A Better Life?

1. The founding of a Chinese factory town is always the same: in the beginning, nearly everybody is a  construction worker. The growing economy means that everything moves fast and new industrial districts rise in several stages. The earliest labourers are men who have migrated from rural villages and almost immediately small entrepreneurs join them. These pioneers sell meat, fruit and vegetables on informal stalls, and later, when the first real shops appear, they stock construction materials. After that, cell phone companies arrive in China Mobile, China Unicom. They sell prepaid phone cards to migrants; one popular product is called the Homesick Card.
2. In China when the factories start production, you start to see women. Young women have a reputation for being hard-working. After the arrival of the women, the clothes shops appear. Today, the factory towns of China seem to belong to another world. The human energy is amazing. The combination of past problems and present-day opportunities has created an extremely motivated population. Most people in China have seen their standard of living go up significantly in recent years.
3. The size of the population is both a strength and a challenge for China. Of the 1.3 billion people, 72 per cent are between the ages of 16 and 64. The movement of people from the countryside to the cities has transformed China into the world’s factory floor. In 1978, there were only 172 million urban residents. Now there are 577 million. Social scientists predict that 60% of China’s population will be urban by 2030. Each year about ten million rural Chinese moves to the cities, so the factories have a constant supply of labour.
4. Chinese schools have been very successful. The literacy rate is over 90 per cent. The next step is to develop higher education. Many people are looking for better training. In a Chinese factory town, there are many private courses: English classes, typing classes, technical classes. In Zhejiang, I met Luo Shouyun, who used to spend a quarter of his wages on training. Now he is a master machinist, with a salary that makes him ‘middle class’. Another young man learned Arabic in order to translate for Middle Eastern buyers.
5. Clearly there are environmental costs from China’s rapid growth. Collaboration between China and other countries will be important in managing environmental problems. Nobody in the developed world should criticize China without taking a look in the mirror. The nation has become successful by making products for overseas consumers. There’s nothing foreign about the materialistic dreams of the average Chinese worker.