi, though these were spun as having attended “Dunchurch College of Management” on his CV. Is this legitimate creativity to produce distinction in an overcrowded labour market?

Although in Brilliant CV by Bright and Earl, potential employees are reminded that “lying about any aspect of your life during recruitment can be grounds for dismissal if uncovered” (2001: 246), it’s possible that under the new Duncan Smith regime there’ll be more scope for potential recruits to creatively embellish their job applications. After all, if the man at the top can do it…

References

Bright, J. And Earl, J. (2001) Brilliant CV: What Employers Want to See and How to Say it. Prentice Hall.